Harvard-Yale Book History Conference
April 28, 2017
9:30-10:10 Arrival/Coffee
10:10-10:15 Opening Remarks
10:15-11:45 Panel 1: Media and Transmission
Panelists: David Nee, Melissa Reynolds, Miles Osgood
Chair: Deidre Lynch
Panelists will consider the effects of transmitting stories, forms, and genres through and between diverse media. David Nee traces the “Pyramus and Thisbe” legend from oral tradition to manuscript to its unstable presence in Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Melissa Reynolds argues that the genre distinction between recipes and other closely related writings such as spells and remedies emerged with print culture. Finally, Miles Osgood links Matisse’s illustrations for Joyce’s Ulysses more closely to the modernist heart of the novel than has previously been presumed.
11:45-1:30 Lunch
1:30-2:30 Panel 2: Antebellum: Reading and Writing
Panelists: Sonia Hazard and Sarah Robbins
Chair: David Hall
This panel will address the themes of authorship and reception within the antebellum U.S., specifically what it means for a text to be “read” and how an author goes about revising or rewriting his or her own text. Sonia Hazard complicates our understanding of how a book can act upon a reader and explores the different ways books create performative scripts that invite the bodies of readers to move beyond conventional modes of reading. Sarah Robbins examines the nature of self-revision within the context of African American literary production and investigates how revision functions under regimes of censorship, enslavement, and violence.
2:30-2:50 Break
2:50-3:50 Panel 3: National Projects
Panelists: Ali John Madani and Louis Lu
Chair: TBD
This panel turns to the role of editing, criticism, and censorship in the construction of nationhood and national history. Madani looks into nineteenth-century disagreements between American critics and German intellectuals over the identification of Germany with Hamlet, suggesting that attention to the earliest editorial pushback against the “German turn” in Hamlet studies can shed light on contemporary critical debates. Lu offers the first study of Quotations of Chairman Mao as a physical object, investigating late twentieth-century attempts to dispose of the Cultural Revolution’s material remains and the present-day consequences of this effort.
3:50-4:00 Closing Remarks/Wine Reception
LOCATION:Lower Library, Robinson Hall, Harvard University STATUS:CONFIRMED DTSTART:20170428T040000Z DTEND:20170428T040000Z END:VEVENT END:VCALENDAR