Freshman Seminar: The Novel and its Media, from Don Quixote to the Internet

LEAH PRICE will offer a seminar on the novel and its media, from Don Quixote to the Internet. More than any other literary genre, the novel grew up together with moveable type; as a result, it's been unusually self-conscious both about its own material form (the printed book) and about its effects on its readers. In this seminar, we'll read novels that question the ethics and psychology of reading: why do we care more about fictional characters than about our own acquaintances? how does literary experience differ from the kind of knowledge gleaned from reading other kinds of texts? do novels educate and improve their readers or distract and corrupt them? But we'll also consider what difference successive media make to the genre, looking at a seventeenth-century novel whose plot relies on the new technology of print (Don Quixote); an eighteenth-century novel whose layout and typography force readers to rethink their unspoken assumptions about how to read a book (Tristram Shandy); a nineteenth-century bestseller in which a vampire is bested via typewriters, telegraphy, and the emergent technology of sound recording (Dracula); late-twentieth-century hypertext fiction; and shorter texts by Jane Austen, Henry James, Jorge Luis Borges, and others. Two meetings in Harvard's rare book library will give participants hands-on exposure to research methods and debates in the history of books and print culture: how did the printing press change the physical form of the book and the ways in which it was bought and borrowed, displayed and scribbled in? how does silent reading differ from reading aloud, or reading in public from reading in private? how is written matter used differently in cultures where books are sacred or where literacy is restricted to a small elite? and does the advent of digital media change these questions? All readings will be available in English; the only prerequisite is the willingness to read a series of long, experimental, and often challenging texts.

Mondays 2-4 in Lowell Lecture Hall B-11 (at the corner of Kirkland and Oxford Streets)