Our text for this week served as an introduction to book history and as we all are seeming to figure out, this is going to be complicated. Her attempt to present us a view of book history from three perspectives served as an organizing tool, yet this structure proposed differing views and sometimes things got murky and as a reader it all seemed very untrusting of itself. I'm sure she knows a lot about what she's talking about and her text was informative, yet as a student and possibly not the most informed person, I found it to be more about what other people thought than what she thought. As a historian, her view of book history is different than that of the bibliographers she talks about and other scholars too. But I think the way that she offers differing views shows just what is so hard about this discipline. I liked that the reading offered the different perspectives and I gained more insight into just what bibliographers do and also realized that book history isn't just about the cultural impact of books (as I thought) or just the dry information about what book was written when and by whom. As I am learning, it is about so much more, even about the history of printing and the mechanical process of creating a binded text. Yet the term "book history" in itself is misleading because its not just about the historical aspect of a book, because as Howsam states, the book is ever-changing.
I guess right now I could be writing a book of a sort.
The utter vastness that encapsulates the history of the book is something that I will personally be grappling with over the next 14 weeks or so, and I am excited to be taking this journey with so many other newbies.
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I sort of wrote about the same things in my blog. I think a lot of us are having a hard time grasping how one subject can encompass so much information, from so many fields. We are used to thinking about disciplines as being distinct... English is English. Sure, it is important to understand the historical aspects or literature, but it isn't something we tend to focus on quite so much as Howsman does. But I am starting to think that a lot of these disciplinary boundaries are really sort of illusions. Subjects are connected a lot more than we tend to think they are.
ReplyDeleteIt is funny, because sometimes when I was reading the book I found myself wondering how valid a discipline book history is; does it really make sense as more than a sub-discipline of English or History? Other times I found the subject matter so vast, that I realized that just how important it is that it be recognized as its own discipline.