Abstracts
Malcolm Baker
“Cut in Stone: Sculpture, Inscriptions and the Commemoration of ‘Great Men’”
From antiquity onwards, one major function of sculpture had been to commemorate the lives and achievements of the great. But commemoration of course took textual forms too, including those of biography, epitaph, encomium and éloge. Frequently, text and image were combined, sometimes as texts in, on or attached to painted portraits but still more commonly as inscriptions carved on the plinths of eighteenth-century statues, bust and monuments. This paper explores the changing relationship between inscription and sculptural image, asks how they might have been read together, and considers the tension between the two as well as their mutual interdependence.
Daniela Bleichmar
“Image / Word / Object: Multimedia Circulations of Natural Knowledge in the Early Modern World”
How did images, words, and things work in concert to produce natural historical knowledge in the early modern world, and to transport it across distances? In which ways did different media collaborate, and in which ways did they compete or invalidate each other? What happens when the lines among images, words, and objects get blurred by artefacts that function as multiple media? This talk will address these and other questions through an analysis of the Quadro de Historia Natural, Civil y Geográfica del Reyno del Perú, an unusual and little-known painting from 1799.
Heidi Brayman Hackel
"Alphabets of the Body: Sign Language in Early Modern England"
This paper explores sixteenth- and seventeenth-century English attempts to inscribe a language onto the human body. After tracing a history of deafness in early modern Europe, the paper centers on efforts to develop and codify methods of communication for the congenitally deaf – primarily the manual alphabets that would become in eighteenth-century France the precursor of American Sign Language. The paper contextualizes these efforts with contemporaneous systems of “nods and signs” used to circumvent silence within monastic orders, to transmit political secrets, and to convey meaning on the public stage, attending to both verbal and visual descriptions of these various systems.
Luisa Calè
“Blake and Extra-illustration”
This paper explores extra-illustration as a mode of inscription that questions the book as a cultural object. By turning a supposedly homogeneous commodity into a supposedly unique record of taste, extra-illustration challenges the function of the book as a reading support and opens its boundaries to articulate additional or alternative orders and contours of knowledge. William Blake’s illuminated books are often discussed as forms of resistance to the commercial book. Turning to Blake’s extra-illustration of Edward Young’s Night Thoughts and Thomas Gray’s Poems willoffer an important alternative angle on his engagement with the material formats, practices, and alternative orders of the book.
Adriana Craciun
“What is an Explorer?”
This paper considers how authorship of Enlightenment exploration narratives is best understood through the dynamic material and social domains of books, rather than by considering the Explorer as the origin of exploration and its narratives. The distinct regulatory and corporate domains, predisciplinary vantage points, author effects, and bibliographic codes through which exploration accounts were produced often differed significantly from those in commercial and literary domains. I suggest that the undertheorized association of Explorer with the proprietary commercial Author is misleading, but that it provides an opportunity for discerning distinct, asynchronous strands in the history of authorship and print.
Matt Crow
"Textuality and Law in the American Revolution"
Through a variety of reading, collecting, and writing practices in the area of law and constitutionalism, Thomas Jefferson crystallized a crisis of historical self-understanding in the American separation from Britain. In turn, he sought to inscribe the fractured, open-ended temporality of the revolutionary moment into constitutional and legislative text and the design of institutions. These textual practices can best be understood as attempts to grapple with the ever-present potential for the renegotiation of political foundations, and as such prompt critical reflection of our contemporary dichotomy between originalism and the living constitution.
James Q. Davies
“Unperformable Objects/Metapianistic Notation”
Take a sketch leaf from Franz Liszt’s so-called “N-6 sketchbook.” Such enigmatic inscriptions require the appropriate affective stance, one sanctioned and structured by a two-hundred-year-old code of disciplinary practice. Musicologists apparently know how to feel in relation to these scores, and to their intrusion at a site of sacred formation. It is as if the “musical work” – in this case the first version of the Harmonies poetiques et religeuses (1835) – were just coming into being. I am interested in such “art” music as this: scores (eventually published) that are no good for playing, that are literally impossible to play, or purposefully illegible, unreadable or unperformable in any conventional musical sense. What are the ideological mechanisms by which it becomes possible to experience music notation in this way? How is it possible to feel as though such inscrutable marks are inscriptions of anything, let alone the record of some supposedly pre-existing, emerging, inaudible or immortal ideality (that is, “a musical work”)? This paper will explore the processes by which such sonic inscriptions (and musical scores in general) become objects of knowledge. I will also be asking what kind of body or conduit you need to apprehend such material inscriptions; even more interestingly, what kind of body you need to perform them, since piano-playing hands would still have been useful to that process we now call “sound reproduction.”
Sean Epstein-Corbin
"Civil War Graves in the Sentimental Imagination"
The grave is a problematic space in antebellum literature. It is at once a limit, a place, a negation, a memorial, an absence, a continued presence, and a site of transport and imagination. In Lydia Sigourney’s poetry, the grave is a site of layered history, of God’s promised heaven, and of a mother’s trauma. For Adam Smith, the grave is a site of sentimental paradox. My presentation will consider how the grave sometimes organizes representation and is a problem for representation, especially in terms of the increasing bureaucratization and institutional control in the nineteenth century.
Kirsten Silva Gruesz
"Technologies of the Textbook: Learning Spanish in English America"
Language instruction manuals represent an underexplored subgenre of the pedagogical text. Grammars, dictionaries, conversation and phrase books both fashion and reflect specific ideologies of a “foreign” language and its speakers that become particularly suggestive when the target language also has a domestic presence—as Spanish long has had in North America. These manuals serve as testing grounds for often inchoate ideas about how language becomes embodied, and the mediating function of tutors in that process. This talk focuses on language autodidacts like Cotton Mather, who taught himself Spanish in the late 1690s in order to “bomb” Mexico with conversion tracts.
Randolph C. Head
“Material order and spatial thinking in early modern archive organization”
As early modern polities came to view their dominions as well-defined territories, their archivists sought to represent territorial spaces within the order of the archive. Yet archival space was not a vacant category available for new inscriptions of political order. The materiality of documents, their occupation of physical space, ensured that space was already a crucial for organizing and finding documents. Moreover, early modern use of space in the archive was semantic in that it inscribed significance onto the spaces of the archives. We thus need to examine closely how both intermediary abstractions and highly concrete linkages enabled early modern secretaries and functionaries to produce spatially-articulated knowledge in the service of their states.
Lynn Huang
“The Science of Reading: A Phenomenology of Eighteenth-Century Fiction”
Lynn Huang will discuss how her dissertation investigates the phenomenology of reading prose fiction in eighteenth-century Britain and considers Enlightenment science and philosophy in terms of reader-response theory. How was fiction received and perceived in an age that privileged direct, sensory experience as the primary measure for knowledge? The visual structure and fixity of printed texts, combined with the scientific preoccupation with observable phenomena, gave rise to the valuation of books and graphic devices as aesthetic objects, and as a field of knowledge.
Adrian Johns
“Inscriptions and mechanisms in the invention of intellectual property”
Intellectual property is obviously one of the defining elements – perhaps the defining element – of today’s information economy. Yet it is not nearly as time-honored a concept as we tend to assume. In fact it originated only in the nineteenth century, as the culmination of an historical process that began in the late seventeenth. At the heart of that process, I shall argue, was an industrial-revolution debate over the nature and scope of “mechanical” as opposed to “literary” invention. And that debate turned on a paradox. Defenders of a natural property right derived from literary authorship had to insist that such authorship was fundamentally unlike anything involved in inventing. Inscriptions had to be distinct from mechanisms, scholars from craftsmen. It was the enemies to literary property, therefore, who argued for a single creative principle common to both domains. In 1774 this second camp won, in a pivotal legal decision that defined modern copyright. This victory of “piracy” over property redefined the relation between inscription and mechanism. That was how it made intellectual property conceivable.
Melissa Lo
“Reading the Rainbow: Descartes’ Pictures and the Making of Méthode”
Throughout his natural philosophy, Descartes persistently relied on images to compensate for the immateriality of linguistic abstraction. Whether giving corpuscular form to the basic ingredients of the universe, or overlaying landscapes with geometrical constructions, pictures were critical tools for rendering his new epistemology intelligible. Nowhere is the binding of image to word more evident than in Descartes’ explanation of rainbows in Les Météores (1637). Through a close reading of the philosopher’s movement between different registers of representation, I will begin to examine the bookish expectations that Descartes placed on his natural philosophy and those who read it.
Alan Lovegreen
“Aerial Script: Surfaces in Edgar Allan Poe's Short Works”
Air is both a discursive space and an archive of the spoken word in nineteenth-century literature. It is an object and an absence, a maker of meaning and a spectral gateway; for Charles Babbage air is a vast library. My presentation will track how some literal, discursive sites in Edgar Allen Poe’s short works move beyond representations of hard, tangible inscription as he engages a form of aerial script. I will reflect on how these air surfaces operate uneasily amidst emerging scientific and technocratic pressures of the period.
Jerome J. McGann
"Poe, Decentered Culture, and Critical Method"
This essay takes the idea of the critical/scholarly edition as both the basis and the paradigm for every kind of literary and cultural study. It then explores the discourse field in which Poe worked as a test case to think about designing more powerful models for the study of volatile and complex bodies of historical and cultural phenomena. Poe’s own work in fact mirrors his cultural world more clearly than perhaps any other of the period’s literary figures. Because digital environments can conveniently organize radically heteroclite materials around multiple centers, they help us to understand the period’s unstable and dynamic orders, on one hand, and to imagine more useful critical mechanisms for studying those dynamic orders.
Miles Ogborn
“Prescriptions: the material and the immaterial in eighteenth-century Jamaican plant Knowledge”
Prescription, n. 1. an instruction written by a medical practitioner that authorizes a patient to be issued with a medicine or treatment. 2. the action of prescribing. 3. an authoritative recommendation or ruling. Origin: from Latin praescripitio(n-) "before" + "write." This paper explores the relationships between plants, spoken words and the inscription of those words in script and print in an eighteenth-century slave society. It sets out a variety of different ways of talking about plants to examine what might be called "prescriptions" – what comes before inscription, what inscriptions authorise, and how plants might, in the context of slavery, become part of various forms of medical talk between healers and patients.
Emily C. Pfiefer
“At the Threshold: An Interdisciplinary Approach to Underwear”
Art historians study garments as objects of display while literary scholars focus on clothing language and semiotics. Meanwhile, the historian prefers to find clothing in archival evidence. Yet, the study of undergarments is often relegated to seductive display books. Thus, unlike other materials, undergarments have no single disciplinary affiliation and have been consigned to a kind of disciplinary limbo. Nevertheless, the liminality of undergarments opens myriad interdisciplinary opportunities. I address some of the possibilities and problems of beginning a dissertation project on undergarments at the threshold between the body and society while bridging multiple disciplines.