Here’s an update to my previous post on the two panels sponsored by the Society for the History of Authorship, Reading, and Publishing at the 2005 annual meeting of the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies.
In an essay entitled “Speech-Manuscript-Print,” D. F. McKenzie writes
“…a phrase like ‘the impact of print’–however carefully it is qualified–cannot help but imply a major displacement of writing as a form of record. In the same way, too great a preoccupation with writing and printing (as the technologies of literacy) may lead us to forget the superior virtues of speech. After all, we did not stop speaking when we learned to write, nor writing when we learned to print, nor reading, writing or printing when we entered ‘the electronic age.’ For those who market texts in those forms, some of them may seem mutually exclusive (do we read the book, hear it on tape, or see the film?), but for the speaker, auditor, reader or viewer, the texts tend to work in complementary, not competitive, ways. None surrenders its place entirely; all undergo some adjustment as new forms arrive and new complicities of interest and function emerge” (Making Meaning: ‘Printers of the Mind’ and Other Essays; ed by Peter D. McDonald and Michael F. Suarez, S.J.; U Mass Press, 2002; 238).
Panel 1: “The Fate of Script in an Age of Print”
Chair: George H. Williams, University of Missouri-Kansas City
Panelists:
Giles Bergel (Queen Mary, University of London), “Shifting the boundaries of ‘the shift from script to print’: the case of engraved lettering.”
Katherine Ellison (Emory University), “Tracing the Way of an Eagle in the Ayre: Script and Print in Seventeenth-Century Cryptography Manuals”
Eve Tavor Bannet (The University of Oklahoma), “Printed epistolary manuals and the rescripting of manuscript culture.”
Panel 2: “The Fate of Script in an Age of Print”
Chair: Eleanor F. Shevlin, West Chester University of Pennsylvania
Panelists:
Betty Schellenberg (Simon Fraser University), “Vicarious Reading, Manuscript Culture, and Johnsonís The Rambler”
Rory Wallace (Emily Carr Institute of Art + Design), “Wish You Were Here”
Cheryl Nixon (University of Massachusetts Boston), “Circulating the Law in Manuscript and Print:Ý Chancery Court Cases and Narrative Forms”
