Encyclopaedia Entries on Book Historians and Theorists
Bourdieu, Pierre (1930-2002). French sociologist and literary theorist. Bourdieu extended Marxist notions to embrace what he called symbolic capital (perceived values) and cultural capital (intellectual abilities). Whereas Marxism privileges wealth, Bourdieu saw subtle psychological processes at work in the operations of power and in society's reproduction in the young of habits of thought and behaviour--especially those that enable one to generate new strategies for coping with the unexpected--that others call ideology but Bourdieu called habitus.
GIE
P. Bourdieu 'Forms of Capital', in Handbook of Theory and Research for the Sociology of Education, ed. J. G. Richards (1986), 241-58
100 words (100) Egan
Chartier, Roger (1945-). French historian of the book. A pioneering materialist, Chartier insists that books' physical forms constrain the meanings they impart. This attention to form diminishes the importance of the invention of printing, which accelerated production but left the form of the codex essentially unchanged. Historicizing reading, on the other hand, reveals differences across time and space so great that one can hardly say that a text remains semantically unchanged in new contexts.
GIE
R. Chartier The Order of Books (1994)
R. Chartier Forms and Meanings (1995)
R. Chartier Inscription and Erasure tr. A. Goldhammer (French original, 2005) (2007)
100 words (100) Egan
Darnton, Robert (1939-). American historian. Specializing in eighteenth-century French book history, Darnton charted the role of books in the European enlightenment and the French revolution of 1789. Although his researches are primarily archival, his abiding concern is the relationship of cultural forms to wider social history and the essential alienity of the minds of persons from the past. Under the influence of his Princeton University colleague Clifford Geertz, Darnton applies anthropological heuristics (especially the question 'what things are good to think with?') to narratives from the past in order to map cultural history. In the 1990s his attention turned to electronic texts.
GIE
R. Darnton 'Trade in the Taboo: The Life of a Clandestine Book Dealer in Prerevolutionary France' in The Widening Circle ed. P. J. Korshkin (1976), 11-83
R. Darnton The Business of Enlightenment (1979)
R. Darnton The Great Cat Massacre and other Episodes in French Cultural History (1984)
150 words (150) Egan
Derrida, Jacques (1930-2004). French philosopher, literary theorist, and founder of deconstruction. Derrida investigated the Western philosophical and philological traditions' ideas about thought, speech and writing, finding fault with such commonplace distinctions as that between plain and figurative language (it is all figurative, he insisted). Responding to structuralism's systems of binary contrast, Derrida pointed out that any positive term in a pair can be defined only by negation of its opposite, upon which it thereby depends. Moreover, contrasted terms are often cognate (as are 'black' and 'bleach'). Binary oppositions are social constructs, not natural entities, and may be taken apart, deconstructed, in order to arrange their components in new ways. (In ordinary speech deconstruction has acquired a weaker sense of mere analysis that careful users avoid.)
GIE
J. Derrida Writing and Difference tr. A. Bass (French original, 1967) (1981)
J. Derrida Of Grammatology tr. G. C. Spivak (French original, 1967) (1976)
150 words (150) Egan
Eisenstein, Elizabeth (1923-) American historian. Under the influence of *McLuhan, Eisenstein argues that the Renaissance was but the last of a series of similar advances in European intellectual culture, the previous ones all failing to take hold because their ideas were disseminated only by manuscript transmission. The standardization made possible by print enabled the extensive cross-checking of statements and opinions that laid the foundation for knowledge to be fixed and cumulatively improved, which was a prerequisite of capitalism's development. Simultaneously, increasing literacy and solitary reading shaped the modern mind.
GIE
Eisenstein The Printing Press as an Agent of Change (1979)
100 words (100) Egan
Febvre, Lucien (1878-1956) French historian. Mentor of *Martin, their The Coming of the Book is a foundational text of book history, to which Febvre brought an abiding concern for geography. His work on the relationship between Reformation theology and capitalism stressed progressive change rather than rupture, and in documenting the transition from manuscript to print he stressed the key role of religious writing.
L. Febvre A Geographical Introduction to History tr. E. G. Mountford and J. H. Paxton (French original, 1922) (1925)
L. Febvre and H.-J. Martin The Coming of the Book tr. D. Gerard (French original, 1958) (1976)
99 words (100) Egan
Foucault, Michel (1926-84). French philosopher and historian of ideas. Foucault's work on madness and sexuality showed the historical construction of distinctions (sane/mad, straight/gay) that otherwise seem merely timelessly natural; thus his work is broadly deconstruction. Foucault was concerned with the mind's structuring systems for making sense of experiential data, and The Order of Things begins with a fictional encyclopaedia organized by a virtually unthinkable taxonomy. According to Foucault many of the taxonomies we take for granted came into being in what he called an epistemic shift around 1800. Responding to *Barthes's 'Death of the Author', Foucault's 'What is an Author?' insisted that authors are merely functions of the power that writing mediates, and are attached to writings in order to limit the otherwise infinite 'proliferation of meaning'.
GIE
M. Foucault The Order of Things (French original, 1966) (1970)
M. Foucault 'What is an Author?' Partisan Review 42 (1975), 603-14
149 words (150) Egan
Genette, Gérard (1930-). French structuralist literary theorist. Genette categorizes attempts to define the literary into those that measure the quality of the writing (conditional definitions) and those concerned merely with adherence to literary forms (constitutive definitions). In his theorizing of narrative techniques, Genette's most useful notion is 'focalization': the degree to which a story is told from the perspective of one or more of its participants, and the devices by which partial perspectives are conveyed.
GIE
G. Genette Narrative Discourse tr. J. E. Lewin (French original, 1972) (1980)
G. Genette Fiction and Diction trans. C. Porter (French original, 1991) (1993)
100 words (100) Egan
Habermas, Jürgen (1929-). German philosopher and literary theorist. Habermas is one of the second generation *Frankfurt School of neoMarxist theorists concerned with capitalism's ideology. Whereas Theordo Adorno and Herbert Marcuse saw capitalism tending to suppress all contradiction in its valorization of uniformity and conformity, for Habermas language remains essentially rational and emancipatory, albeit distorted by ideology. The cure, for Habermas, lies not in revolution but in mind-centred discourses such as psychoanalysis.
GIE
J. Habermas Theory of Communicative Action tr. T. McCarthy (German original, 1981) (1984-7)
J. Habermas Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere tr. T. Burger and F. Lawrence (1989)
100 words (100) Egan
Martin, Henri-Jean (1924-2007). French book historian. Protégé of *Febvre, their The Coming of the Book is a foundational text of book history and mostly Martin's work. Martin's research began with printing in seventeenth-century Paris but later extended to embrace a full history of the French book trade (co-edited with *Chartier) and a complete history of writing's role in economic and social progress. Martin was especially concerned with the visual organization of written materials and its bearing upon meaning, and thus a pioneering archival materialist.
GIE
L. Febvre and H.-J. Martin The Coming of the Book tr. D. Gerard (French original, 1958) (1976)
H.-J. Martin Print, Power, and People in 17th-Century France tr. D. Gerard (French original 1969) (1993)
H.-J. Martin, R. Chartier, and J.-P. Vivet Histoire de l'édition francaise 4 vols. (1982-6)
H.-J. Martin The History and Power of Writing tr. L. G. Cochrane (French original, 1988) (1994)
148 words (150) Egan
Ong, Walter J. (1912-2003) American literary historian. Active in several fields and an expert on the French rhetorician Petrus Ramus, Ong's best-known work was on the differences between oral and literate cultures, especially in relation to the development of literature. Ong thought that psychologically realistic characters are rare in orally-transmitted (and therefore social) fictions, whereas the private, interior worlds of solitarily-consumed print literature (especially the novel) encourage writers to create characters as unpredictably complex as real people. From Ong's perspective, Homer's The Odyssey is the formulaic and cliché-ridden product of pre-literate consciousness.
GIE
W. J. Ong Literacy and Orality (1982)
100 words (100) Egan
McLeod, Randall (1943) Canadian analytical bibliographer and textual critic. McLeod invented an inexpensive means of headline analysis using photocopied transparencies and a stereoscopic collating machine. In the 1980s McLeod turned postmodern and began publishing essays under the pseudonym Random Clo[u]d that mock the hubris of editorial interventions and advocate what he termed un-editing, which in practice means not editing.
GIE
R. Cloud 'What's the Bastard's Name?' in Shakespeare's Speech-Headings ed. G. W. Williams (1997), 133-209
75 words (75) Egan