Comments on: History 62 The History of Reading

By: eb

eb — Thu, 23 Nov 2006 20:45:18 +0000

A late recommendation: David Henkin’s City Reading, about the kind of text you might run into walking along the street in antebellum New York – advertising signs, posted bills, street signs, scraps of money, etc. – is worth a look. I’m not sure what you’d call that kind of reading. Public literacy?

By: Gavin Weaire

Gavin Weaire — Wed, 15 Nov 2006 16:40:53 +0000

William Johnson “Towards a Sociology of Reading in Classical Antiquity” _American Journal of Philology_ 121 (2000) 593-627 (on Project Muse).

Good, despite being another “Towards a Sociology of…” Not something you’d want on your syllabus, probably, but helpful as something to direct students to if they want to explore reading in antiquity some more for themselves. Also a helpful corrective to the “silent reading unusual” urban myth about ancient reading.

It might actually be good for the classroom, now I think about it, because Johnson makes a fair bit of use of the analogy with reading set literary texts, and it strikes me that it’d be easy to get discussion started with that.

By: Timothy Burke

Timothy Burke — Tue, 14 Nov 2006 22:39:06 +0000

I’ll probably cut either Ong or Goody. Short selections.

I’m toying with adding Peterson. But it’s pretty dense stuff.

By: jpool

jpool — Tue, 14 Nov 2006 20:43:19 +0000

A bit tangential, but on the “death of reading” linguist Geoff Nunberg had an interesting commentary a couple of years back on NPR’s Fresh Air on the temporality of the phrase “curling up with a good book.” http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=4208928

This looks like a really nice course. I’ve been thinking about working up some version of this from an African studies perspective, using Hofmeyr, but also the recent work by Stephanie Newell and Derek Peterson and connecting that to either work on the history of education, or to anthropological work on communication/media/public sphere.

Wow, Swarthmore students must be something, if you can get them through Ong, Goody and Fabian in the first week.

By: Western Dave

Western Dave — Tue, 14 Nov 2006 17:48:22 +0000

Ok folks, this is a threadjack. A colleague and I are working on developing a research project on how girls use technology so we can than apply these insights to our teachng. As we launched into our usual lament about the decline of literacy and what not, we looked at the document interpretaiton assignment for the tenth grade US history class that was on her desk. The assignment was focussed on nationalism and contained both documents and symbols. We had an “a-ha” moment. Our kids weren’t freaks, we were. In other words, from say 1920-1991 (Nirvana’s Teen Spirit video being one possible cut-off), U.S. society was uniquely literate compared to before and after. We don’t just mean knowing how to read, but relying on the written word for the vast majority of information transmitted. Just wondering

By: Timothy Burke

Timothy Burke — Tue, 14 Nov 2006 16:18:12 +0000

Sherman:

The big research paper will have about four or five major suggested possible themes, one of which is literacy and education. It’s one of the major topics that I thought about trying to include extensively in the design and decided instead to work it in through discussion. But maybe I need to fiddle with the syllabus a little on this point as well.

By: Timothy Burke

Timothy Burke — Tue, 14 Nov 2006 16:15:58 +0000

Alan, thanks. I thought about the literature on printing and reading in China, but I simply don’t know it. I’ll go look at the Brokaw. The Harrison also sounds interesting.

By: Alan Baumler

Alan Baumler — Tue, 14 Nov 2006 14:47:13 +0000

Tim,
You seem to be focusing mostly on printing in the West, which probably works better. If someone gets interested in doing a paper on printing in China you might point them at

Cynthia J. Brokaw and Kai-wing Chow eds. Printing and Book Culture in Late Imperial China, California, 2005

Brokaw’s introduction is very good, and the volume refers to most of the recent scholarship.

More important, you might take a look at Henrietta Harrison ”Newspapers and Nationalism in Rural China 1890-1929” Past and Present No. 166 (Feb., 2000), pp. 181-204

It is a marvelous article that looks at how one provincial schoolteacher integrated print news (modern newspapers) with other forms of news (gossip and oral reports) by taking evidence from his extensive diaries. I think she talks more about these issues in her book, but the article is probably better for your class.

By: Sdorn

Sdorn — Tue, 14 Nov 2006 10:56:05 +0000

No Harvey Graff? Also see his syllabi over at the all-too-unused History of Education and Childhood site I put up a few years ago.

By: Timothy Burke

Timothy Burke — Tue, 14 Nov 2006 05:04:11 +0000

I’d been meaning to read the Rose. Will do so posthaste.