“What is a Letter?”
3:30-5:00pm, October 21 | South Hall 2635

From the late nineteenth century on, there has been a chorus of complaints about the decline of letter-writing as it lost out first to postcards and, finally, to email. This talk will show that for the great majority of letter-writers, from the sixteenth to the twentieth centuries, the art of letter-writing has been the art of creating as much blank space as possible so as to write as little as possible.

Peter Stallybrass is Walter H. and Leonore C. Annenberg Professor in the Humanities and Professor of English and of Comparative Literature and Literary Theory.  He is currently the  R. Stanton Avery Distinguished Fellow at the Huntington Library (2011-12).

We hope to see you there!

Please join us to discuss Kirsten Silva Gruesz’s essay “Mexican/American: The Making of Borderlands Print Culture,” forthcoming 2011 in the Oxford History of Popular Print Culture, ed. Christine Bold (click on the essay title to download PDF).

In advance of Jessica Brantley’s talk on February 7th, the RFG and the Medieval Studies program will hold a reading discussion in HSSB 4041 at 6:30 pm.  The following two chapters will be up for discussion:

“Devotional Intimacy: A Book of Remembrance” by Eamon Duffy

“Images of the Vernacular in the Taymouth Hours” by Jessica Brantley

Hope you can join us!

More devotional books of hours remain in modern libraries than any other kind of book from late medieval England:  almost eight hundred manuscript volumes, and many thousands of printed ones.  And yet this fact has
failed to affect the reading and interpretation of late-medieval literature.  In this talk, Professor Brantley will explore the importance of the book of hours for literary history, investigating the evidence for connections both broad and specific between books of hours and vernacular reading in late medieval England.

Jessica Brantley is Associate Professor of English at Yale University, author of the book Reading in the Wilderness: Private Devotion and Public Performance in Late Medieval England, as well as numerous articles on the history of the book in the medieval period.

This talk is co-sponsored by the Medieval Studies Program.

William Blake, "The Echoing Green"

Thursday, November 18 / 3:00 PM
Davidson Library, Special Collections Seminar Room (3rd floor)

As part of the celebration of Davidson Library’s acquisition of its 3 millionth volume, The History of Books and Material Texts RFG is holding an interactive presentation on two book artists from opposite ends of the 19th century: William Blake and William Morris.  Though their bookmaking philosophies and styles were quite different, both have had lasting influences in the world of artists’ books.

The presentation will include a introduction to Blake’s and Morris’s works, and the opportunity to view relevant Special Collections holdings.

Please join us!

In addition to inviting speakers whose expertise is relevant to book history and textual materiality, we’re hoping to dovetail with the IHC’s “Geographies of Place” theme for this year (see http://www.ihc.ucsb.edu/category/series/geographies-of-place/ for more info).  If there’s a speaker you’d especially like to see, please send a name our way.

Sophia Rochmes will discuss Jean Mielot’s Speculum Humanae Salvationis for Philip the Good (1396-1467), a draft of a manuscript containing Mielot’s translation of the Latin typological book.  This minute provides ample evidence to discuss issues of production and use of luxury manuscripts in the court of Philip the Good, including the relationship of text to image, the relationship of format to use, and the functions of books in the ducal library.

Ulrich Keller will share his research on text/image packages published in mass circulation magazines like LIFE, and in popular, large-edition books. Photographs shot for and published by LIFE with captions and texts have a way of resurfacing decades later in art galleries and museum exhibitions as expensive collectors’ items, assuming a very different appearance and meaning compared to the original publication.

Presentations will be followed by discussion.  We certainly hope to see you there!

Nile Green is a Professor of History at UCLA and author of Indian Sufism Since the Seventeenth Century: Saints, Books, and Empires in the Muslim Deccan (2006), among several other books and articles. He studies the Middle East and South Asia in the 18th through 20th centuries, specializing in religion and colonialism.  Recently, his work has focused on exchange between Europe and Asia and on the history and technologies of the “Islamic” book.

Professor Green’s talk at UCSB will reconstruct the circumstances in which, amid a burgeoning international market for lithographic materials, Iranians gained access to these printing technologies around 1830. Within a year either side of 1818, the first Muslim printing presses were established in Tabriz (Iran), Bulaq (Egypt) and Lucknow (India). These founding typographic presses were the fruit of distinct local interactions with the industrializing marts of Europe that a few years later sowed seeds for the second round of interactions which spread lithography through Asia. Having been invented with drawing and musical notation in mind, the transfer of lithographic techniques for printing handwritten Persian was one of the earliest and most successful examples of the adaptation of a European industrial technology to local demands overseas.

This talk is co-sponsored by the Mellichamp Endowed Chair in Global Religions and Modernity, the Comparative Literature Program, the Religious Studies Department and the Center for Middle Eastern Studies.

McCune Conference Room, HSSB

Johanna Drucker is author, book artist, visual theorist and cultural critic. She holds the Martin and Bernard Breslauer Professorship, Department of Information Studies, UCLA.

Her talk will address our understanding of the way the graphical organization of codex books supports functionality has increased dramatically in the era of digital design activity. The analysis of format features and design elements in print, once approached largely from an aesthetic study of style or a bibliographical analysis of material production, is now focused on functions. This reassessment provides a foundation for the design of information structures in digital environments, but must be qualified by an engagement with new capabilities of electronic media. This talk suggests a few basic premises from the study of the codex as a diagrammatic space that might be of value in the design of digital environments at various scales.

Harry Reese (College of Creative Studies) and Alan Liu (English) will be respondents to Dr. Drucker’s talk, and their comments will be followed by a general discussion.

This event is co-sponsored by the departments of Art, History of Art and Architecture, Film and Media, the College of Creative Studies, and is endorsed by the English Department.