[Englecturers] William Sherman Lecture

[Susan Brown]

Please join the Department of English for a talk by

 

 

William Sherman

 

Monday, May 12

3:00-4:30 pm

English Department Conference Room 2212

Light refreshments will be served.

 

"The Beginning of 'The End': Terminal Paratext and the Birth of Print
Culture"



 

Thanks to Gerard Genette's 1987 book, Paratexts [Seuils], we are now much
more sensitive to the crucial work done by liminal features such as titles,
dedications, and prefaces. According to Genette, these are what "enable a
text to become a book and to be offered as such to its readers." But neither
Genette nor anyone else has yet attended to the visual and verbal devices
used to mark the ends of texts, in manuscript, print, or digital culture.
This talk will offer an illustrated survey of these features and their
functions, focusing primarily on English literature from the 14th to 17th
centuries, when medieval models were giving way to those that we now expect
to see when we pick up a book. I will begin by exploring the role played by
these terminal features, rather than those found at the beginnings of works,
in turning texts into books; and I will end by asking whether print culture
has (as Walter Ong and others have suggested) a fundamentally new attitude
toward textual closure. 

 

 

William Sherman is Professor of Renaissance/Early Modern Studies and
Co-Director of the Centre for Renaissance & Early Modern Studies. He was
born in St. Paul, Minnesota, and received his BA from Columbia and MPhil and
PhD from Cambridge. He held research and teaching positions at the National
Maritime Museum (UK), the University of Maryland, and Queen Mary (University
of London) before moving to York in 2005. From January to June 2008, he will
be the Eleanor Searle Visiting Professor at Caltech and The Huntington
Library.

 

Co-sponsored by the Center for Ideas and Society

 

 

Susan Brown

Management Services Officer

Department of English

University of California, Riverside

(951)827-1456

 

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