Conference Abstracts,
Listed in Order of Presentation
Benjamin Franklin's Circulations in the Atlantic World
Friday, June 10, 2005, 11:30 am-1 pm (First Baptist Church)
Benjamin Franklin, celebrated as a foundational figure in American
culture, achieved his reputation as a printer, postmaster, and diplomat in
North America. Yet he was, in his own day, involved in creating
transatlantic affiliations, in cultural and informational media, in
politics, and in natural philosophy. Taking up Franklin's transatlantic
work evident in both manuscript and print, the panelists are considering
Franklin in the cosmopolitan context of Atlantic culture and its
performances.
Panel chair: Wayne Franklin (English, Northeastern University)
- Jesse M. Lander (English Department,
University of Notre Dame),
"Franklin's
'Disputatious
Turn': Reading Conversions, Rhetoric, and the Transatlantic Rise of
Politeness"
This paper argues that Franklin's retrospective reconstruction of his
intellectual development in the Autobiography conforms in crucial
aspects
to a general trend in European and British culture: the rejection of
polemical divinity and the adoption of more skeptical modes of discourse.
An important aspect of this trend was an increasing suspicion, in some
circles, about the virtues of print, especially when associated with
dogmatic religious controversy, and a renewed appreciation of the arts of
conversation and the value of the philosophical dialogue. The rise of
politeness in the eighteenth century has been successfully charted by many
scholars. Less has been said, however, about the way in which insistent
civility entailed the rejection of theological dispute as sterile and
rebarbative. In pursuing this argument, I examine several of the scenes
of reading described in the Autobiography. Although my attention
is
concentrated on the first part of the Autobiography, composed in
1771, I
make use of the manuscript revisions of the late 1780s to argue that in
the wake of the American Revolution Franklin remained eager to align his
own personal intellectual trajectory with broad developments in British
and European culture.
- Christopher Hunter (Comparative
Literature, University of Pennsylvania),
"`Ashamed
of No
Origin': The Cosmopolitan History of Benjamin Franklin's
Autobiography"
In recent years it has become commonplace to analogize Benjamin Franklin's
career as a printer and statesman with the concomitant expansion of the
American republic of letters. A modern reader might therefore be surprised
to see Franklin's Autobiography described as a "French book." And
yet that
is the heading under which it appears in a nineteenth-century Parisian
bookseller's catalogue. Like Franklin's America, the borders of the
Autobiography are porous. Far from the implicitly nationalist
fantasy of
an unmediated and singularly American inheritance, Franklin's memoirs have
always been both profoundly mediated and international. Contemporary
interpretations -- as the anachronistic title of Franklin's
Autobiography itself reveals -- are governed not only by the
textual logic of Franklin's writing but by other logics as well. This
paper will examine Franklin's
memoirs in light of their translations, a certain "postal-effect," the
requirements of double-entry bookkeeping, and the nature of
eighteenth-century scribal publication -- all the material logics of
transcription and dissemination that Franklin thematizes in his text.
- Carla Mulford (English Department, Penn
State University), "Savage
Eloquence: Benjamin Franklin's Press at Passy, 1782-1783"
Two key issues troubled Franklin in 1782, as he was engaged on a
protracted diplomatic mission to secure a peace agreement between Great
Britain and the original colonies: the treatment that Britons had received
at the hands of American Indians whose efforts against the colonists had
been backed by Great Britain and the treatment of American prisoners of
war in the hands of brutal captors. Enraged at British atrocities,
especially at the hands of others sent to do Great Britain's bidding,
Franklin wrote two scathing satirical hoaxes, one featuring American
Indians scalping colonists in behalf of Great Britain and another
purportedly a letter from John Paul Jones defending himself against a
charge, in Britain, of piracy, and charging George III with ruthless
murder. This paper will discuss the printing and circulation of these
hoaxes while also addressing Franklin's political uses of tropes common to
Europeans. writing in the eighteenth century, the tropes of savagery and
civility.
Manipulating Media
Friday, June 10, 2005, 2-3:30 pm
The papers on this panel examine the successful manipulation of verbal
media -- and the failures that define success in print, manuscript, and
performance.
Panel chair: Robert A. Gross (history, University of Connecticut)
- David Shields (English and History, University of South Carolina),
"Poor
Performance: Failure in Print, Manuscript, and Speech"
What constituted failures in the various arenas of oral and written expression in early America? Neither of the two
dominant current engines of adjudication--the market or institutional evaluation by teacher, professional critic,
boss,
or editor greatly determined inadequate performance. By examining several cases of failed communication--in a salon, in
an epistolary poem, and in a printed broadside--several conditions of botched performance will be imputed. Failure
was manifested in flaws of production (the misspoken joke, the poem with botched meter, the printed mistake) and in
negative reception. A looser, more conversational response characterized most situations of negative reception than
that envisioned in classical and neoclassical rhetoric's account of audience reaction. What is particularly
interesting is the heat gradient of response--the range of malediction of reactive reception. Print over the course of
the 18th century became increasingly the resort of the response of "critics," volunteer cultural and aesthetic
arbiters. The critic usurped the authority of norms of evaluation possessed as a sensus communis of taste and
schooling.
- Joan Radner (Literature, American University), "Speaking Our Way to Improvement:
Orality, Literacy, and Manuscript Traditions in Northern New England
Villages"
In the shrinking rural hamlets of nineteenth-century northern New England, the interplay of performed,
manuscript-based, and printed discourse integrated and maintained viable communities. In village lyceums -- debating
societies -- "got up" by local citizens in the wintertime "to cultivate and improve our intellectual and moral
faculties," participation crossed lines of gender, age, and status in ways unthinkable in urban areas.
These village societies deployed numerous verbal events in conjunction with their debates: declamations, recitations,
dialogues, essays, lectures, mock trials, public critiques of the presentations, and oral performances of homegrown,
manuscript literary newspapers. The result was a complex intermingling of verbal modes. Handwritten newspapers,
composed and read aloud by community members, imitated and parodied print literature and journalism; recitations and
declamations turned printed matter into oratory; essays, delivered orally, brought the literary skills of their authors
before neighborhood scrutiny.
The intertwined spoken and written traditions of village lyceums constituted a dynamic negotiation between the
rural northeast -- conservative, but not retrograde -- and the increasingly urban, cosmopolitan, professionalized,
and commercial national culture.
- Susan
Williams (English, Ohio State University), "New Voices, New Venues: James Redpath and the Promotion of
American Civic Discourse"
As an editor, publisher, and founder of the Boston Lyceum Bureau, James
Redpath (1833-1891) worked with a number of significant American authors,
including Louisa May Alcott, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Mark Twain. At the
same time, Redpath was an ardent abolitionist and biographer of John Brown
who saw his literary endeavors as an outgrowth of his self-named position
as "Crusader of Freedom." This paper will highlight three aspects of
Redpath's career that merge oral and print media: 1) his acquisition of
the Weekly Anglo-African in 1861 as part of a public effort to
promote
Haitian colonization; 2) his publication of Alcott's letters in
Hospital
Sketches (1863); and 3) his interviews with Jefferson Davis for The
North
American Review in the late 1880s. These various intersections
indicate
the need not only for more study of Redpath (the only full-length study is
Charles Horner's largely anecdotal Life of James Redpath [1926])
but also
for a reconception of print culture as always embedded within other
cultural practices.
Print, Manuscript, and Performance and the Public Sphere
Friday, June 10, 2005, 4-5:30 pm
These three papers all make important contributions to public sphere
theory, using analysis of the relations among verbal media to do so.
Panel chair: Michael Warner (English, Rutgers University)
- Carolyn Eastman (History, UT- Austin),
"Making American Audiences in
an
Eighteenth-Century Commercial Republic"
My essay examines the relationship between emerging political definitions
of "citizenship" and the public, political, and domestic sites in which
individuals enacted different ideas of civic engagement. The sites and
contexts in which ordinary men and women participated in publicvia
churches, newspapers, public celebrations, schoolrooms, broadsides, and
parlors, among many otherseach fall, in different ways, outside of what
can neatly be termed a republican, or even political, environment. These
sites could give civic engagement a religious, commercial, or domestic
toneor a combination of all three. For this paper, I examine the ways
that late eighteenth-century American printed works and oratory explicitly
transmitted ideas about belonging to an audience. In essence, these works
frequently sought to "teach" their readers or auditors how best to
participate and to engage with their leaders and one another. As they did
so, they merged together political identities with notions of
participation in commercial and domestic affairs, encouraging "citizens"
to consider a variety of issues alongside or in tension with the public
goodsuch as an orator's personal presentation or the endorsement of a
newspaper by men of high standing. Overall, then, the essay analyzes the
multiple and sometimes contradictory definitions of civic identity and
public participation at play in late eighteenth-century America.
- Lloyd Pratt (English and African American
Studies, Yale University),
"Semiprivate Space and a Democracy of Race"
Frederick Douglass first appeared in the public records of Maryland only
as another man's private property, but he would later come to exemplify
the challenges of life lived as a public man. Received accounts suggest
Douglass went from private man to public figure on the night of August 14,
1841, when a young Douglass took the stage at the Nantucket Atheneum. As
history has it, Douglass rose and found his public voice while telling his
life story to the abolitionists and curiosity-seekers gathered in the
Atheneum's lecture hall for the first Nantucket Anti-Slavery Convention.
Yet the Atheneum abrogated the line separating public life from private
life, and for this reason it is perhaps best to term Douglass's appearance
there a semiprivate debut. Neither the structure of the Atheneum's
ownership, nor its physical makeup, nor the political function of the
Atheneum were simple to specify. In this respect, it exemplified an
antebellum American semiprivate sphere that challenged calcifying racial
norms by refusing to honor the public/private divide.
- Oz Frankel (Historical Studies, New
School University), "The State
between
Orality
and Textuality: Government Reports as 'Orature'"
By the middle decades of the nineteenth century, the federal government
emerged as an enterprising publisher, supervising the printing, binding,
and mass circulation of countless documents, including expedition
accounts, farming primers, and presidential "messages," among other print
ephemera that became a staple of the modern state. This paper interrogates
government reports as a unique literary-bureaucratic genre that straddles
orality and textuality to constitute what Joseph Roach, among others,
recently designated "orature." The practices of reporting and the
accompanying epistolary documents, or "reports," retained oral,
intermediate, and ritualistic dimensions that harked back to periods in
which reports were made in person by subordinates to their superiors.
Moreover, the presentation of important accounts to state officials,
Congress, and the public at large by their (often celebrated) authors
involved a ceremonial surplus that only increased in the 20th century. In
the 19th century, the submission of reports featured, at times, the
reading of an entire document or specific segments. My paper examines the
performative aspects of official reportage and its contribution to a state
sponsored public culture. |
James Russell Wiggins Lecture
Friday, June 10, 2005, 7:30 pm (Antiquarian Hall)
-
Sandra Gustafson (English Department,
University of Notre Dame), "The
Emerging Media of Early
America"
Electronic media are radically reshaping our understanding of what texts
are, how they produce meaning, and how verbal forms affect society and
culture.
Recent transformations in verbal technologies help to illuminate earlier
moments in the history of textual forms. In this lecture, I will examine
some common assumptions about the history of verbal technologies and offer
new ways of thinking about the emergent properties of textual media.
Conventional media histories of the early modern period often focus on
print as an emerging technology and an agent of social change, contrasting
the new printed medium with the allegedly static forms of oral performance
and manuscript. My lecture will offer alternatives to this print-driven
media history, considering instead how theories of technology and history
are bound up with the ways that we talk about textual forms, and providing
new ways of looking at media that better account for the complex evolution
of verbal culture. Focusing on Daniel Webster, whose oratorical prowess
and literary ambitions brought together technologies of oral performance
and printed media in a distinctive fashion, and Emily Dickinson, who used
manuscript in novel ways that are central to her poetics, and whose
manuscripts have acquired a new life as they become accessible on the
World Wide Web, I will discuss the generative qualities of verbal media
considered in dynamic relation to each other.
Mediating "Race"
Saturday, June 11, 2005, 9-10:30 am (Antiquarian Hall)
The symbolic and social meanings of print, manuscript, and performance
were constituted dialectically with concepts of "race." The papers on
this panel explore complementary dimensions of the interaction between
racial identities and verbal media.
Panel chair: Laura Murray (English, Queen's University)
- Thomas L. Doughton (Interdisciplinary
Studies, College of the Holy
Cross), "'Long Wide de Grande Folkes': Slave Literacy and Participation in
the World of Social Communication in Colonial New England"
Not only were significant numbers of people of color literate in colonial
New England, but they were also part of a wider world of social
communication related to the region's print culture. Enslaved or
indentured, they read newspapers. Some drafted letters, petitions, and
narratives of their lives. By the 1770s literate Africans, however, had
become such a part of the social landscape that a Salem resident sought
newspaper publication of the following announcement: "Massah Hall--Pleas
putta he New Paper--long wide de grande Folkes--dat King Peter de
Furst--libbe Salem--he marr'd to Misse Queen Dinah--las Thursday. Cato."
This paper will, accordingly, explore slave literacy in colonial New
England and the significance of literacy skills in the political,
religious and social activities of the region's enslaved people,
problematizing the relationship of slaves to the printed word and
demonstrating how slaves of this region used text to challenge the
dominant discourse of the period. Where others have seen ambiguity,
hybridization and mobility, "Long Wide de Grande Folkes" would propose
that enslaved people in New England utilized the printed text as a space
of mediated reciprocity across which they created strategies for resisting
continued enslavement.
- Phillip H. Round (English, University of
Iowa), "Authors and Indians:
From
Performance to Print in Nineteenth-Century Indian Country"
In the opening pages of The Experiences of Five Christian Indians,
Pequot
author and activist William Apess (1798-1838) comments, "I intend
publishing a book of 300 pages, 18mo. in size, and there the reader will
find particulars respecting my life." The resulting work, A Son of the
Forest (1831), became a classic "first" in American Indian
autobiography-a
self-authored, copyrighted text.
"Authors and Indians" reveals that Apess was not alone in conceiving of
his life story in terms of bibliographic/print culture detail ("a book of
300 pages, 18 mo. in size"). This paper employs a book studies
(histoire
du livre) approach to early Native American verbal artistry, offering
an
overview of how Native American utterances moved through circuits of oral
transmission, alphabetic literacy in both English and Native syllabaries,
and into manuscript and print texts. It argues that American Indian verbal
art, although profoundly local, was engaged in national struggles for
sovereignty with the state and Federal governments via the indispensable
medium of print. Both so-called accommodationists and nativists in Native
communities from Maine to Oklahoma framed their political and cultural
positions within these circuits of verbal artistry. This talk draws on
35mm slides of Native American first editions and manuscripts to stimulate
further thinking about the many "ideologies of the book" at play in Indian
Country during the nineteenth century.
- Heather S. Nathans (Theater, University
of Maryland, College Park),
"'Chaos is
come
again': Othello, Amalgamation, and the Destruction
of Pennsylvania Hall"
On May 14, 1838, a group of Philadelphia abolitionists opened the
Pennsylvania Hall. On May 17, 1838, a mob of 20,000 to 50,000 citizens
watched the building burn to the ground. The burning of the Pennsylvania
Hall sparked more than a month of violence against the city?s black and
abolitionist community. Yet in that same year the city also witnessed
multiple productions of William Shakespeare's racially charged play,
Othello.
In this paper, I argue that burning of the Pennsylvania Hall helped to
cement the establishment of racial hierarchies and boundaries in 1830s
Philadelphia, by provoking opponents and supporters of abolition and
amalgamation to declare themselves in print and in public performance.
Through an investigation of the Pennsylvania Hall incident, I hope not
only to explore the way in which published accounts, performance, and word
of mouth shaped the contemporary understanding of the issues at stake, but
to offer some explanation of why a city so adamantly opposed to the idea
of amalgamation on its streets or in its public meeting halls, could
tolerate its representation on the public stage.
Gendered Histories of Print, Manuscript, and Performance
Saturday, June 11, 2005, 11am - 12:30 pm
All three papers on this panel challenge key historiographical
assumptions
about verbal media, with gender as the fulcrum.
Panel chair: Pat Crain (English, University of Minnesota)
- Hilary E. Wyss (English, Auburn
University), "Native Women and Writing
in
Colonial
New England"
It has long been assumed in the study of literacy and print culture that
Native women in the colonial world did not participate in
literary/literate circles. And yet the relationship of Native women to
English education and print culture in the eighteenth century and before
is far more complicated. Native women did in fact participate in literacy
instruction -- as students in local schools, in boarding schools, and even
as
schoolteachers. And yet there is no record of any Native women
participating in the extensive transatlantic world of print culture
associated with missionary fund-raising, at least in part because of the
institutional ambivalence about Native women's role in education.
In this paper I will discuss both the presence and absence of Native women
in New England's educational ventures. I will explore how definitions of
literacy (both modern and colonial) have masked Native women's role in the
intersecting worlds of orality, writing, and print. I will examine the
ways even apparently literate Native women as diverse as Molly Brant, Mary
Occom, and Abiah Togkoosen (among others) marked their bodies, their
texts, and their spaces within alternative literacy systems.
- Granville Ganter (English, St. John's
University), "Is It Oratory?:
Women and
Public Speech in the 1820s"
In this paper I discuss the careers of two forgotten female public
speakers of the 1820s: Miss Miller, a Methodist preacher whose sermons
first developed acclaim in 1826, and Miss Clarke, a public lecturer who
supported herself traveling the northeast from 1825-7. The first half of
my paper provides historical background including dates and quotations
from these women's speeches as published in newspapers from Baltimore to
Buffalo. On a more theoretical level, the primary question I ask in this
paper is, "why is women's public speech of this period not recognized as
oratory." My answer is that audiences of the 1820s reserved the word
oratory a descriptive term for a men's practice. When women
performed the
same behavior, it was called, "a reading," "a theatrical performance,"
"prophesying," "a lecture," but not oratory. Historical amnesia about
these speakers has greatly skewed discussion of the domestic sphere.
- Joycelyn Moody (English, Saint Louis
University), "Silenced Women and
Silent
Language
in Early African- and Anglo-American Newspapers"
This paper discusses the limited representation of (ex-)enslaved women in
US abolitionist serials. Extant accounts of ex-slavewomen's told
lives
indicate that these rhetors recognized the value of print accounts of
their experiences to the anti-slavery project, but also that they seem to
have been wary as well of a potential misuse or neglect of their orature
in the protection of race, gender, and caste hierarchies. Their dictated
(auto)biographies, then, are haunted by gaps and ellipses by "silent"
language. Given the absence of enslaved women's narratives from its media,
the abolitionist enterprise itself seems ironically to have silenced slave
and ex-slave women. Inasmuch as abolitionists indeed sought to end
slavery, they apparently did not deem communication with actual free(d),
fugitive, or enslaved women vital to their condemnations of the
institution. Abolitionists' limited representation of enslaved women
further suggests that they incorporated slavewomen's accounts of bondage
into their own records without identifying them or, conversely,
identifying them but in stereotyped portraits. Invariably, early
abolitionist texts under-represent the full reach of (ex-)slavewomen's
contributions to ending slavery.
Subjectivity and Form
Saturday, June 11, 2005, 1:30-3 pm
The papers on this panel explore the constitution of subjectivity
through
acts of reading, writing, and performance from the Puritans through the
nineteenth century.
Panel chair: David D. Hall (history, Harvard Divinity School)
- Matthew P. Brown (English/Center for the
Book, University of Iowa),
"Hand
Piety: Devotional Steady
Sellers and the Conduct of Reading"
Identified by book specialists as central to the colonial trades but oddly
neglected by literary historians, the devotional steady sellers are a
vital canon for understanding the performative nature of pious reading.
The prescriptive literature, sermon series, and psalmbooks that make up
this devotional canon allude generally to the overlapping literacies of
orality, gesture, and writing in the pre-1700 West, while drawing
particular attention to the codex format. This paper attends to the canon
as a set of devotional manuals: as nonlinear reference works
operated by
the hand for information retrieval and as conduct books intended to
discipline and permit the affective life of piety. With evidence from the
godly manuals, from versions of Psalm 119 circulating in New England, and
from personal miscellanies which reproduce these discontinuous reading
practices, I argue that the steady sellers exploited the storage potential
and navigability of the book format. They promoted random access and
nonlinear collation, while stimulating the imaginative life of pious
readers. The talk concludes by suggesting that the indexical and affective
reading style modeled by the steady sellers helps rethink the mentality
ascribed to devotional experience in the period.
- Angela Vietto (English, Eastern Illinois
University), "Sarah Wentworth
Morton,
Revolutionary Salonniere to Isolated Romantic Thinker: Changing Values of
Verbal Performance and Women's Authorship in the Early Republic"
The literary career of Sarah Wentworth Morton offers a paradigmatic
example of rapid shifts that occurred during the early Republican era in
ideals of authorship. In Morton's early works in the 1790s, the author
appears as a literary salonniere writing from within (and largely for) a
coterie of other genteel readers; the model of authorship that emerges is
highly social. After a hiatus from publishing, Morton issued in 1823 a
book of essays and poems, My Mind and Its Thoughts, from which a
very
different model of the author emerges: here, Morton appears as a
paradigmatic Romantic author, offering to her readers a set of highly
subjective observations cultivated in isolation. Both portraits of the
author (or, more precisely, the author function) are, of course,
constructions, and both reflect the literary culture from which they
emerge. A close analysis of Morton's construction of her image as author
during these two distinct phases of her career suggests that widely
divergent models of authorship were available to writers in the early
Republic and that even "non-professional" authors might well have
consciously manipulated those models.
- Thomas Augst (English, University of
Minnesota),
"Scripting the Inner
Voice:
Diaries and the Performance of Individuality"
How did the advent of a mass culture of literary practices alter the ways
that ordinary people gave shape and direction to their lives -- the forms
in
which men and women from diverse circumstances and regions learned to
express their identities as individuals? Drawing on diaries from the mid
to later nineteenth-century, this paper demonstrates some of the ways in
which diaries became a stage for the performance of a new sort of
self-consciousness, identified less with traditional motives of temporal
and spiritual accounting than with the articulation of autonomy -- an
"interior" voice that writers practiced in silence and solitude. As the
diary became a fixture of a modern middle-class leisure, education, and
moral improvement, differences of social experience -- differences that
otherwise separated men from women, whites from blacks, immigrants from
natives, and made regional cultures distinct -- became homogenized in
private writing as the performance of individuality. This paper suggests
how modern script culture became integral to modern conceptions of
psychology that continue to underwrite theories and practices of literary
and historical studies.
Workshop on sources
Saturday, June 11, 2005, 3-4 pm
Workshop, by AAS staff, on research materials for the study of
histories of print, manuscript, and performance
- Georgia B. Barnhill (Andrew W. Mellon
Curator of Graphic Arts)
and Thomas G. Knoles (Curator of Manuscripts), "Research Materials for the Study of the Spoken Word and Public
Performance
at AAS"
AAS's status as a repository for the study of the printed word in America
is well-known. Two AAS curators will draw on their special collections to
address other topics raised by this conference. Curator of manuscripts
Thomas Knoles will document the multifaceted interrelationships between
manuscripts and the spoken word by offering a wide range of examples from
the AAS collections including handwritten sermon notes, lyceum materials,
diaries, and correspondence. He will discuss ways in which such resources
can be used to investigate the complex transactions that take place
between speakers, their sponsors, and their audiences. Georgia Barnhill,
Andrew W. Mellon curator of graphic arts, will discuss AAS collections
relating to popular public performance--theatre, music, and other
entertainments--with particular emphasis on the graphic arts collections
of prints, photographs, music and broadsides. Relationships between these
collections and other library collections will be made.
Between Stage and Page
Saturday, June 11, 2005, 4:30-6 pm
This panel examines the dynamic interaction between written or printed and
performed theatrical works.
Panel chair: Elizabeth Dillon (English and American studies, Yale
University)
- Jeffrey Richards (English, Old Dominion
University), "Theater's Deep
Well:
Drama
and Dissemination in the Eighteenth Century"
In colonial America, fueled in part by professional performances in a few
key cities, print texts of English and other European-language plays
circulate among elite and middling readers, either imported from London or
occasionally republished by colonial printers. After a period of
political closet drama and the departure of professional actors during the
Revolution, the circulation of acting texts begins anew in the post-war
period. American publishers print increasing numbers of British plays,
particularly late in the 1790s and early 1800s, as well as
American-authored plays that appear on American stages. In addition,
others write and circulate manuscripts, while the period becomes more
intensively involved in print, with the growth of advertising in early
national newspapers and the use of playbills. Writers such as Mercy
Warren, Charles Stearns, and St. George Tucker exemplify various
dimensions of the way in which theater and drama contend for position in a
public sphere increasingly dominated by a stage-performance culture.
- Lucy Rinehart (English, DePaul
University), "Between Stage and Page:
The
Publication of Plays in the U.S., 1785-1830"
In this paper, I examine the practices, forms, and functions of early
American play publishing. As the professional theater established
itself for the first time on a permanent basis along the Atlantic
seaboard, increasing numbers of (mostly British) plays were published.
I am particularly interested in the first chapter of this publication
history, the period before the appearance of the "standard drama"
editions in the 1840's and 1850's and the securing of performance rights
for authors in 1856. These later editions were presented as
comprehensive and authoritative, descriptive and prescriptive. By
contrast, earlier play publications often recorded not only the text of
the performance, restored to the page through various conventional
devices, but also the text as a performance, a contest of authority
between different "authors." Published plays of the period presented
themselves as the cooperative enterprise (and mutually advantageous
advertisement) of publishers and theater managers (or occasionally
actors and even more rarely playwrights); close study of these texts
illuminates the complex trans-Atlantic cultural exchange, brokered
principally by British emigrant actors, that sustained the early
American theater and reveals another dimension of what Meredith McGill
has called "the culture of reprinting."
- Katherine Wilson (Theatre, CUNY), "The
Path of a Script: Louisa
Medina's
1838 Melodrama 'Nick of the Woods'"
This paper sketches a method for merging Book History with Theatre Studies
through a theoretical reconstruction of the "life" of one script,
condensing and theorizing what is known (or inferred) about practices of
rehearsal, stage production, and dramatic publishing surrounding the
script during the industrialization of publishing, in the era of
nineteenth century American melodrama. Suggesting that, ideologically and
practically, the status of a play-script transformed through across the
century, the paper trails one popular antebellum frontier spectacle,
Nick
of the Woods, from 1838, when Louisa Medina adapted it from novel by
Robert Montgomery Bird; through copying for rehearsal; handling by
prompters and musical composer/conductor; publishing and printing;
recurring restaging even after the Civil War; to its final end in archive
collections (but not drama anthologies). Each of these phases opens a
brief discussion of interrelated subjects, such as the status of the
playwright in an actor-centered theatre, the interaction of music and text
in melodrama, and the affect of dramatic copyright on conceptions and
practices in commercial theatre.
|
Lyric Enactments
Sunday, June 12, 2005, 8:30-10:00 am (Antiquarian Hall)
The circulation of musical and poetic performances -- geographically as
well as between printed and vocal forms -- is the shared focus of these
three papers.
Panel chair: Caroline Sloat (American Antiquarian Society)
- Philip Gura (English, UNC-Chapel Hill), "The
Print
Revolution and the
Recording, Transmission, and Performance of American Vernacular Music"
Music history remains understudied in the history of the book and of print
culture. In this paper I explore how the publishing of early American
musical instrument tutors contributed to the recording, transmission, and
performance of American vernacular music, specifically the African and
African American tunes characteristic of blackface minstrelsy. As minstrel
shows proliferated, enterprising performers on the banjo, the iconic
instrument of minstrelsy, transcribed into standard music notation tunes
that hitherto had been learned by ear. They found publishers to print this
music in instruction manuals and thus made available a body of material
that hitherto had resided exclusively in the American vernacular
tradition. Such tutors offer the first printed record of tunes that had
their origins on African instruments and then were modified by African
Americans, particularly as they encountered the repertoire of Scots-Irish
fiddle music in the upland South. The explosion of print in antebellum
America thus made possible not only the preservation of a significant
aspect of folk culture but also expedited its proliferation as tunes
hitherto identified with the minstrel stage circulated widely in Victorian
America.
- Coleman Hutchison (English,
Northwestern University), "Secret in altered lines like memory:
The
Civil War Song in Print and Performance Publics"
To date, historians have relied almost exclusively on printed materials
(e.g. songsters, sheet music, and broadsides) to reconstruct a history of
the Civil War song. Such a privileging of print obscures the fact that
Civil War song circulation was by no means limited to a print
public
sphere. Their tunes modulated and harmonized, their lyrics forgotten,
misremembered, and improvised, an archive of unrecorded, errant versions
of these songs bespeaks a culture of revisionism that has eluded
traditional histories of the Civil War song. Pace D.F. McKenzie, this
paper offers several examples of the complementary not competitive
relationships amongst "speech-manuscript-print" versions of Civil War-era
songs such as "Dixie" and "Bonnie Blue Flag." Demonstrating that Civil
War-era songs achieved a free-flowing circulation in and of revision, the
paper argues that the ability of individual groups to revise lyrics to fit
a series of local, regional, and national agendas had a profound effect on
the ways Civil War-era communities imagined themselves, and one another,
through song. Indeed, it was the fluid relationships amongst manuscript,
print, and performance that gave rise to increased cultural autonomy for,
and increased competition between, the publics constituted by those songs.
- Ingrid
Satelmajer (English, University of Maryland - College Park),
"Print
Poetry
as Oral 'Event' in Nineteenth-Century American Periodicals"
I examine intersections between print and oral culture manifested in the
periodical representation and distribution of poetry in nineteenth-century
America. I see "ephemeral" nineteenth-century periodicals as central to
our understanding of the cultural esteem in which poetry was held. As
sites that not only published poets but also marketed them as cultural
celebrities, periodicals offered print-centered hype, as they festooned
their covers with poets' portraits and provided readers visits to writers.
homes. However, as poetry ceded its cultural centrality to fiction and was
denigrated as space-filler, I argue, periodical culture.s creation of it
as a consumable in part sought to market poetry as "event," a tactic that
drew heavily on the genre's still vital ceremonial and occasional role. As
sources that sought to represent public events, periodicals tracked the
oral performance of poetry by publishing performed texts like John
Greenleaf Whittier's "Haverhill." Moreover, as sources that conceived of
themselves as available for print and oral dissemination -- clipping
and
reciting -- periodicals created events and programs in which poetry played
an
essential role.
Visual Texts and Performances
Sunday, June 12, 2005, 10:15-11:45 am
These three papers explore the ideological and symbolic functions of
visual texts and the dynamic interaction between the visual and the
performed.
Panel chair: Barbara Lacey (history, St. Joseph College)
- Peter Stallybrass (English,
University of Pennsylvania), "'K' is for
'King'?:
The Rhymed Alphabet in the New-England Primer, 1727-1843"
The New-England Primer outsold any other book in eighteenth-century
America apart from almanacs, and it provides an extraordinarily rich body
of material for the analysis of continuities and changes in political and
religious culture. The primer is composed of sedimented layers of texts
recycled from the past, including Aesop's fables, Catholic and Protestant
books of hours (called in England "primers"), "The Complaynt of Veritie,
made by Iohn Bradford" (1559), the Geneva and King James translations of
the bible (1560 and 1611), John Foxe's Acts and Monuments (1563), the
Westminster Catechism (1648) and John Cotton's catechism (1641/6), A Guide
for the Child and Youth (1667), The Protestant Tutor (1685), and "A
Dialogue between Christ, Youth and the Devil" (1695). How and why were
these and other texts compiled in what became the dominant guide to
literacy in eighteenth-century America? How were the conflicting
ideologies of sixteenth-century radical English Protestantism, 1630s
Laudian royalism, and 1680s anti-Catholicism transformed into a uniquely
"American" primer? How and why did a children's book that assumed that
learning about death, murder, and adultery was the appropriate entry to
literacy (i.e. to reading the bible) triumph over The Royal Primer,
for
instance, which constructed its imagined reader as a "child" ("A stands
for Apple and Awl, B stands for Book and for Ball, C stands for Custard an
Cream")?
My paper will focus on conflicts over the letter "K" in the rhyming
alphabet. The explicitly royalist rhyme for learning the letter "K"
exonerated the "martyred" Charles I from the charge that he was a "man of
blood":
Our King is good
No Man of Blood.
I will examine the extraordinary survival of this rhyme both during and
after the Revolution as well as competing and revised versions of the
rhyme. I will also explore when and why political and biblical rhymes were
discarded as unsuitable for children.
- Martin Brückner (English, University of
Delaware), "Wall Maps, Dramas,
and
Metaphors: Symbolic Practice in Early Anglo-American Society"
This paper explores the material function and performative rituals that
surrounded the perhaps largest document available in eighteenth-century
print and manuscript culture, the wall map. Next to the looking glass, the
curtain, and the oil painting, the wall map was one of the few artifacts
which frequently occupied a multitude of real and symbolic spaces,
including private studies and public buildings, as well as American genre
paintings, satirical cartoons, and colonial narratives of social
intercourse. Until recently wall maps tended to be discussed in terms of
material spectacle, as decorative pieces and sentimental objects that
figured prominently in the rituals of social representation. This paper,
by contrast, departs from this interpretation. Instead, it considers wall
maps as a textual vehicle of communication through which Americans not
only tested the boundaries between orality and literacy, but also as a
theatrical device enabling colonists to negotiate their increasingly
conflicting attitudes towards social integrity inside a troubled imperial
body politic.
- Laura Schiavo (Director of Museum
Programs, Jewish Historical Society of Greater Washington),
"Reading the Image: Visual Culture as Print Culture and the Performance of
the Bourgeois Self"
Contributions to the study of the history of the book in the late
eighteenth and nineteenth century have documented the explosive growth of
print culture and the reading experiences of a population altered both by
shifts in literacy and the availability of printed materials. However
these studies have often overlooked visual print culture, material often
subsumed by the field of art history and understood to be most closely
related to questions of representation. This paper uses the example of
the stereograph -- a popular photographic medium first available
commercially in the 1850s -- to explore the ways in which visual print
culture can benefit from, and contribute to, the study of the history of
print. What's more, the experience of stereoscopic viewing -- the subject
of a good deal of contemporary nineteenth-century commentary -- supplies
new evidence for considering the relationship between print culture and
performance.
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