2003 Summer Seminar
"Reading and Everyday Life: Books, Texts, Histories"
Sunday, June 15-Friday, June 20, 2003
SEMINAR LEADERS:
- Barbara Hochman (Foreign Literatures, Ben Gurion
University of the Negev)
- David Stewart (English, National Central
University, Taiwan)
FACULTY:
- Robert A. Gross (History and American Studies, College of William
and Mary)
- Mary Kelley (History, American Culture, and Women's Studies,
University of
Michigan)
- Members of the AAS staff
View the syllabus
AMONG THE PRINCIPAL insights to come out of the last twenty-five years of
reading history is that different readers read differently. They read in
different places; they read for different reasons; they read different
things; and when they do read the same things they understand them to have
different meanings. "Reading and Everyday Life" will consider the reading
of two very different, though both very popular, books of the
1850s: Harriet Beecher Stowe's famous abolitionist novel/tract, Uncle
Tom's Cabin, and pulp novelist George Thompson's now largely forgotten
autobiography, My Life; or, The Adventures of Geo. Thompson. Our
purpose
will be to think about who read these books, how they read them, and
why. We will also think about the consequences of such reading, directly
in acts of reading themselves (weeping, anger, prurient interest), and
more broadly in their effects on the everyday lives of readers.
Insofar as Uncle Tom's Cabin and My Life attracted different
readers with
different reading needs and practices, reconstructing their reading
histories poses different methodological problems. These we will consider
with special emphasis on links that have developed between history and
literary criticism, links that have been indispensable to recent reading
studies. Interdisciplinary methods will be particularly useful in helping
us understand the initial popularity of writers like Stowe and Thompson as
well as the scholarly ambivalence that has attended them since. In
addition to the primary texts, which we would ask participants to read
beforehand, readings for the five-day seminar will include a range of
representative scholarship, criticism, and theory. The format will combine
seminar discussions, guest lectures, library workshops, and evening round
tables.
SEMINAR LEADERS are Barbara Hochman and David Stewart. Hochman is senior
lecturer of foreign literatures and linguistics at Ben-Gurion University
of the Negev. She has just received notice of an NEH grant for continuing
work on her current project, "Uncle Tom's Cabin and the Reading
Revolution," for which she was awarded a one-month fellowship at AAS in
2000.
David Stewart
is assistant professor of English, National Central University, Taiwan,
and currently Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow at The McNeil Center
for Early American Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. Hochman, who
has published widely on American fiction, is at work on her next book
about Stowe and the publication of Uncle Toms Cabin; Stewart works
on
Thompson and men's reading.
Visiting faculty will include Robert A. Gross, Forrest D. Murden Professor
of History and American Studies at the College of William and Mary, and
Mary Kelley,
Ruth Bordin Collegiate Professor of History, American Culture, and Women's
Studies, at the University of Michigan, and members of AAS staff.
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