Centre for the Study of Print and Media Cultures
Simon Fraser University

     
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Reception(s): The Afterlife of Media

Friday, November 26, 2010, Academic Quadrangle 6229, Burnaby Campus
PDF of the registration form available here

10:30 to noon: Keynote talk & discussion

Rick Sher, Distinguished Professor of History in the Federated History Department of New Jersey Institute of Technology and Rutgers University, Newark, “Eighteenth-Century Book History, Researched and Imagined: The Copyright Myth of 1774.”

This will be about the commonly held view that the House of Lords’ decision on copyright in 1774 had an immediate and earth-shattering impact on British print culture, by lowering prices, making books more accessible, and transforming Britain into what William St. Clair has called “the reading nation”. Although debunking that myth was not the primary theme of my book, it has turned out to be the part of it that has generated the most interest and controversy in certain circles.

Noon to 1pm. Lunch

1pm to 2:30: Session 1, Panel and discussion

Peter Cramer, Department of English, SFU, “Recruiting and Animating Participants for the Brooklyn Museum Controversy: The Contributions of New York City Print Journalists.”

In this paper, I examine the case of the controversy surrounding the Sensation exhibit in Brooklyn, NY which by most accounts began, along with the exhibit itself, in September 1999. By approaching a case in this way, I enter into a dilemma faced by the researcher of any controversy: Who counts as a participant? This is a thorny problem because so many parties might legitimately claim participant status, yet trying to account for them all would be impractical and perhaps impossible. It is a subset of the larger problem of determining and delimiting context, where for any given event some uncountable number of statements, locations, and frames of reference at many scales of abstraction might, in principle, apply. A cast of characters in a controversy represents a series of choices, of course, rather than an objective, universal, and comprehensive catalogue. By paying attention to these choices and searching for their justifications, we can discover something about how particular speakers and writers recruit and animate participants for controversy. In order to address this in the case of the Brooklyn Museum controversy, I ask whom journalists recruit and animate as participants by examining New York City newspaper coverage of the event. In particular, I consider the direct reported speech in coverage, treating the tendency to be directly quoted as an indicator of participant status in news discourse. In the first part of the study, I investigate who is recruited by tracing out attributions of direct reported speech, and in the second part, I investigate what speech is directly reported, and how this serves to animate the various participants recruited by journalists. The results show that Mayor Rudolph Giuliani achieves unique prominence as a participant in terms of the quantity of reported speech, its positioning within articles, and the fitness of his reported speech to the professional aims and norms of journalists and of news writing.

Betty Schellenberg, Department of English, SFU, “Choosing Print (or not): Media Self-Consciousness and Agency in the Mid-Eighteenth Century.”

My paper will begin by delimiting its approach to print and agency as a comparative and individualised one, influenced by Raymond Williams’ insight that the familiar forms of media as social institutions are the effects of “a set of particular social decisions, in particular circumstances.” I will argue that the middle of the eighteenth century was a moment of heightened self-consciousness about media choice—in part because of an increased perception of print as reliable and effective for uses such as permanent information storage and dissemination across geographical and class barriers, but also because the long-established alternatives of oral communication and scribal culture were flourishing in an urbanising society (facilitating coffee-house conversation, clubs, and Bluestocking salons) and in the developing communications networks of Britain and its growing commercial empire (requiring a sophisticated culture of letter-writing, taking advantage of improvements in the post and in transportation networks). In this context, the choice of one medium over another suggests the selection of a particular form of agency over another.

While much of my evidence will necessarily be taken from written records, I will not focus simply on the author as agent; rather, I will use recent definitions of interactivity to blur the division between author/producer and reader/consumer that is itself one feature of print dominance. My examples will include Samuel Johnson’s theorisation of the book in relation to knowledge; his deliberate from a known, socially embodied audience to a distant and future reader; Elizabeth Montagu’s recommendation of print publication to amateur writers or their friends as a means of posthumous preservation; and Sarah Scott’s distributed use of print to convey her social activism across gender and class divides. Turning to focus on the reader, I will look briefly at anonymous fan mail to Samuel Richardson and his experiments with using printed forms in response before turning, finally, to readers of Thomas Gray as, variously, repudiating, endorsing, assisting in the production of, and passively receiving his writing. This array of instances will point to some conclusions about the social needs served by print technology in the mid-eighteenth century, but also about accompanying disabling effects of print on other forms of agency. In this vein, I will conclude by raising a few questions about the presumed “social saturation” of print moving forward from the eighteenth century.

2:30 to 2:45 break

2:45 to 4:15: Session 2, Panel and discussion

Diane Gromala, School of Interactive Arts and Technology, SFU, “The MeatBook”

Conventions of how we understand what we understand a book to be have been regularly explored and challenged by artists. In The MeatBook, artist Diane Gromala explores the notions that text and the traditions of the book have stripped us of sensuous engagement, and of relying on certain senses at the expense of others in the construction of knowledge. The MeatBook is an eight-page book, constructed of raw meat and electronics. As readers approach it, The MeatBook quivers and emits animal-like sounds, the character of which changes according to how the reader interacts with the book. Similarly, as readers turn the pages, each page "quivers" as if in fear, or undulates, as if it experienced pleasure. Over the course of a few days, depending on conditions, The MeatBook decays, emits odors and attracts what is normally unseen or ignored in our everyday ecology, and wreaks havoc with its electronic bindings. The MeatBook calls into question what constitutes reading, text and interactivity, and underscores the integral relationship between book and reader, information and affect, conservation and presence, and the interplays among the immaterial, material and human bodies.

Chantal Gibson, School of Interactive Arts and Technology, SFU, “Book/mark.”

With the book came the bookmark. Be it a humble slip of paper, a feather, or a fine piece of silk, the bookmark was needed to protect the spine and the pages of the codex and to mark the reader’s place. As it preserves the structure and the contents of the book, the bookmark preserves the reader’s memory. Rested between the pages of a book, its placement marks a start and a stop, a birth and a death. Preservation and memory are the major themes in Book/mark, a hanging book that marks the historical crossing of nearly 3000 Black Loyalists into Nova Scotia in 1783. Inspired by Lawrence Hill’s novel The Book of Negroes and the artist’s own journey to locate ancestors, the hanging book is comprised of 2978 handmade bookmarks, each representing one individual noted in the Historical Book of Negroes. The mixed media book explores the question “What happens when the bookmark becomes that page?” When sewn together with jute rope, the painted fabric bookmarks become the pages of this text. Ultimately the hanging book becomes both a history book and a memorial.

4:15 to 4:30; Closing Remarks