Skip to main content
"By creating we think, by living we learn" Patrick Geddes
Main University menu
 

Templates Top-Level Menu

MLitt Module

EN52006: Writing, Texts and Books: Publishing Writing

Module Organiser: Gail Low

Credits: 40

Aims

  1. To explore issues in book and publishing history.
  2. To explore issues in the production, dissemination and reception of texts.
  3. To explore the material cultures of texts.
  4. To explore the role of `little magazines' in the field of cultural production.
  5. To provide students with specific book history concepts and methods that  inform postgraduate research in English Studies and Creative Writing

Intended learning outcomes

Indicative content

What is book history? What is an author? What impact does the marketplace have on the production of texts? What place does reviewing have on the construction of a text? What is the impact of book prizes? This module is an introduction to some key debates in book history which aims to study texts as material artefacts that circulate within institutional frameworks of literary cultures such as those of publishing, the academy, and the marketplace.

Key topics include:

Examples of Weekly Topics

  1. What is Book History?
    Book history debates have sought to encourage us to think of the book not simply as `text' in the narrow sense of the word, but also as `institution’, made up of a network of social, cultural and discursive relationships in addition to words on a page. The discipline reminds us that books are material artefacts as well as imaginative and creative works. This seminar offers an overview of some of the key areas of investigation in book history.
  2. Authorship and Texts
    Since the publication of Michel Foucault’s classic essay, `What is an Author?’ and Roland Barthes’ `The Death of the Author’ the concept of authorship in literary studies has been much debated. Both essays have been supplemented by a host of book histories studies on the modern notion of authorship as an institution. This seminar offers an historical overview of those debates and looks specifically at how the author as sign performs classificatory, editorial, scriptural as well as commercial and property functions in social and cultural contexts that exceed the originating moment of creation.
  3. Case Study: Mediaeval manuscript culture
  4. Editing: The Socialisation of Texts
    This seminar will discuss the range of material and symbolic exchanges entailed in the creation and reception of literary texts. How does awareness of these affect how and what we read, and how in turn does it impact upon literary history and reputation?
  5. Case study: Editing Virginia Woolf
    This seminar will consider Woolf's first novel The Voyage Out, the first UK and US editions of which exhibit major differences originating with the author herself. When editing a text, should we seek to recover some original intention; or authorial second and third thoughts; or any final thoughts? Which of those are authoritative, and why?
  6. Publishing: the contemporary culture industry
    This seminar will look at the contemporary field of publishing through the analytic lens provided by the cultural theorist and sociologist Pierre Bourdieu; it will encourage you think self-reflexively as readers, writers, critics and as consumers of the book industry.
  7. Literary Prizes and the Economy of Prestige
    This seminar will look at literary prizes and the cultural/symbolic capital that they lend to the marketing of books; it will address in particular, the (Mann) Booker prize for Fiction.
  8. Modernism and the Little Magazines
    This seminar will consider the importance of small press and little publication to the Modernist avant-garde in the early decades of the 20th century. We will consider the cheap and temporary nature of many of these publications, the relation between little presses and mainstream publishing houses and conflicts of literary taste. The seminar will contextualise transatlantic literary modernism in terms of its means of production and creation of audiences.
  9. Two Modernist Case Studies: The Selling of Imagism & Early Joyce and the Literary Marketplace
    This seminar will build on the material and discussions of Week 9 to focus on two topics in detail. Firstly we will consider the innovations of Imagism as the cultural marketing of the avant-garde and a new sense of poetic meaning in material terms. We will question how important the manipulation of the marketplace and reading public was in making spaces for new aesthetic actions. Secondly, we will look in detail at the case of Joyce’s early rejections, and the debates which surrounded acceptable taste and the boundaries of literary provocation, focussing on the differences between large publishing houses and the little magazines. These case studies will make specific points of general discussion from the previous week.
  10. Material Texts: from newspapers to comics to graphic novels
    This seminar will explore the changing form of the comic, from single panel to comic strips, comics books and graphic novels, with an emphasis on format and publication history and its effect on notions of readership, cultural capital and authorship.

Teaching, Learning and Assessment

This module comprises 22 hours of seminar/tutorial time and/or individual supervision and/or directed reading.

Assessment: two research essays (2500 words each)

Edit