Lecture: What Is a Book? Authorship Textuality and Reading from the Age of the Codex to the Digital World
The lecture will discuss the mutations of written culture, and particularly the definition of the “book” from the birth of the codex to the digital age. It will focus on the challenges launched by the new modes for compassing, publishing, and appropriating texts to the categories and practices which defined, at least from the eighteenth-century on, “l’ordre du discours,” to quote Foucault.
Roger Chartier
Visiting Scholar
Roger Chartier is Professeur at the Collège de France, Directeur d’études at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales and Annenberg Visiting Professor of History at the University of Pennsylvania. His work in Early Modern European History is mainly dedicated to cultural history and the history of the book, printing and reading. He has been lecturing and publishing on the relationship between the material history of institutions and the embodied practices which both animate and survive these institutions: in particular, early modern techniques of reading, disseminating and collecting printed information.
His work, based at the intersection of literary criticism, material bibliography and sociocultural history, is not disconnected from broader historiographical and methodological interests which deal with the relation between history and other disciplines: philosophy, sociology, and anthropology.
Recognized internationally, Roger Chartier’s hundreds of articles and books have been translated in at least ten different languages. He is frequently asked to lecture or to participate in extended teaching programs in related disciplines, in various countries across Europe, North and South America.
Primary Recipient Awards
Roger Chartier – French Scholars Lecture Series – 2015