Robert Darnton

Le tappe della modernità dell’editoria sono segnate da alcuni testi qui raccolti di Valentino Bompiani, Roger Chartier, Robert Darnton, Carlo Dionisotti, Giangiacomo Feltrinelli, Gérard Genette, Gian Carlo Ferretti e Donald McKenzie, il quale dimostra che «nuovi lettori creano testi nuovi, i nuovi significati dei quali dipendono direttamente dalle loro nuove forme».

This chapter surveys the three most prominent ways in which the historical context of ideas have been understood. Put simply, they can be labelled textual contexts, social contexts and cultural contexts. Although all three ways of understanding historical context have thrived at various points in the past and certainly continue to be used today, there is a sense in which general trends in the practice of intellectual history have favoured each of these approaches in turn. At the moment, the cultural history of ideas tends to present itself as the cutting edge of current intellectual practice.

This chapter suggests that the present ascendancy of cultural history has developed not just from changing scholarly fashions, but also from a growing apprehension amongst many historians that the older concepts of context utilised by previous intellectual historians were perhaps too restrictive. The cultural history of ideas has flourished in recent years because it offers a self-consciously capacious understanding of historical contexts.

Robert Darnton famously described book history as " one of the few sectors in the human sciences where there is a mood of expansion and a flurry of new ideas. " Indeed, for literary scholars, a renewed attention to the materiality of texts and the networks in which they circulate has spurred exciting new interdisciplinary scholarship. Book History has also done much to expand the archive, considering the " low brow, " " middle brow, " and " high brow " interchangeably. This course will provide a background in some of the major theoretical statements to come from the field, including work on crucial nodes often ignored or dismissed in the study of " literature: " libraries, readers, publishers, and booksellers.

We'll then turn to the exhilarating (and humbling) task of considering the future of the book by examining new formats as well as outdated (and flat-out wrong) twentieth-century predictions of the book's demise. In other words, we'll use futures past (of film, television, and audiobooks) to frame our thinking in the contemporary moment. With this historical context in mind, we'll tackle some of the thorny questions of our present textual moment: How do you read T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land as an app? How about Young-Hae Chang Heavy Industries's Dakota? How should scholars work with a text that’s an audiobook before or instead of becoming a print book?

The course will include visits to and collaborations with our library’s Special Collections and the Black Rock Press. As a seminar in theory, the course welcomes students of all periods and specializations as well as MFA students interested in “the book.”

罗伯特·达恩顿《屠猫狂欢》（一名《屠猫记》）是新文化史研究的代表作。这种研究模式对非常规史料，尤其是文学文本的使用以及对“阐释”的看重，与文学研究多有共鸣之处，近年来也在中国现当代文学研究领域产生了一定影响。本文将首先回到《屠猫记》文本，分析这种研究方式所带来的启发，而后，我将以同样描述相同历史时段的托克维尔《旧制度与大革命》作为参照，指出这种研究思路的限制和可能性。以文学研究者的视野深入理解《屠猫狂欢》是必要的，《屠猫狂欢》面对正统史学时表现出的那些“灵巧”与“困窘”，正让文学研究者心有戚戚。

Le recours à des tactiques de contournement prémunit-il un texte hétérodoxe de toute censure ? Si le lecteur initié est susceptible de repérer le sens caché sous le texte explicite, pourquoi le juge n’en serait-il pas capable ? Selon la modélisation straussienne, le censeur doit administrer la preuve du sens ésotérique, ce qui neutraliserait la censure. Et, en effet, l’idée de signification occulte se heurte au démenti de l’auteur, au reproche de spéculation impossible à confronter à une réfutation factuelle et donc d’affirmation infondée. De la sorte, l’utilisation de détours verbaux verrouillerait toute certitude quant à l’existence et à la nature d’un sens ésotérique. L’examen de cette thèse exige une double enquête, l’une de fait pour déterminer dans quelle mesure les censures historiques ont pensé saisir la part occulte d’un texte, l’autre « en droit » pour savoir si la science ou l’art du langage autorise une telle démarche interprétative.
Pris en considération depuis l’Antiquité, les détours verbaux élaborés afin de surmonter une contrainte sont analysés et décrits par la rhétorique ; le dévoilement d’un sens caché hétérodoxe n’est donc pas sans fondement (I). De fait, les censeurs s’efforcent d’élucider les significations latentes ; quelques exemples tirés de tribunaux à des époques variées en témoignent (II). Si le modèle straussien n’est donc pas toujours opératoire, c’est que ses postulats herméneutiques méritent des nuances (III).

The revolution of 1848 was a crucial step for the apprenticeship in the democratic practices in the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies. Historians have been dedicating scarce attention to this theme, since they consider political life in Southern Italy as a prerogative of a very small group of capital citizens.
This book deals with the political mobilization in Naples during 1848 and aims at challenging the idea of the Italian Mezzogiorno as peripherical in the European revolutionary context. To this end, two aspects of the process are focussed and explored: first, the street politics, which played a key role in the making of public opinion, i.e. the demonstrations, the petitions, the sociabilité in the coffeehouses and the popular figures; second, the radical group which tried to lead the political mobilization in the Bourbon capital. The latter, in addition, has been deep investigated in its cultural, ideological and socio-economical aspects with the ambition to explain its contribution to the realization of the much more widespread “imaginaries”and istances of the Neapolitan revolution.

Jeżeli przyjmiemy, że Nowa Era potrzebuje historii jako specyficznego podejścia do przeszłości, to opowiadanie o niej wydaje się o tyle płodne, o ile stanowi sposób poznania siebie, "innego" i świata oraz o ile odzwierciedla i przyczynia się do "stawania się" nowego świata. Dlatego też historia potraktowana jest tutaj jako refleksja nad człowiekiem (filozofia) i jako opowieść, pokazująca, kim jest człowiek (antropologia) i jak to jest być człowiekiem (etyka). Takie deklaracje wynikają z wołania o aktywną postawę badacza w tworzeniu rzeczywistości i przyjęciu za nią odpowiedzialności. Książka ta włącza się także w "etyczny zwrot", który dosięgnął historię. Przenika ja tak ważne obecnie pytanie o "dobro historii": gdzie jest owo dobro co nim jest.

The uses and reception of Sándor Kisfaludy’s
Patriotic Appeal of 1809

In the end of 1808, Sándor Kisfaludy was commissioned by Joseph Beckers, the adjutant of Archduke Joseph to write a short pamphlet on a future noble levy, to draw attention of the Hungarian nobility to the asset of their “obsolete privileges”. Kisfaludy finished it as a long, rhetorically lush, and thematically complex pamphlet in the early 1809, and the work was blue pencilled by Beckers and the Palatine to erase socio-politically sensitive parts. The work was published anonymously in late March – early April in Hungarian, and in the translation of Lajos Schedius in German. The Patriotic Appeal to the Hungarian Nobility became one of the most important propaganda works of its time, which was written first and foremost to the educated wealthy landed gentry, the leading political class of the country. The printing was conducted by the ideas of Kisfaludy. The present study reconstructs the „life-cycle” of the pamphlet within the frames of history of books, emphasizing the convergence between book and intellectual history, based on the idea of Robert Darnton. To this, on the one hand it will be shown, how this work was produced and circulated as a material object, on the other hand, how it was received as a printed text by the contemporary literary public. To map the spread of the book, to analyse the traces of possessors and of various types of its usage and reading, this contribution tries to explore all the copies in existing and historic collections, as well as to examine the marginals and other notes in them.

Keywords: 19th century, Hungary, history of books, reading, collections, pamphlet, patriotism, nobility, propaganda, Napoleonic Wars

This interview was made in February 2004 and published in Estonian in the Estonian edition of Robert Darnton’s “George Washington’s False Teeths: An Unconventional Guide to the Eighteenth Century” (“George Washingtoni valehambad. Tavatu teejuht 18. sajandisse”, Tallinn: Varrak, 2004, pp. 209–222). The original, English version was published on 21 June 2004 at the website of Eurozine (http://www.eurozine.com/interview-with-robert-darnton/).

"Ce texte retrace l'évolution d'un topos qui traverse différentes périodes historiques, et qui se caractérise par l'articulation entre 1° une alarme lancée à propos des dangers d'une diffusion excessive des titres scolaires, a fortiori ceux décernés par l'université,
2° la désignation d'un groupe d'intellectuels surnuméraires porteurs d'un risque politique, et
3° des projets de réformes censés contrecarrer la production d'un tel groupe.
Plutôt que de produire un récit continu de l'évolution de ce thème, nous allons nous efforcer de mettre en lumière, à partir des sources dont nous avons connaissance, des moments historiques caractérisés par des façons distinctes de problématiser les dangers sociaux de la surproduction universitaire.
Ce passage en revue nous invitera à voir, dans la récurrence des dénonciations du surnombre de diplômés ainsi que dans l'activisme réformiste qui vise l'université, autant d'hommages involontaires au potentiel critique de cette institution, et surtout de sa démocratisation."

Acknowledgements Notes on Contributors Introduction Emperor Kennedy Legend: A New Anthropological Debate L. Kolakowski The Watercress Seller C. Steedman from Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison M. Foucault Workers Revolt: The Great Cat Massacre of the Rue Saint-Severin R. Darnton Eruptions of Funk: Historicizing Toni Morrison S. Willis At the Table of the Great: More's Self-Fashioning and Self-Cancellation S. Greenblatt Facing History, or the Anxiety of Reading. Holbein's 'The Ambassadors' According to Greenblatt and Lyotard J. Pieters Reading Cultural History C. Belsey Theses on the Philosophy of History W. Benjamin Camus' The Plague, or a Monument to Witnessing? S. Felman Why Bother with the Past? Engaging with Some Issues Raised by the 'End of History as we Have Known it' K. Jenkins from The Writing of History M. de Certeau Summaries and Notes Glossary Suggestions for Further Reading Index

¿Qué decimos cuando decimos “ciudad”? ¿A qué nos referimos?, o será mas bien, ¿a quién? En La invención de lo cotidiano 1. Artes de hacer, el historiador francés Michel de Certeau abordó la pregunta sobre la ciudad: ¿qué es la ciudad? ¿el conjunto de sus habitantes, un deslinde geográfico, un sujeto universal? Con la ayuda de la película The Dark Knight Rises (2012), este ensayo pretende utilizar Ciudad Gótica, tal y como es presentada por el guionista y director Christopher Nolan paraabordar el tema de la “ciudad” problematizado De Certeau, y traer dicha concepción al presente para ver si, tal y como lo pronosticó, la ciudad es un concepto que está en constante degradación.

Palabras clave: ciudad, Michel de Certeau, Batman, Ciudad Góti- ca, ciudad concepto, acontecimiento, política, revolución, Slavoj Žižek, dictadura del proletariado.

ABSTRACT
What is it that we say when we say “city”? What are we talking about? Or is it “who” are we talking about? In The Practice of Everyday Life, French historian Michel de Certeau took on the question about “the city”: What is the city? Is it the sum of its inhabitants, a geographical demarcation, a universal subject? With the help of the film The Dark Knight Rises (2012), this essay pretends to use Gotham City, as it is presented by screenwriter and director Christopher Nolan to take on the notion of “city” as it was described by De Certeau, and to bring this conception to the present to see if, as was foretold by the author, the city is a concept that is in constant degradation.
Keywords: city, Michel de Certeau, Batman, Gotham City, concept city, event, politics, revolution, Slavoj Žižek, dictatorship of the proletariat.

Discutindo a importância da visada underground da vida literária, o artigo propõe, a partir do método utilizado por Robert Darnton, em “Boemia literária e revolução” (1989), uma metodologia de pesquisa que engloba ferramentas não intencionais, a fim de analisar um fato literário em instâncias específicas do sistema literário.


Discussing the importance of the literary underground, this article proposes, based on the methodology used by Robert Darnton in “The Literary Underground of the Old Regime” (1982), a research methodology which incorporates unintentional tools with the goal of analyzing a literary fact in specific instances of the literary system.

Travelogue from Harvard University focusing on book history, based on the authors' experiences as visiting scholar at the history department in 2014-2015. An interview with the former Harvard University librarian Robert Darnton on the National Digital Public Library of America (DPLA) is also included.

Ao discutir as relações entre espaço, gênero e prestígio na vida literária, o artigo examina a maneira como os locais públicos e privados incidiram na escolha discursiva dos escritores, promovendo audiência no universo simbólico das letras. Enfatiza-se como polos dialéticos primordiais os cafés e os salões, situados na esfera pública, bem como outros espaços como sacadas de jornais e praças públicas; visa-se ainda o espaço privado, como as residências (ou salas), palco para a formação das chamadas igrejinhas literárias, cujos encontros entre intelectuais foram construídos a partir de um perfil de cordialidade. Parte-se da abordagem de Pascale Nova (2002) e Robert Darnton (1989), acerca da formação do prestígio no universo literário, em aplicação aos textos de Lincoln Souza (1961), Brito Broca (1979) e Humberto de Campos (1954), comentadores e observadores da vida literária brasileira, especialmente na primeira metade do século XX. ABSTRACT: When discussing relationships between space, genre and prestige in literary life, this article examines the way in which public and private places influence the choice of discourse for writers, promoting an audience with the symbolic universe of language. Emphasis has been given to cafés and salons as primordial dialectic centers being that they are located in the public sphere, as well as other spaces such as newspaper stands and public squares. This study also looks at private places, such as residences (or meeting rooms), being a stage for the formation of the so-called literary churches, whose meetings among intellectuals were constructed from a profile of cordiality. It began with the approach from Pascale Nova (2002) and Robert Darnton (1989), regarding the formation of prestige in the literary universe, applying texts from Lincoln Souza (1961), Brito Broca (1979) and Humberto de Campos (1954), who were commentators and observers of Brazilian literary life, especially in the first half of the twenty-second century.

72 544x376 El presente trabajo pretende analizar de que manera la “nueva historiografia francesa” sento los precedentes ideologicos y metodologicos necesarios para que un historiador medievalista como Jacques Le Goff considere la historia del cuerpo como un problema de analisis pertinente y el giro antropologico como la mejor herramienta de indagacion historica frente a otras mas tradicionales. Asimismo, realizare una comparacion entre este autor y Charles Darnton, en vistas a entender que diferencias y similitudes existen entre ambos en su toma de partido por un enfoque antropologico. ?Que podemos decir de ese temprano intento de Darnton y la mas reciente tentativa de dar, como dice Le Goff, una historia al cuerpo, y un cuerpo a la historia? Casi veinte anos separan a ambos textos, seria interesante saber si la distancia que percibimos entre ellos es solo temporal o se desencadena a un nivel mas profundo, aunque ?realmente son diferencias? ?O tan solo una forma personal de internalizacion de herramientas, donde cada uno realiza su propio sincretismo de teorias y metodologias, con sus propias perspectivas pero compartiendo un mismo horizonte? Estas cuestiones, y las relativas al impacto en las ciencias sociales de los cruces entre la antropologia y la historia, son materia de reflexion en este articulo. Normal 0 21 MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Tabla normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0cm 5.4pt 0cm 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0cm; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:10.0pt; font-family:"Times New Roman";} 72 544x376

From the current vantage point of the transformation of books and libraries, Mani presents a historical account of world literature. By locating translation, publication, and circulation along routes of "bibliomigrancy"--the physical and virtual movement of books--Mani narrates how world literature is coded and recoded as literary works find new homes on faraway bookshelves.

Mani argues that the proliferation of world literature in a society is the function of a nation's relationship with print culture--a Faustian pact with books. Moving from early Orientalist collections, to the Nazi magazine Weltliteratur, to the European Digital Library, Mani reveals the political foundations for a history of world literature that is at once a philosophical ideal, a process of exchange, a mode of reading, and a system of classification.

Shifting current scholarship's focus from the academic to the general reader, from the university to the public sphere, Recoding World Literature argues that world literature is culturally determined, historically conditioned, and politically charged.

The famous clash between Edmund Burke and Tom Paine over the Enlightenment’s “evil” or “liberating” potential in the French Revolution finds present-day parallels in the battle between those who see the Enlightenment at the origins of modernity’s many ills, such as imperialism, racism, misogyny, and totalitarianism, and those who see it as having forged an age of democracy, human rights, and freedom. The essays collected by Charles Walton in Into Print paint a more complicated picture. By focusing on print culture—the production, circulation, and reception of Enlightenment thought—they show how the Enlightenment was shaped through practice and reshaped over time.

These essays expand upon an approach to the study of the Enlightenment pioneered four decades ago: the social history of ideas. The contributors to Into Print examine how writers, printers, booksellers, regulators, police, readers, rumormongers, policy makers, diplomats, and sovereigns all struggled over that broad range of ideas and values that we now associate with the Enlightenment. They reveal the financial and fiscal stakes of the Enlightenment print industry and, in turn, how Enlightenment ideas shaped that industry during an age of expanding readership. They probe the limits of Enlightenment universalism, showing how demands for religious tolerance clashed with the demands of science and nationalism. They examine the transnational flow of Enlightenment ideas and opinions, exploring its domestic and diplomatic implications. Finally, they show how the culture of the Enlightenment figured in the outbreak and course of the French Revolution.

Aside from the editor, the contributors are David A. Bell, Roger Chartier, Tabetha Ewing, Jeffrey Freedman, Carla Hesse, Thomas M. Luckett, Sarah Maza, Renato Pasta, Thierry Rigogne, Leonard N. Rosenband, Shanti Singham, and Will Slauter.