American Print Cultures and the Art of the Book

(3 Credit Hours) · Undergraduate

Have you ever tried to think about books by making one? Included handwriting as the subject of your literary analysis, or ink? Have you ever wondered how much the authors you study were thinking about the paper you’d be holding when you pick up a book? This course is a celebration of book technologies in American literature. We will undertake a comparative study of print, type, paper, and letterforms from early American letters to the contemporary “post-print” era. By doing so, we will explore why our love of books, paper, and print has returned so dramatically at the same time that digital reading technologies and platforms have proliferated. In texts by authors including Phillis Wheatley Peters, Emily Dickinson, and Benjamin Franklin we will study early encounters with print and other writing technologies. Moving to the contemporary period, we will read fiction and poetry obsessed with print legacies, by writers like Susan Howe and Ruth Ozeki, and will also look at contemporary artists and communities like the Book/Print Artist/Scholar of Color Collective who are reframing print histories and practice as collaborative and pedagogical. The course uses an experimental structure: we split the weeks into intensive literary seminars and hands-on workshops. Students work with letterpress, learn basic bookbinding techniques, and work with early and late innovations in the book arts. At the heart of our explorations will be the intense relationships that literary works have cultivated with their own materials and techniques of production. Creative and critical assignments.