Cultures of the Book

1.00 credits · Undergraduate

From cuneiform tablets and birch bark scrolls to medieval codices and from paperbacks and books on tape to e-readers, text technologies have played important roles in many cultures. This course explores the history of the book and adjacent text technologies, and it looks at how these technologies have shaped and been shaped by authorship, reading, publishing, and politics at different times and in different places. Subjects include the production, composition, circulation, interpretation, reception, management, and destruction of material texts.