Date/Time
Date(s) - 9 Feb 2015
5:15 PM - 5:15 PM
Location
Class of 1978 Pavilion, Special Collections Center
Category(ies) No Categories
Please join us next Monday, 9 February for the next meeting of the Workshop
in the History of Material Texts, when we will welcome Linda H. Chance and
Julie Nelson Davis (both UPenn), whose talk is entitled “The Handwritten
and the Printed: Issues of Format and Medium in Japanese Premodern Books,
Revisited.”
We will convene at our usual time and place: 5:15pm in the Class of 1978
Pavilion in the Kislak Center on the 6th Floor of Van Pelt-Dietrich Library.
Linda & Julie write:
“In this workshop we will consider some challenges that study of the
history of the book in Japan presents. By focusing on the relationship
between the handwritten and the printed, we will bring forward some issues
of the mediums and formats of book production in the history of the book in
Japan. Among the questions we are engaging are: What are the presumed
virtues of print and the limits of manuscript? What is the relationship of
text and image in the East Asian calligraphic tradition and how is that
adapted for print? We are particularly concerned with questions of what
makes a text legible (and how you read an illegible text). This has become
an everyday scholarly obsession with us since co-founding the Reading Asian
Manuscripts Faculty Working Group and starting to make our way through
Penn’s holdings of woodblock printed books. Attendees at this workshop will
experience some of the complications that difficult script styles present
for readers of Japanese books. We will also talk briefly about our efforts
to train a new generation of scholars to read original texts, especially
using digital tools to collaborate on reading outside the limited canonical
corpus of transcribed manuscripts.
This is an updated version of the workshop we gave at the Schoenberg
Symposium on Manuscripts in the Digital Age in response to the general
theme “Thinking Outside the Codex.”
*Linda H. Chance is Associate Professor of Japanese Language and Literature
in the department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations at Penn. Her
main field is non-narrative prose of medieval Japan, in which she has
published a monograph, *Formless in Form: Kenkô, Tsurezuregusa, and the
Rhetoric of Japanese Fragmentary Prose *(Stanford University Press, 1997).
>From an interest in early modern commentarial and reception histories,
Chance has been engaged with the book in Japan as idea and material object.
Recently she was a coauthor with Cecilia Segawa Seigle, Penn emerita, of *Ooku:
The Secret World of the Shogun’s Women
*(Cambria Press, 2014).Julie Nelson Davis is an Associate Professor in the
Department of the History of Art at the University of Pennsylvania, where
she teaches the arts of East Asia from 1600 to the present. Davis was a
Robert and Lisa Sainsbury Fellow at the Sainsbury Institute for the Study
of Japanese Arts and Cultures and has received a number of other grants in
support of her work on early modern Japanese print culture. Her first book,
*Utamaro and the Spectacle of Beauty*, was co-published by Reaktion Books
and the University of Hawai’i Press in late 2007. Davis has written
numerous essays and articles in the field of Ukiyo-e, the “pictures of the
floating world,” and her second book, *Partners in Print: Artistic
Collaboration and the Ukiyo-e Market*, published by the University of
Hawai’i Press, came out in early 2015. *
All are welcome! Please forward this email widely to any who might be
interested. Those who do not hold University of Pennsylvania ID cards
should bring another form of photo identification in order to enter the
library building.