Date/Time
Date(s) - 30 Jan 2012
5:30 PM - 7:30 PM
Location
Van Pelt Library
Category(ies) No Categories
Workshop in the History of Material Texts
Patricia Crain, Associate Professor of English at New York University, will present on “‘The Bank of Industry’: Rewards of Merit and the (Cultural) Capital of Childhood.” We will meet at 5:30 in the Martin and Margy Meyerson Conference room, which is located on the second floor of Van Pelt Library, diagonally across from the elevator bank.
The reward of merit, a premium handed out in the nineteenth-century schoolroom and one of very few dedicated childhood print genres, imitates other nineteenth-century documents, especially currency, stock certificates, transportation and entertainment tickets, and voting ballots, as well as parlor prints. Rewards of Merit constitute a site of the full array of nineteenth-century visual iconography and advertise, often self-consciously, the printer’s art. This paper explores rewards of merit’s iconology, the ways in which these bits of ephemera imagine and position children, and the ideology of making the classroom into a site of mock-capital exchange, that figures childhood as the place to transact the business of what one set of rewards calls “the bank of industry.”
Patricia Crain is Associate Professor of English at New York University. She is the author of The Story of A: The Alphabetization of America from The New England Primer to The Scarlet Letter (Stanford, 2000). Her current book-in-progress is Imagining the Child Reader: Literacy, Property and the Media of Childhood.