Date/Time
Date(s) - 15 Apr 2013
5:15 PM - 6:30 PM
Location
Martin and Margy Meyerson Conference Room, 2nd floor Van Pelt Library
Category(ies) No Categories
Please join us this Monday, April 15, for the next meeting of the weekly Workshop in the History of Material Texts. We will convene, as usual, at 5:15pm in the Martin and Margy Meyerson Conference Room, which is located on the second floor of Van Pelt Library, diagonally across from the elevators.
This week, we welcome *David Scott Kastan* (Yale), whose talk is entitled “The Body of the Text.” Kastan writes:
“The Body of The Text” looks carefully at the first two printed editions of John Donne’s Poems (1633 and 1635), which have inevitably been thought to have no authority for understanding Donne’s poetic achievement. The extraordinary survival rate of manuscript copies of John Donne’s poetry has encouraged a fantasy of authenticity to surround his verse (in spite of the fact only one English poem survives in his own hand), and also a devaluation and misrecognition of what these posthumous publications by John Marriott in fact represent. They are subtle and sophisticated efforts to reconfigure “the body of the text,” as they preserve the corpus of Donne’s poetry, but they are also remarkable print productions in themselves, pointing to sometimes overlooked aspects of the seventeenth century book trade, which may have theoretical and material consequences for understanding what *was* an author.”
*David Scott Kastan **is the George M. Bodman Professor of English at Yale University. He has written widely on early modern literature, and has edited Shakespeare’s 1 Henry IV, Marlowe’s Dr. Faustus, and Milton’s Paradise Lost, in addition to serving as a general editor of the Arden Shakespeare. His A Will to Believe: Shakespeare and Religion will be out later this year from OUP. He is presently writing a history of the book in fifteen micro-histories fo