CFP: Readers and Writers in the 18th C. (3/15/03; 5/3/03)

Princeton Eighteenth Century Society presents:

Readers and Writers in the Eighteenth Century: an Interdisciplinary
Conference May 3, 2003. Princeton University.

The eighteenth century saw a huge expansion in the reading public as
well as an increasingly diverse range of literary productions. Novels,
essays, discourses and journals are only the beginning: anyone with a
taste for letters - notables, erudite provincials, country gentlemen,
washerwomen and countesses - contributed a book of poetry, a political
tract, a little treatise on fluvial navigation or the storage of
grains. This is why the eighteenth century is such a rich period for
anyone interested in exploring the dynamics between readers and
writers.

In an essay entitled "Readers Respond to Rousseau: the Fabrication of
Romantic Sensitivity," Robert Darnton sets about trying to "think the
unthinkable," that is, to recognize "[the Rousseauistic variety of
reading] as a distinct social phenomenon [that] should not be confused
with reading in the present, for the readers of the Old Regime lived
in a mental world that is almost unthinkable today." This conference
attempts to do just that: to try and imaginatively recover the
specificity of the reader-writer relationship in the eighteenth
century.

We encourage papers from a variety of disciplines and methodologies,
ranging from the abstract and conceptual to the materialist or
statistical, from theoretical analyses to histories of the book. We
especially encourage work which takes an interdisciplinary approach or
rethinks our sense of texts and readers (for example, by looking at
how architecture is *read* by those who inhabit and create it, how
writers function as readers of their own texts, or how reviewers and
publishers create versions of texts and publics).

If you would like to present a 20-minute paper, please send a 250 to
300 word abstract by March 15, 2003.

Contact: Lucien Nouis <lnouis_at_princeton.edu>

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Received on Mon Feb 03 2003 - 16:52:13 EST