ENG 3803 Cherry-Randle Spring 2021

Textual transmission has a long global history and over time humans have implemented “text” in a variety of discourses. Each technological advancement of textual transmission has unique conventions and problems that affect human understanding and appreciation of material textual culture. By concerning ourselves with changing textual forms, argues D.F. McKenzie, “allows us to describe not only the technical but the social process of their transmission. In those quite specific ways, it accounts for non-book texts, their physical forms, textual versions, technical transmission, institutional control, their perceived meanings, and social effects” (Bibliography and the Sociology of Texts p. 13).

We will begin by asking these questions:

How have humans communicated with each other throughout history? Speech? Visual Images? Text? What modes and mediums does human communication take? How does text evolve? Really at the heart of this class is how does text move and change from one text technology to another? What problems and implications arise from such radical influences of technological advancement and societal influences? This course will explore and unpack these questions using hands-on applications to understand the challenges each text technology faces and how it influences human understanding.

We will begin our inquiry into the history of text technologies around 30,000 B.C. with the Chauvet-Pont-d’Arc Cave of France, to the printing press and its use in America and the effects of creating imagined communities by fueling the separation and revolution between America and Britain, and we will end our journey with Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass and society’s intervening role of his revisions in 19th century America.