The following books are available for purchase at Amherst Books (8 Main Street) and on reserve at the Circulation Desk in the Library:

required:

• Umberto Eco, The Name of the Rose (San Diego: Harcourt Brace Harvest in Translation, 1994)

• David Finkelstein and Alistair McCleery, eds., The Book History Reader (London and NY: Routledge, 2002)

• Carlo Ginzburg,The Cheese and the Worms: The Cosmos of a Renaissance Miller, translated by John and Ann Tedeschi (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, 1992)

• Alberto Manguel, A History of Reading (NY: Penguin, 1997)

• Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita (NY: Vintage International, 1998)

• Azar Nafisi, Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books (NY: Random House, 2003)

• Arturo Pérez-Reverte, The Club Dumas (NY: Vintage Books, 1998)

• Neal Stephenson, The Diamond Age Or, A Young Lady's Illustrated Primer (NY: Bantam Spectra, 2000)

recommended:

* Jerome Rothenberg and Steven Clay, eds., A Book of the Book: Some Works & Projections About the Book & Writing (NY: Granary Books, 2000)

note: This book is temporarily out of print and stock, but the store has managed to acquire a handful of copies. We encourage advanced students and those particularly interested in the arts to purchase it.

All other assigned readings are accessible online through the course web site.

co-taught with Mary Russo, Professor of Literature and Critical Theory, School of Humanities, Arts and Cultural Studies (HACU)

a 200-level course recommended in particular for students in the second year and above

One of our aims is to provide a setting in which students can explore the humanities and the social sciences, and the connections between them. In particular, we hope to be able to assist students in planning their Division II concentrations and incorporating the perspective of book history into their other studies. To that end, the course includes brief guest talks by colleagues from a variety of fields. We also sponsor a public film series on "dangerous books."

The power of knowledge has caused reading to be both venerated and feared, carefully guarded and eagerly promoted. Censorship and book-burning are the counterparts to printing and schooling. Reading is an act at once social and intensely personal. How and what we read can determine who we are and how we live. We will examine the book as an apparatus of culture in civil society, as a material object, and as an embodied machine that produces and is produced by its readers. We will begin by exploring the aesthetic and social dimensions of bookmaking and reading from both historical and philosophical perspectives. Then we will turn to selected histories and fictional narratives of dangerous books.

A distinctive feature of the course is a hands-on component. 2003 marks the 70th anniversary of the burning of "un-German" books by the Nazis. To mark that occasion, we will not only study that event in the context of our larger consideration of what makes certain texts "dangerous." In addition, guided by book artist Amaryllis Siniossoglou, students will produce hand-made books that in some way preserve and commemorate the authors and texts targeted in 1933.

go to the course website