GENED 1034: Texts in Transition
Thanks for your interest in Gen Ed 1034!
Through our discussions together and our visits (with behind-the-scenes access) to museums, archives, libraries, special collections, and conservation labs, we will be putting the humanities into practice throughout the semester. Specifically, we'll be exploring a fascinating and urgent question for our moment of rapid changes in media and modes of communication: What makes some texts long-lived while others are ephemeral, today and in the past?
Update of April 13, 6:30pm: the course is now fully enrolled. We’re very sorry to disappoint those who weren’t successful this year. We plan to offer the course in Fall 2025 and hope you’ll consider lotterying for it then. Warm thanks for your interest in our topic!
Update of April 12, 7am: We really appreciate all the expressions of interest we’ve received--thank you for your enthusiastic interest! The date has elapsed for those who lotteried into the course to accept their slots. We are now closing the waitlist and will be contacting a few students of the many who have asked to be the waitlist during the day today. Please note that GenEd calls for 25% of the seats in the course to be reserved for first-years and the second enrolment window in late August, so the course will not show full enrolment until that process is complete. If you don’t hear from us later today that means that unfortunately we won’t be able to respond favorably to your interest and you should make other plans. We plan to offer the course again in Fall 2025.
Update of April 10, 1:45pm: the lottery has run.
To those who were unsuccessful in the lottery: there may be a few spots available after the deadline for accepting a spot in the course has passed (midnight on April 11). If you are interested in being on the waitlist to which we might be able to turn please write a short email explaining your interest to amblair@fas and lwhittington@fas We might not be able to respond to these messages but rest assured that we will read them and be in touch with you if a spot opens up for you.
This course may not be taken Pass/Fail.
This course has an enrollment cap and is a part of the coordinated, ranked-choice Gen Ed lottery. For all questions about the lottery please email gened_enrollment@fas.harvard.edu not the instructional staff of this course.
To participate in the lottery, you must first request permission to enroll and then rank your choices through my.harvard by 11:59 p.m. EST Tuesday, April 9, 2024. The Gen Ed lottery will run Wednesday, April 10; if you are successful in the lottery, your course petition in your Crimson Cart will turn to a green check that allows you to enroll. You then have until 11:59pm on Thursday, April 11 to claim your seat. After this date instructors can begin approving petitions until the course cap is reached. For timely updates and detailed instructions about entering the Gen Ed lottery, please see https://gened.fas.harvard.edu/fall-2024-courses-and-lottery."
SECTIONING: This class requires students to enroll in an untimed, placeholder section during registration and to submit time preferences. Sections will be assigned by April 26. In order to take this course you must be available to attend every week lectures on Mon and Wed 3-4:15pm and a one-hour discussion section at one of these times :
Thurs 1:30/ Thurs 3pm/ Thurs 4:30pm/ Fri 10:30am
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Texts in Transition: Course Overview
This course is about how written language survives and changes over time. As our writing today becomes ever more digital—and paradoxically both more ephemeral and more durable—the attitudes and tools we have for preserving our culture are more complex and fluid. We will study how written language—text— travels through time and across media. We will ask: how good are texts for capturing, transmitting, and preserving human experience? How have texts come down to us from the distant past? How do we ensure that what we write today will survive into the future? As we investigate contemporary approaches to cultural preservation, we will consider how pre-modern European cultures transmitted and transformed texts, and created institutions that we still rely on today, including museums, libraries, and archives. Each week you will observe or apply methods of preservation, restoration, destruction, translation, and transmission in an attempt to preserve a personal artifact. We will also read works of literature that reflect on questions of durability, ephemerality, and written memory. By the end of the course, you should be a more thoughtful curator of your own textual presence and media ecology around you.
As a student in this course, you will:
- Develop long-term thinking about the transmission of written culture.
- Use past examples to illuminate our current media ecology.
- Appreciate the effect of technologies, institutions, and individuals in making texts durable or ephemeral.
- Prepare to make decisions that will affect the preservation of the texts we write today.
The course meets three times per week: Monday & Wednesday 3:00-4:15pm in Harvard Hall 201 along with a one-hour discussion section (Thurs 1:30pm/ Thurs 4:30pm/ or Fri 10:30am-- in order to take this course you must be available at one of these times). MW meetings will combine lecture, discussion, and visits to museums, archives, libraries, special collections, and conservation labs. Th/Fri meetings will dive deeper into the readings, do making activities, and work towards weekly assignments.
Meet Your Teachers
Course Format and Weekly Rhythms
GenEd1034 relies on participation and interaction in three course meetings per week: two full-group sessions on Mondays and Wednesdays 3:00-4:15pm EST and one discussion section of about 15 students (you will be assigned to one of these three sections). Our weekly schedule rhythm will be as follows:
- Sunday-Wednesday: complete the week's readings (Borsuk and Chiang are available from the COOP and on reserve in Lamont; all others in PDF form on Canvas).
- Monday 3:00-4:15pm: Lecture in TBA [Harvard 201]
- Wednesday 3:00-4:15pm: Lecture in Harvard 202 or visit to a site on campus (as per syllabus)
- Thurs/Fri: Section led by TFs Manny and Andreas to discuss readings and lectures. To take the course you must be available for one of these 1-hour sections starting at Thurs 1:30pm, Thurs 3pm, Thurs 4:30pm, Fri 10:30am.
- Friday 11:59pm: homework due to the Canvas site. (with the exception of Saturday October 5 instead of Friday October 4).
Course requirements
- Attendance at lectures and sections (20%)
- 8 short assignments as per syllabus (totaling 20% of the course grade). These assignments are short (max 500 words) are graded check plus (A)/ check (A-/B+)/ check minus (B).
- 2 more substantial assignments in week 4 and week 10 serve as mini-midterms, are letter-graded—they are each worth 10% (together 20% of the course grade).
- Capstone Project (for a total of 40% of the course grade) comprising
- Short oral Presentation (about 6 minutes) in class on your capstone project (10%)
- Submission of an essay version of your capstone project (1500 words) (25%). Plus a short reflection paper discussing your decisions along the way and what you felt you learned in the process (500 words) (5%). Both are due on the last day of reading period, Tues Dec 10, 11:59pm EST.
For this project, please select a text you care about and that you would like to see transmitted to the future. This could be something you or someone you know has written or something that has come down in your family; or a text you admire but that you feel has been underappreciated or is in need of attention. We will offer a list of suggestions and are happy to hear your ideas before you settle (with the approval of an instructor) on your topic in Week 3. The short weekly assignments in weeks 3 and 5-10 are designed to help you curate this text; you can draw on these short assignments in preparing the capstone presentation to the class and the final submission of the capstone project and reflection paper.
General Education Requirements
This course fulfills the General Education requirement in Histories, Societies, Individuals or Aesthetics & Culture. Freshmen are welcome! This course does not count for the general education distribution requirement in Arts and Humanities or Social Sciences. This course counts for the “pre-modern” distribution requirement for History concentrators. This course counts for the “Literature before 1700” requirement for English concentrators. No prior college level background is expected.
View course policies here
Syllabus (pdf to download)
Wednesday September 4: Introduction: what is a text? What is transmission? Choosing a text
Sections meet Th/Fr: introductions; discuss assignment 0
ASSIGNMENT 0 due in section: find and photograph some text on the Harvard campus or nearby Cambridge (for reporting in next class—nothing written required).
UNIT ONE—MATERIAL TRANSMISSION
Week 1: texts in physical forms
Monday Sept 9: media ecologies of the ancient world
Wednesday September 11: visit to the Art Museum (with a focus on ancient media)
Sections meet Th/Fr: discuss readings: what do these primary texts tell us about the media ecology of Greco-Roman antiquity?
Readings for Week 1:
Amaranth Borsuk, ch. 1: “The Book as Object”
*Classical writers on texts and transmission: Plato, Phaedrus 274e-277a; Sappho, Fragments 2, 16, and 58; Horace, Odes 3.30; Ovid, Metamorphoses 15.871-879; Martial, Epigrams 1.1, 1.2, 3.2, 4.72, 7.51, 13.1; Life of Adam and Eve 49-50
ASSIGNMENT 1 DUE Friday 11:59pm EDT: compose a label describing the text and the medium of one object of your choice in the Harvard Art Museum—focus on the relationship between the text and its material form. (250 words)
Week 2: preservation and loss of ancient texts in the Middle Ages
Monday September 16: book culture in the Middle Ages; medieval manuscripts, paths of transmission for ancient Greco-Roman literature.
Wednesday September 18: session at Houghton Library (medieval + early printed)
Sections meet Th/Fr: discuss readings: what do The House of Fame and “Adam Scriveyn” tell us about textual transmission in the European Middle Ages?
Friday September 20: optional stitching workshop with experts from the Preservation Lab (details TBA ca. 2-3pm).
Fri Sept 20, 9am-2pm (also on Tues Sept 24): Please come to special office hours to discuss your choice of text for the final project (times TBA) with your TF and one of the professors
Readings for Week 2
*Geoffrey Chaucer, The House of Fame and “Adam Scriveyn” [copies distributed in class]
ASSIGNMENT 2 DUE Friday 11:59pm EDT: a making assignment from your kit—learn how to stitch a quire of paper; upload a photo of your quire. For guidance see the links on canvas for this assignment.
Week 3: impacts of the Renaissance: finding and printing texts
Monday September 23: humanism, recovering lost texts, preserving damaged and fragmentary works
Tuesday Sept 24 (also on Fri Sept 20): Please come to special office hours to discuss your choice of text for the final project (times TBA) with your TF and one of the professors
Wednesday Sept 25: invention of printing, reactions to printing
Sections meet Th/Fr: discuss readings: how does Petrarch envision the future of his texts?
Readings for Week 3
Amaranth Borsuk, ch. 2: “The Book as Content”
*Francis Petrarch, “To Posterity”; Letters to his Friends: 3.18 (to Giovanni dell’Incisa on searching for manuscripts), 18 (to Nicholas Sigeros on receiving a copy of Homer); Letters to the Ancients 24.3-4 (to Cicero), 24.7 (to Quintilian), 24.8 (to Livy), 24.12 (to Homer)
ASSIGNMENT 3 DUE Friday 11:59pm EDT: choose the text that will be the object of your final project; write a label for it.
Week 4: impacts of the Renaissance: repairing and correcting texts
Monday September 30: humanism and the editing of texts
Wednesday October 2: review and prep for first graded assignment
Sections meet Th/Fr: hands-on editing exercises; editions of Emily Dickinson
Readings for Week 4
Thomas Tanselle, “The Varieties of Scholarly Editing”
*Emily Dickinson, “There’s a certain Slant of light”; “This is my letter to the World,” “I’m wife – I’ve finished that –”; “Because I could not stop for Death” (manuscript and editions from 1890, 1955, 1998, and 2016)
ASSIGNMENT 4 DUE Saturday Oct 5, 11:59pm EDT: in the year 1500 you have discovered a long lost ancient text. Discuss the pros and cons of manuscript versus print as the best of preserving and disseminating the text in both the short long term and the short term. (500 words—letter-graded assignment) [midterm equivalent]
UNIT TWO: CULTURAL TRANSMISSION
Week 5: paratexts and interpretation—managing transmission (part 1)
Monday October 7: Erasmus and the transmission of the Bible
Wednesday October 9: types and functions of paratexts
Sections meet Th/Fr: what are the challenges of editing religious or sacred texts?
Readings for Week 5:
*Erasmus, New Testament Scholarship (selections)
ASSIGNMENT 5 due Friday 11:59pm EDT: research report on the historical context of your text–when, where, by whom, for whom, in relation to what other kinds of texts did was your text created? list 2-3 secondary sources that you have used to learn about this context (250-500 words).
Week 6: paratexts and interpretation—managing transmission (part 2)
Monday October 14: Holiday—no class
Wednesday October 16: presenting an author to posterity: William Shakespeare
Sections meet Th/Fr: discuss Shakespeare First Folio paratexts
Readings for Week 6:
*William Shakespeare, front matter to The First Folio (1623)
ASSIGNMENT 6 DUE Friday 11:59pm EDT: compose paratexts for your text; a commentary plus 2-3 others of your choice: e.g. preface, dedication, index, errata, title page with image, commendatory ode, florilegium, prayer or other of your invention (500 words).
Week 7: transmission by transforming: imitation, invention, adaptation, forgery
Monday October 21: repurposing texts; example of Michel de Montaigne; invention of the essay.
Wednesday October 23: Session with Weissman Preservation Center –ideals and practices of book conservation
Sections meet Th/Fr: discuss Montaigne and Zadie Smith: how do essay writers use and transform other texts?
Readings for Week 7:
*Michel de Montaigne, Essays: To The Reader, “Of Cannibals” (I.31), “How We Laugh and Cry for the Same Thing” (I.38), “Of Democritus and Heraclitus” (I.50), “Of Conscience” (II.5), “Of Repentance” (III.2)
*Zadie Smith, “Life Writing” and “Meet Justin Bieber!”
ASSIGNMENT 7 DUE Friday 11:59pm EDT: just as Montaigne made old texts new by writing his Essays, use your text to create another text: e.g. a parody, an extension, an imitation, a reply (e.g. to a letter). (500 words)
UNIT THREE—THE ROLE OF INSTITUTIONS IN TRANSMISSION
Week 8: libraries and digital technologies I
Monday October 28: multiple functions of libraries—some examples from Harvard’s many libraries
Wednesday October 30: the technological and socio-political background to the digital era
Sections meet Th/Fr: discuss Borges and missions of libraries
Readings for Week 8
*Jorge Francisco Borges, “The Library of Babel”
Matthew Battles, “Books for All” in The Library: An Unquiet History
ASSIGNMENT 8 DUE Friday 11:59pm EDT: prepare an annotated bibliography of 2-3 secondary sources on the theme(s) you are emphasizing in the study of your text.
Week 9: libraries and digital technologies II
Monday November 4: strategies of libraries (storage and acquisitions)
Wednesday November 6: panel with Harvard librarians on managing collections, digital tools, and copyright
Sections meet Th/Fr: discuss “Cold Storage”
Readings for Week 9
Amaranth Borsuk, ch. 4 : “The Book as Interface”
*View “Cold Storage” film about the Harvard Depository on Vimeo (30 mins)
Nicholas Basbanes, “Deep Sleep,” in Patience and Fortitude: A Roving Chronicle of Book People, Book Places and Book Culture (New York: 2001)
Aaron Perzanowski and Jason Schultz, “The Promise and Perils of Digital Libraries,” in The End of Ownership
ASSIGNMENT 9 DUE Friday 11:59pm EST: select a passage from your source and provide a close reading of it, informed by your understanding of its historical context (quotation + 250-500 words)
In case of interest: Boston Antiquarian Book Fair, Nov 8-10, 2024 Hynes Convention Center, Boston
Monday November 11: physical books in the digital era
Wednesday November 13: visit to Widener (scavenger hunt)
Reading for Week 10:
Eric Lindquist, “Books and the Iniquitie or Wearing of Time,” in Yvonne Carignan ed. Who Wants Yesterday’s Books? (2005), pp. 5-34.
ASSIGNMENT 10 DUE Friday 11:59pm EST: discuss the pros and cons of choosing among the media options currently available for preserving and disseminating your text for both the short and the long term. Consider at least one digital technology and at least one “legacy” technology (i.e. manuscript or print in a particular medium) in weighing two or three options. This is an iteration of the assignment in week 3 comparing the virtues of manuscript versus print ca 1500 (500 words) [letter-graded; midterm equivalent]
Monday November 18: history of archives; memory and record-keeping; Ted Chiang
Wednesday November 20: visit to the Harvard University Archives
Sections meet Th/Fr: discuss Ted Chiang’s short story
Readings for Week 11
*Ted Chiang, “The Truth of Fact, the Truth of Feeling” in Exhalation, pp. 185-212. May also be available here: https://web.archive.org/web/20140222103103/http:/subterraneanpress.com/magazine/fall_2013/the_truth_of_fact_the_truth_of_feeling_by_ted_chiang
Resubmit a revised ASSIGNMENT 10 DUE Friday 11:59pm EST
Week 12: last lecture
Monday November 25: last lecture
Wednesday November 29: Thanksgiving
Sections meet Th/Fr: no sections
No reading; no weekly assignment.
Week 13— showcasing student projects
Monday December 2: student presentations
Wednesday December 4 (last day of class): student presentations
No sections this week.
Reading period starts on Thurs Dec 5
DUE on Tuesday December 10 (last day of reading period), 11:59pm EST: final project and reflection paper (discuss your decisions throughout the curation exercises in light of what others worked on; consider counterfactuals). Compare the past/future fate of the adopted text with that of others considered in the course.
Course Summary:
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