HENA0363FU Engelsk - Frit emne: English Literature, Print Culture, and the Digital Future

This course will introduce students to the idea of studying texts in their material contexts: as print, circulating objects, digital files, or manuscript. What have these medial forms brought to poetry and novels, and what can we learn by reading texts with this expanded sense of their form in mind? How are digital research methods changing the way we read texts of the past, and the way the texts of the future will be conceived? How do texts themselves engage with their material contexts and their networked futures? The course will be organized as four historically chronological units (18th cent. literature, William Blake and Romanticism, Victorian popular printing, and current novel fiction). Students are allowed to explore the possibilities of reading English literature materially and to think about texts from these periods as they engage their own place in media history. In addition, the course will include visits from local and international specialists in print and library studies. We also have the opportunity to visit both the Royal Library and a current digitization project, which allow us to examine the production of literary text for use in databases and digital archives. By the end of the course, students will have deepened their knowledge of English literature as material culture. They will be able to situate texts in the cultural context of print and publishing history, as well as relate this to broader theoretical discussions.