Resource: A New Republic of Letters

Summary

Discusses the implications of the "institutional system of cultural memory" (ix) in the digital age. Should literature and culture be reflected on as method or theory? What is the relation between method and theory in the realm of cultural memory? How should this be addressed practically in humanities research and pedagogy?

Three Sections

1. From History to Method
2. From Theory to Method
3. From Method to Practice

Useful Content

p 1

• "For humanist thinking has been shaped by the institutions and the technology of books."

p 2

• "I am interested in the materials, particularly the documentary materials that represent and misrepresent, that record and fracture, the cultures we inherit and transmit."

p 6

• "Every book is a coded set of instructions for repurposing its design-accessible information."

p 7

• "While all three (Ovid, Petronius, Dante) are foundation for the transmission of cultural memory of the West, they are not a conscious resource only for a small class of persons, a kind of secular priesthood: humanities scholars from the West. Indeed, the move to specialization in humanities research and education has greatly increased the difficulty of accessing such resources. So too has the focus on the present and recent past in humanities education. What is most 'relevant' to present needs and concerns may well be hidden form us by what Shelly called 'veils of familiarity.'"
  • What are the equivalent texts for Korean humanities scholars?
• "In the terms of an earlier lexicon, poetry is the art of memory, rhetoric a set of memory techniques, and philology the science of memory. Their contemporary names are art, media, and scholarship."

p 7-8

• "(Maurice) Halbwachs's studies of human memory argued that because 'it is individuals as group members who remember,' the memory of both the individual and the group is sustained through their localized constellation. The past is thus always received and reconstituted by these dynamic collectives, which preserve their character by various kinds of ceremonies and commemorative events."

p 8

• Quoting Paul Connerton - "Exposed to what Debord has called 'diffuse spectacle'... [people] find historical knowledge annihilated... as a perpetual present is installed in its place."

Table of Contents

Introduction

1. Why Textual Scholarship Matters
2. "The Inorganic Organization of Memory"
3. Memory: History, Philosophy, Philology
4. The Documented World
5. Marking Texts in Many Dimensions
6. Digital Tools and the Emergence of the Social Text
7. What do Scholars Want?
8. Philological Investigations I: The Example of Poe
9. Philological Investigations II: A Page from Cooper

Conclusion: Pseudodoxia Academica; or, Literary Studies in a Global Age

Review

This book will serve as a great theoretical perspective for my research. It also has many useful references to other important works which I can look into in the future. Each chapter should have notes written on it in detail.