Forms and Meanings: Texts, Performances, and Audiences from Codex to Computer

by Roger Chartier

In this provocative work, Roger Chartier continues his extraordinarily influential consideration of the forms of production, dissemination, and interpretation of discourse in Early Modern Europe. Chartier here examines the relationship between patronage and the market, and explores how the form in which a text is transmitted not only constrains the production of meaning but defines and constructs its audience.

Genres: History

144 pages, Paperback

First published September 1, 1995

About the author

Roger Chartier is a French historian and historiographer who is part of the Annales school. He works on the history of books, publishing and reading. He teaches at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris, the Collège de France, and the University of Pennsylvania.

Reviews

[Cali]

Chartier examines the cultural-historical processes that led to the development of the modern book and the dichotomies present in historiographical conceptions of popular culture, as popularized by Peter Burke. He presents his notion of appropriation as a way to moderate the popular culture dialectic, arguing that cultural analysis resting on a consideration of social aspects of production and dissemination best expresses the relationship of writer to reader, coder and encoder. The semiotic analysis leaves something to be desired (he introduces the linguistic turn but does not make a significant attempt to show how his thesis of appropriation circumvents it), but the general social history of texts and material culture is useful.