Inscription and Erasure: Literature and Written Culture from the Eleventh to the Eighteenth Century

by Roger Chartier, Arthur Goldhammer (Translator)

The fear of oblivion obsessed medieval and early modern Europe. Stone, wood, cloth, parchment, and paper all provided media onto which writing was inscribed as a way to ward off loss. And the task was not easy in a world in which writing could be destroyed, manuscripts lost, or books menaced with destruction. Paradoxically, the successful spread of printing posed another danger, namely, that an uncontrollable proliferation of textual materials, of matter without order or limit, might allow useless texts to multiply and smother thought. Not everything written was destined for the archives; indeed, much was written on surfaces that allowed one to write, erase, then write again. In Inscription and Erasure , Roger Chartier seeks to demonstrate how the tension between these two concerns played out in the imaginative works of their times. Chartier examines how authors transformed the material realities of writing and publication into an aesthetic resource exploited for poetic, dramatic, or narrative ends. The process that gave form to writing in its various modes—public or private, ephemeral or permanent—thus became the very material of literary invention. Chartier's chapters follow a thread of reading and interpretation that takes us from the twelfth-century French poet Baudri of Bourgueil, sketching out his poems on wax tablets before they are committed to parchment, through Cervantes in the seventeenth century, who places a "book of memory," in which poems and letters are to be recopied, in the path of his fictional Don Quixote.

Genres: History, Nonfiction

224 pages, Hardcover

First published August 19, 2005

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

[Muyina · Rating 3 out of 5]

El texto expone una serie de reflexiones alrededor de la materialidad/inmaterialidad de los textos, ya sea en impresos, manuscritos o producciones que no estaban destinadas a perdurar. Para esto se vale de análisis particulares sobre diferentes obras y autores.
Tal vez sean la Introducción y los dos primeros capítulos los que hacen mayor honor al título y al tratamiento de la escritura efímera (como tabletas de cera). Los siguientes apuntan en buena medida al proceso de edición, aunque también señalan diálogos con el presente y auto referencias que aparecen en varios textos, para finalizar con la cuestión de la propiedad intelectual según autores como Diderot.

[David · Rating 2 out of 5]

Chartier seems aimless in this collection of essays. Each piece is centered on a work of literature, like Don Quixote or Ben Jonson's plays, and depictions of books or book forms (like gazettes or journals), but I failed to grasp the point of the essays. Better to read Chartier elsewhere.