#robert darnton

Thanks for the ask kind anon and sorry for taking forever to answer! (this one was not easy!)

Top 5 books of all time?

In no particular order:

1. Alias Grace by Margaret Atwood

Set in an interesting historical period (Canada in the 1800s) + partially based on real events + focuses on women's issues + from a female perspective + includes complex, morally grey characters + unreliable narrator trope + criminal (sub)plot + weird historical psychoanalysis & psychiatry + some really great writing. Need I say more?

(Also the show is actually really good as well, if you don't feel like reading the book!)

2. The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde

I mean, it's a classic for a reason. Gay yearning. Corruption. Murder. Beautiful descriptive prose. But hey, this is Tumblr, so I feel like I'm preaching to the choir here.

(Still need to get my hands on the uncensored version at some point!)

3. The World's Wife by Carol Ann Duffy

I've reread this one more times than I can count. Duffy draws on the classics (mostly Greek mythology, but also fairy tale characters and even Faust) but reimagines them through a more contemporary, as well as female perspective. That could go wrong really easily, but this book in fact does a stellar job in my opinion.

Just read Eurydice, my favourite (I don't think I've ever felt quite as represented by a poem before). Or Medusa. Or Pygmalion's Bride.

Or, you know, and poem that is not Mrs. Tiresias - I like to pretend that one is not there.

4. A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess

Very much my teenage obsession. It's a gripping read written from the point of view of a teenage criminal that speaks in a strange mix of English and Russian that is at first barely coherent. It's raw, it's brutal, but it also asks some very interesting questions about the nature of morality and free will in a way that does not feel forced.

Oh, and the movie's great as well. Possibly the best soundtrack of all time. So good and so problematic that it's been banned in the UK until the 2000s.

5. The Great Cat Massacre (and Other Episodes in French Cultural History) by Robert Darnton

A collection of essays focusing on the microhistory of 18th century France? It's a real mystery why I like it so much, huh.

It's actually a bit insane how much I owe to this book. It arguably helped to spark my Rousseau and Diderot (and, in general, enlightenment era) obsession. I also sneakily reapplied Darnton's argument to justify my thesis (it's totally necessary to study 18th-century mental health approaches, give me all the funds now, please! /s).

Darnton is not only a hilarious author, but you also get a sense that he truly cares about the people he writes about. If you get your hands on it, I recommend reading chapter 4 (includes police description of the key enlightenment figures, like V, Rousseau, and Diderot!) or chapter 6 (the Rousseau stan culture analysis).

Boom. That's it. There's the writing prompt.

But if you're curious, it's from Robert Darnton's “What is the History of Books?” from The Kiss of Lamourette: Reflections in Cultural History p. 108:

The history of books began to acquire its own journals, research centers, conferences, and lecture circuits. It accumulated tribal elders as well as Young Turks. And although it has not yet developed passwords or secret handshakes or its own population of Ph.D.'s, its adherents can recognize one another by the glint in their eyes. They belong to a common cause, one of the few sectors in the human sciences where there is a mood of expansion and a flurry of fresh ideas.

On that note, it's pretty cool to look through 500-year-old rare books with a forensic eye.

Actually, it's very cool.

Just look at it! Who wouldn't want to flip through a book like that?

I might stage a heist if it weren't for medieval book curses. Artwork:

"Baldurs Gate 3 Gale Fan Art" by Gerry Arthur

"Daily Practice#097" by Kittichai Rueangchaichan (Razaras)

"Sirius" by Anna Helme

"Owain" by Marta Nael

Fanfiction does many of the things book historians are interested in, yet it is understudied from a book historical point of view. Fanfiction studies includes copyright and publishing history, reader-author relationships, communal reading practices, and material production. Writing and sharing fanfiction provides insight into contemporary, pop cultural reading practices and creative responses to multimedia texts. Fanfiction offers many entry points for book historians to consider textual production, the future of textual media and the digital book, and reader response. Fanfiction writers and readers alike engage with texts in myriad ways that unsettle many assumptions that book historians take for granted, including Robert Darnton’s communication circuit, the reexamination of which anchors this dissertation.

This dissertation relies on Francesca Coppa’s definition of fanfiction, which articulates six characteristics that illuminate the relationships between fic writers, fic readers, and distributing platforms. These six characteristics   of fic are critical to the fic communication circuit: they place fic adjacent to Darnton’s standard model, they challenge ownership and for-profit motives of textual production, and they illustrate a more immediate reader response and creative interpretation than is typical in analogue media:

Fic is ‘created outside of the literary marketplace’, that is, without the intent for profit and without the institutional recognition of traditional publishing.

Fic ‘rewriters and transforms other stories’, and

Fic ‘rewrites and transforms other stories currently owned by others’. Coppa elaborates: ‘it is only in such a system—where storytelling has been industrialized to the point that our shared culture is owned by others—that a category like “fanfiction” makes sense’ [1]. That is to say, in a system where stories can be bought or sold, the transformative, for-pleasure work of fanfiction is defined in contradistinction to for-profit story production and distribution; in a system without purchase and ownership of stories, the work of fanfiction would be called ‘folklore’.

Fic is ‘written within and to the standards of a particular fannish community’: fic writers signal to their readers their understanding of a fandom and place within it using intertextuality and other methods.

Fic is speculative in that it is (often) more interested in ‘character rather than about the world’. Fic provides space to elaborate on internal motivations, examine secondary characters in the source text, and explore how circumstances change a character.

Fic is ‘made for free, but not “for nothing”’, meaning that while fic is rarely made and shared for profit, participants receive satisfaction in the form of kudos, feedback, art, and friendship [2].

These features place fanfiction (and the fanfiction communication circuit) outside of traditional publishing, maintained by different criteria. As a textual practice often associated with women’s crafts, fanfiction shares characteristics with coterie manuscript practices: non-profit driven, for pleasure, and privately produced. Catherine Coker argues that this gendering reinforces the ‘hierarchies of value between print and digital that emphasize traditional patriarchal and public practices of reading and writing over private coterie practices’ [3]. She notes that fanfiction, which is dominated by women and gender-nonconforming people, was born from and is a continuation of these ‘private coterie practices’ that were not valued precisely because they were ‘women’s work’ and ‘not-for-profit’ [4]. In examining the function of writer, reader, and fannish response in the succeeding chapters, I argue that fanfiction attains value and success through community and gift-giving, rather than the norms of profit and mainstream circulation.

Darnton presents a sufficient and adaptable model for describing the relationship between author, printer, publisher, distributor, and reader in his communication circuit [5]. Padmini Ray Murray and Claire Squires note that in a reconstructed circuit for the digital publishing age, ‘the traditional value chain, …is being disrupted and disintermediated at every stage’ [6]. This disruption in the traditional circuit holds true for the production, dissemination, and consumption of fanfiction. Because fanfiction mostly exists in tandem to the source text upon which it is based and, by extension, the literary marketplace, I model the fanfiction communication circuit in tandem with, rather than superimposed upon, Darnton’s communication circuit. Murray and Squires argue that in digital publishing, the author and publisher roles and the publisher and distributor roles are conflated. In fanfiction (hereafter referred to as fic), production and distribution are similarly conflated, as the publishing (rather, posting) and distributing platforms are one and the same for many interfaces, and the fic writer has sole control over posting their work. These conflations merit a ‘re-examination’ of Darnton’s model, in which I outline a fandom communications circuit in tandem with Darnton’s circuit to parallel, rather the superimpose upon, the circulation of fic text with source text [7].

This dissertation examines transformative works: works that change, even ever so slightly, the metatext unto a given purpose. In 2002, a representative at LucasFilm said, ‘“We've been very clear all along on where we draw the line. We love our fans, we want them to have fun. But if in fact somebody is using our characters to create a story unto itself, that's not in the spirit of what we think fandom is about. Fandom is about celebrating the story the way it is”’ [8]. This statement marks the difference between affirmational and adaptive-transformational fandom (and the notion that creatively responding to a work is somehow not celebrating it) [9]. Transformational fandom is less interested in taking the work as it is, as LucasFilm attempts to dictate, and more interested in intervening in a source text for new or continued storytelling. Transformative fanfiction turns commonly-accepted models of Anglo-American book production on its head: book history often operates under a precept to follow the money. In the case of fanfiction, there is typically no financial compensation, and we must instead follow the fan community. The return is in the gift-economy, comprising kudos, likes, favorites, follows, art, feedback, comments, and further works inspired by one’s own.

Citations

Francesca Coppa, The Fanfiction Reader: Folk Tales for the Digital Age (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2017), p.7.

Coppa, The Fanfiction Reader, pp.2-14.

Catherine Coker, ‘The margins of print? Fan fiction as book history’, Transformative Works and Cultures, 25 (2017)<https://journal.transformativeworks.org/index.php/twc/article/view/1053>1.2.

Coker, ‘The margins of print?...’,  2.2.

Robert Darnton, ‘What is the history of books?’, Daedalus, 111, pp.65-83.

Padmini Ray Murray and Claire Squires, ‘The digital publishing communications circuit’, Book 2.0, 3 (2013), p.3.

Murray and Squires, ‘The digital publishing communications circuit’, p.4.

Amy Harmon, ‘“Star Wars” Fan Films Come Tumbling Back to Earth’, The New York Times, 28 April, 2002; Maciej Ceglowski, ‘Fan is A Tool-Using Animal’, 6 Sep 2013, <https://idlewords.com/talks/fan_is_a_tool_using_animal.htm>.

In Antoine de Saint Exupéry’s tale, the Little Prince meets a businessman who accumulates stars with the sole purpose of being able to buy more stars. The Little Prince is perplexed. He owns only a flower, which he waters every day. Three volcanoes, which he cleans every week. “It is of some use to my volcanoes, and it is of some use to my flower, that I own them,” he says, “but you are of no use to the stars that you own”.

[Le Petit Prince: an original watercolour illustration from the book by Antoine de Saint Exupéry]

There are many businessmen who own knowledge today. Consider Elsevier, the largest scholarly publisher, whose 37% profit margin stands in sharp contrast to the rising fees, expanding student loan debt and poverty-level wages for adjunct faculty. Elsevier owns some of the largest databases of academic material, which are licensed at prices so scandalously high that even Harvard, the richest university of the global north, has complained that it cannot afford them any longer. Robert Darnton, the past director of Harvard Library, says “We faculty do the research, write the papers, referee papers by other researchers, serve on editorial boards, all of it for free … and then we buy back the results of our labour at outrageous prices.” For all the work supported by public money benefiting scholarly publishers, particularly the peer review that grounds their legitimacy, journal articles are priced such that they prohibit access to science to many academics – and all non-academics – across the world, and render it a token of privilege.

We have the means and methods to make knowledge accessible to everyone, with no economic barrier to access and at a much lower cost to society. But closed access’s monopoly over academic publishing, its spectacular profits and its central role in the allocation of academic prestige trump the public interest. Commercial publishers effectively impede open access, criminalize us, prosecute our heroes and heroines, and destroy our libraries, again and again. Before Science Hub and Library Genesis there was Library.nu or Gigapedia; before Gigapedia there was textz.com; before textz.com there was little; and before there was little there was nothing. That's what they want: to reduce most of us back to nothing. And they have the full support of the courts and law to do exactly that.

We find ourselves at a decisive moment. This is the time to recognize that the very existence of our massive knowledge commons is an act of collective civil disobedience. It is the time to emerge from hiding and put our names behind this act of resistance. You may feel isolated, but there are many of us. The anger, desperation and fear of losing our library infrastructures, voiced across the internet, tell us that. This is the time for us custodians, being dogs, humans or cyborgs, with our names, nicknames and pseudonyms, to raise our voices.

[Watch: Why One Woman Stole 50 million academic papers — and made them all free to read by Vox]

We demonstrate daily, and on a massive scale, that the system is broken. We share our writing secretly behind the backs of our publishers, circumvent paywalls to access articles and publications, digitize and upload books to libraries. This is the other side of 37% profit margins: our knowledge commons grows in the fault lines of a broken system. We are all custodians of knowledge, custodians of the same infrastructures that we depend on for producing knowledge, custodians of our fertile but fragile commons. To be a custodian is, de facto, to download, to share, to read, to write, to review, to edit, to digitize, to archive, to maintain libraries, to make them accessible. It is to be of use to, not to make property of, our knowledge commons.

Filiation

NOUN; the manner in which a thing is related to another from which it is derived or descended in some respect.

“Where the historian of ideas traces the filiation of formal though from philosopher to philosopher, the ethnographic historian studies the way ordinary people made sense of the world.”