Landscape, Architecture, and/on the Printed Page

HIS 4526 Subject & Catalog Number

Description

This course goes down the proverbial rabbit hole in considering the fundamental, incidental, anecdotal, but above all the meaningful formal and structural analogies between books and other print media, and the spaces imagined and realized in and by architecture, landscape, and urban design and experience. The rabbit hole, it will be recalled, appears in the opening chapter of Lewis Carroll’s Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, and was itself a passage furnished with bookshelves. There are texts within texts, and worlds within those texts, each and all producing planned and chance encounters between signifiers and signifieds, readers and writers. Questions of page layout, punctuation!, paratexts, narrative structure, paper-making, book-binding and ecocodicology, publishing houses and reading rooms, marginalia and marbled paper, the threaded histories of reading, writing, (though not so much ’rithmetic), illustration, illumination, and blank spaces, the vineyard of text, the mirror in parchment, a scribal world set into print—these and other topics will be addressed with regard to masterworks (major and minor) of literature (Perec, Mallarmé, Sterne, Douglass, Piranesi, Stein, et. al.) and an array of familiar and fantastical books ranging from the sexagesimo-quarto to the Audubonian double elephantine folio. We will always have in view, specifically in relation to architectural, landscape and urban culture, what Roger Chartier describes as the “space between text and object, which is precisely the space in which meaning is constructed.”