Alternative Publications: Passing Notes
Listen to the lecture “Alternative Publications: Passing Notes” in the media player below or via Apple Podcasts or Spotify.
Listen on Spotify or Apple Media.
Transcript of lecture:
Quick links to some sources: some of Edward Taylor’s poetry here, John Winthrop’s journal
As a reminder, the learning goals of the lecture are:
…for learners to be able to provide a definition of scribal publication; to give one or two examples of it amongst the Puritans; and to identify one or two ways it can tell us more about the Puritans.
Discussion questions and forum:
- How does scribal publication change your view of what publication could be? Do you think it should be analyzed as its own discrete concept or practice? Why or why not? Can you think of any contemporary analogues of scribal publication (perhaps, grassroots publishing?) or other examples of it? How does the notion of scribal publication help us to understand what media and communications is?
- Edward Taylor did not formally publish his poems in print, but he wrote them down in an organized way in manuscript form and seems to have left them for posterity. (His poems only came to more widespread attention when a scholar “found” them in the Yale library in the early 20th-century and drew attention to them). You can read a little about Taylor and his Preparatory Meditations poems here: https://viva.pressbooks.pub/amlit1/chapter/author-introduction-edward-taylor-ca-1642-1729/ . To what extent do you think Taylor’s preparing a manuscript of his poems is considered publication? Scribal publication? What are ways in which this particular form of publication might have affected the reception and understanding of his poems?
Respond to these discussion questions (or other topics of your choosing, relating to the lectures) here: