ENGL 265: |
Seminar in Special Topics
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New Approaches to Media History and Criticism: Editing the Wandering Jew's Chronicle |
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| Fall 2006 |
| Instructor: Giles Bergel |
| Meets on: W 11:00 AM - 1:30 PM |
| Prerequisites: Graduate standing |
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| http://english.ucsb.edu/courses/dept_overview.asp?CourseID=280 |
Content of two-quarter course will vary from year to year; providing that the letter designations are different, the course may be repeated with consent of the Graduate Adviser.
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This course combines the study of early-modern cheap printed media with
modern digital textual scholarship. The Wandering Jew's Chronicle is a
song-ballad of the monarchy of England, printed forms of which survive in
eleven broadside and other cheap versions dating from 1630 to 1830. Each
version relates the succession of the throne of England, starting in 1066
and cumulative to each time of publication. The versions are often
illustrated with woodcuts and are characteristic of the period's
typographical development. One broadside version has previously been
digitized by the UCSB Pepys Ballad Archive; this course will complement
ongoing, interdisciplinary research into Early-Modern ballads at UCSB and
extend it chronologically and thematically.
The first quarter will survey
appropriate readings in book history and print culture, including oral and
visual communication; typography and other aspects of the material text;
the development of the ballad trade; and the history of ballad collecting,
editing and study.
The second quarter will intensively study the ballad itself, preparing it
for textual criticism and digital publication. We will scan images and
transcribe text from all surviving versions, collating their variants. A
single, edited version that documents the text's complete variants will be
the theoretical goal of the project, as will a version or versions suitable
for performance or reading. Specialized digital humanities software will be
critically assessed for our purposes. The project will, for the first time,
make available all versions of the ballad, together with appropriate
critical apparatuses and commentaries, through online publication. We will
also study the ballad's place within early-modern historical and political
thought, through readings in nationalism, cultural theory and
historiography.
The first quarter provides an historical introduction to
the ballad form [English 231: English Broadside Ballads, 1500-1800 Patricia Fumerton, Winter
2007] as well as
an introduction to the project phase. This course will run half-time,
meeting alternate weeks, over Fall 2006 and Winter 2007; students may audit the Fall quarter only. |
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