EVENT DETAILS

2016 Wellek Lectures with Katherine Hayles

Katherine Hayles, Professor of Literature at Duke University, will present the 2016 Wellek Lectures

Lecture 2: "Memoralizing Print: Individual and Collective Memory in J. J. Abrams and Doug Dorst’s S"

Since classical times, writing has been linked to memory—either as an externalization that preserves memory across generations, or as a threat that will  inevitably diminish the human capacity to remember, as in Socrates’ famous charge.  S. a collaborative project conceived by Abrams and written by Dorst, presents as an old library book stuffed with ephemera and encased in a cardboard holder—postcards, odd letters, images, etc.  These multiple print artifacts include the story of a protagonist who has lost his memory and takes the name S. from a paper scrap he finds in his pocket.  They also include handwritten marginalia by Jen and Eric, contemporary students in pursuit of the encoded relationship between the print book’s author and translator.  At a time when digital databanks and web networks threaten to displace print inscriptions as central repositories of cultural memory,  S. explores the relation between the individual and the archive in multiple senses, celebrating the print book even as it inscribes its precarity and deep penetration by digital marks.