Project manager: Prof. Dr. Elisabeth Décultot
Project associates: Prof. Dr. Helmut Zedelmaier, Christian Kuhlmann
Duration of project: 01.11.2015 - 31.01.2020
This project investigates transformations in reading and writing with regard to the practices of excerpting, citing and plagiarizing from the early modern period up to the present day, across all of Europe. The C18th deserves particular attention here as a transitionary period and link between the humanistic tradition and the present day.
Reading, excerpting and connected practices such as citing and plagiarising are fundamental activities within written knowledge production and circulation. They are practiced across cultures, eras and disciplines. Their different forms and practices were for a long time overshadowed by historical and philological interests. With digitisation - which has connected collecting, saving and circulating information to new technical possibilities - it has recently become of greater interest to investigate intellectual and literary production with regard to these changing practices and technologies.
The point of departure for this project's investigations is the practice of excerpting. Althought the history of reading is an important field within humanities research, there has still been little investigation into the art of the "excerpt" or "extract" (Latin: excerptum; French: extrait; Italian: estratto) and the connected practice of collecting reading records. Since the Renaissance, European scholars were required to keep excerpt books - collections of reading notes. These excerpt books - which were available at any time, and which could be enriched with new information with every reading and could occasionally reach the size of handwritten libraries - served, on the one hand, as a storage space for selected extracts, citations, tropes and ideas. On the other hand, they were used as quarries, from which materials for the production of the writer's own works could be extracted.
Such excerpt books are extraordinarily valuable sources for the history of reading and writing, and hence also that of citation, adaptation and plagiarism. They provide important information about at least two central aspects of the production of texts. One the one hand, the reading habits of those making the excerpts are documented: excerpt books demonstrate familiarity with this or that author, a preference for this or that discipline. However, their significance is not limited to providing a register of works read or lists of sources. Excerpt books are also the seeds of writers' own works. They offer an insight into a writer's workshop. We can see from them how a writer takes up and transforms in their own work something they have read in another's.
The project primarily investigates four aspects of practice of excerpting:
1. Firstly, light should be thrown on the historical context and tradition in which the reading and writing method of excerpting is embedded. This will involve not only an analysis of the early modern context in which the widespread reading practice of excerpting developed, but also the continuing development of its forms up to the C20th and beyond. A central role was played in connection with this by the Enlightenment, a period in which, on the one hand, the ars excerpendi was sharply criticized as a simple exercise in copying, but on the other, intensive use was made of traditional (and also new) forms of knowledge acquisition.
2. Beyond the diachronic dimension, comparisons between different European regions and language areas will be made in order to develop new approaches to a more differentiated cultural history of reading, writing, and text and knowledge circulation in Europe.
3. The next step will address the effect of excerpting on writing. In other words, does this form of reading bring a particular form of writing with it? If so, which?
4. Finally, how the reading practice of excerpting relates to central concepts of our modern understanding of literature (author, original and originality, imitation, copy, invention, plagiarism) will be investigated, along with why excerpts and the practice of excerpting are still not given the attention they deserve today.
Prof. Dr. Helmut Zedelmaier
helmut.zedelmaier(at)izea.uni-halle.de
Christian Kuhlmann
christian.kuhlmann(at)germanistik.uni-halle.de
The IZEA is housed within the Martin-Luther-Universität Halle-Wittenberg. As an institution of advanced study on the cultural and intellectual history of the 18th century, the IZEA contends with a period that laid the foundations of modern western society.
Martin-Luther-Universität Halle-Wittenberg
Interdisziplinäres Zentrum für die
Erforschung der Europäischen Aufklärung (IZEA)
Franckeplatz 1 // Haus 54
06110 Halle
Deutschland
izea(at)izea.uni-halle.de
Tel.: +49 345 55 21781
Fax: +49 345 55 27252