We are delighted to invite you to the upcoming WA Wednesday Lunch Talk, which will take place on January 22nd at 13:15 in Aula Hrynakowskiego.
This session will feature two presentations:
- Prof. Paweł Stachura: “Images of Divided Nation in American Early Realist Novels: John William De Forrest, Albion W. Tourgée, and Mark Twain”
- Dr Justyna Rogos-Hebda: “Multimodality in the pre-screen era: A time traveller’s guide to making sense(s) of visual textuality before the Tudors”
In the United States of the 1860s and 1870s, the turbulent times of the Civil War and the Reconstruction Era saw a crisis of democracy and erosion of national cohesion comparable to the contemporary polarization in American politics. Relatively little fiction was produced at the time, which would respond to the terrible and confusing events of the War and the Reconstruction. The presentation will focus on Albion W. Tourgée's Fool's Errand (1879), an autobiographical novel by the veteran who tried to help establish democratic and legal institutions in North Carolina, while the state was under military occupation of the US Army.
This talk makes a case for “the modern Middle Ages”: drawing on insights from my project on abbreviations in Middle English literary texts, I will argue that meaning-making processes in pre-print European culture were predicated on practices of literacy that would be recognizable to modern digital natives. Focusing on the trifecta of scribal practices, textual visuality and medieval multimodalities, the talk will center around abbreviation symbols as vehicles for linguistic, pragmatic and cultural information, all conspiring to create meaning in a medieval and early modern text.
We look forward to seeing you there!