Roger Chartier. The Author's Hand and the Printer's Mind.

Abstract

This is a series of essays from 2001–2010, loosely connected (or editorially grouped) around three topics: historiography, book history, and editing. Within these categories there are recurrent topics: for example, the publishing and reception of Don Quixote (perhaps the strongest theme running through several parts of the collection). Many of these essays have been previously published, but appear here for the first time in English translation; others were originally lectures. To say that there are weaknesses in this volume is no critique of Roger Chartier and his influential work. My reservations only have to do with the decision to publish these works together, a decision that may result in readers and potential readers missing the most interesting essays. Part I, “The Past in the Present,” consists of two unpublished lectures, and a revised translation of the “Postface” to Chartier's Au bord de la falaise: L'Histoire entre certitudes et inquiétude (1998) (which has not yet been translated). There is nothing controversial here and the lectures read less like critical essays than like pep talks to budding historians. They outline the great heroes of twentieth-century historiography, largely of the Annales School, and urge us to follow. Few readers of Chartier (unless they pick up his book by accident) need such encouragement. The third chapter, on Fernand Braudel, opens with the ominous and astonishing sentence: “Why reread Braudel?” I recognize the familiar trope “Rereading X,” But this is a preposterous question, rhetorically structured as not even to admit the possibility that we have not already read, say, The Mediterranean or Civilization and Capitalism in whatever language we first encountered them. Further, I cannot conceive of anyone reading Braudel thinking, “Enough of this old-fashioned creaking stuff.” When I am enmeshed in any of his studies, I forget entirely the historiographical principles and polemics at their base. The question, however, might be more meaningfully posed at the head of the two other chapters, where other heroes are celebrated: Marc Bloch, Hayden White, Lucien Febvre, Carlo Ginzburg, Michel de Certeau, and others. I never read a sentence of Bloch that did not make me want to read more, yet with Hayden White, each sentence makes me want to hurry up and be done with it.