Interacting with Print Graduate Seminar

The Interacting with Print Research Group Presents

Reading and Writing:  How Young French Women interacted with Print in the Eighteenth Century

A Seminar with Prof. Dena Goodman (University of Michigan)

Friday, November 20, 2009

10:00am – 12:00pm

Please join us for coffee at 9:30am

McGill University, Arts Council Room

Arts Building, Room 160

Preparatory Readings Available Online at http://interactingwithprint.mcgill.ca

Kindly RSVP to interactingwithprint [at] mcgill.ca

Is reading a matter of passive absorption or active engagement?  If the Enlightenment is thought to have taught readers to read actively and critically, the novel is (and was) often represented as absorbing its readers as it suspends their critical faculties.  And the novel is (and was) understood to be a particularly female genre.  So, following this logic, we would expect the reading practice of women in the eighteenth century, and especially of young women, to be passive and absorbtive, rather than active, engaged, and critical.  This is certainly the impression we get from visual representations of eighteenth-century women engaged with print, or with writing of any sort.  It is why reading was considered dangerous for young women; because they did not read critically and were easily absorbed in what they read, what they read had to be tightly controlled.

What about writing?  Is it active or passive?  We tend to think of writing as active and creative, and writing that is not active as mere rote copying or formulaic exercises – not really writing at all.  This is often how letter writing and particularly the letters of elite women are characterized:  as formal exercises in politeness without originality or, indeed, sincerity.

In this seminar we will test these assumptions about reading, writing, and gender by examining the letters and writing practice of elite young French women in the eighteenth century as they engaged with printed texts. 

Prof. Dena Goodman is Lila Miller Collegiate Professor of History and Women's Studies and co-director of “The Encyclopedia of Diderot and D’Alembert Collaborative Translation Project,” (http://www.hti.umich.edu/d/did), a digital library project housed at the University of Michigan. Her latest book, Becoming a Woman in the Age of Letters explores the lives of women and the meaning of gender in eighteenth-century France through the lens of letter writing as a cultural practice. It was published by Cornell University Press in 2009. Earlier work explored Enlightenment political thought and the role of Parisian salonnières in shaping the intellectual sociability of the Enlightenment. She has edited collective volumes on a variety of topics: the contributions of women writers to the shaping of the public sphere, Marie-Antoinette, and the cultural meanings of furniture in the eighteenth-century Atlantic world.