About

MEETING TIMES (T1 2024-25) 
Lectures: 1h weekly, Time and location TBA (also posted online: see links in NOTES — to watch *before* each week’s workshop), Workshop: 2hrs weekly, Time and location TBA

A practice-led introduction to small press publishing, both print and digital. Students gain an overview of the history and theory of print culture, from Gutenberg to the “pamphlet wars” of the Early Modern Period, from Transatlantic Modernism to the “mimeograph revolution” of 1960s US counterculture, and from desktop publishing to present day digital culture. Lectures and discussion (drawing on set texts excerpted from the illustrative bibliography) focus on the material and social dimensions of independent publishing, on the role that small presses have played in periods of marked social and political change, including the present day emergence of world literatures. Students are asked to examine small presses as indicators of literary networks that traverse, but are not contained by, regional and national literatures alike, permeating and benefiting from trade publishing and emerging digital platforms (including social media), and upending simple oppositions between region and metropolis, margin and center. A series of practical workshops introduces students to digital and analog aspects of desktop publishing craft, working with the basics of typography and layout and with some elemental formats (blog, pamphlet, zine, chapbook), as well as with some of the literary genres of the industry (manifesto, review, editorial, cover and jacket copy), asking students to consider both digital and paper publishing platforms, and the role of social media in publicity and distribution.