London Seminar in Digital Text and Scholarship

Thursday 6 November, London Seminar in Digital Text and Scholarship, Room 274/5 (Stewart House), 17:30 – 19:30
Speaker: Martin Mueller (Northwestern) on “The Importance of Not-Reading?”
A century ago the German nonsense poet Christian Morgenstern wrote a poem about text-condensing spectacles. Referring to itself as an example of the power of those spectacles, the poem declares that read through them it would be unreadable because thirty-three instances of it would only add up to one question mark. This is a witty turn in the age-old history of “not-reading,” about which Pierre Bayard has written an entertaining book and to which Franco Moretti’s “distant reading” has made an important theoretical contribution.   More information at www.sas.ac.uk/events/list/ies_whatson

Martin Mueller’s primary research field has been the uses of ancient epic and tragedy by European writers since the Renaissance.