Textual Studies Program 20th Anniversary Lecture and Celebration

In Don Quixote, words are never safe from the perils of disappearance: manuscripts are lost as are poems written on trees. Librillos de memoria must be erased and memories often fail to remember. Cervantes' book is haunted by the tensions between traces and erasure, remembrances and anamnesis, collective memory and individual forgetfulness. In this lecture I would try to illuminate these Cervantine oppositions reading them with the categories proposed by Freud and Ricœur, as well by Borges' fictions”.

Roger Chartier is Professor at the Collège de France and Annenberg Visiting Professor of History at the University of Pennsylvania. He is the author of many deeply influential works on the history of writing, reading and authors in early modern Europe, including The Cultural Origins of the French Revolution (1991), The Order of Books: Readers, Authors and Libraries in Europe between the Fourteenth and Eighteenth Centuries (1994), Inscription and Erasure: Literature and Written Culture from the Eleventh to the Eighteenth Century (2008), and Cardenio between Cervantes and Shakespeare: The Story of a Lost Play (2013). Chartier co-edited with Henri-Jean Martin the transformative 4-volume Histoire de l’edition française (1983-6).