The First International Making Books, Shaping Readers Conference
University College, Cork, April 18th - 20th 2007
http://www.ucc.ie/en/mbsr

Theme: "Making an Audience"

This conference encourages a broad interpretation of the notion of an
audience in keeping with the etymology of the word. (The term audience,
which derives from the Latin audenita, "a hearing, listening", from awis,
"to perceive physically, to grasp", and from the nineteenth century
transformation of the sense of the word to "readers of a book", reflects the
way in which technologies of the word have changed throughout history, from
oral, to manuscript, to print).

The research project Making Books, Shaping Readers
(http://www.ucc.ie/en/mbsr) invites papers for a conference on "Making an
Audience". This conference will explore how different publications of the
material text posit not only different audiences, but also different notions
of an audience. Papers might focus on the kind of audiences texts invite; on
how shifts in the methods of textual production record a shift in the role
of the reader from medieval to contemporary times; on how the act of reading
is inscribed in the book; ways in which the production of a text defines its
ideal audience; and on how a text's transmission over time effects how it is
read. We are also concerned with tracing the actual reader / audience of a
text through, perhaps, marks and annotations in the text. The analysis of
how audiences are both inscribed in, and inscribe, the material book demands
an interdisciplinary approach, therefore we invite papers from scholars in
all disciplines. We are interested in all aspects of how audiences are made
via the various forms of textual materialities, including e-texts.
 
Selected papers may be included in an edited volume of essays, and accepted
abstracts will be published on the MBSR website prior to the conference.

Abstracts (300-500 words) should be sent to: Making Books, Shaping Readers
Conference, Dept. of English, University College Cork, Ireland, or
(preferably) by email to mbsr_at_ucc.ie, by Friday, October 27th 2006.

All queries can be directed to the organisers, Siobhán Collins, Carrie
Griffin and Mary O' Connell, at mbsr_at_ucc.ie.

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Received on Tue Jul 18 2006 - 17:43:46 EDT