Lcs #4 The Nation State And Print Capitalism

Slide 1: The Gutenberg Galaxy • 1500 - 20, 000, 000 Books in Print • 1600 - 200, 000, 000 Books in Print

Slide 2: Mass Literacy • urbanization • printing • centralized government

Slide 3: Nation the nation is a cultural and/or ethnic entity.

Slide 4: State the state is a political and geopoliti cal entity

Slide 5: The Nation-State A political unit consisting of an autonomous state inhabited predominantly by a people sharing a common culture, history, and language.

Slide 6: Rise the of Nation- State 15th-18th Centuries

Slide 7: Nation-State • Development of Central, Secular Governance - less powerful monarch and church • Rise of Vernacular Languages - Latin became less influential • Shared Identity - idea of belonging to a particular cultural, political and geographical entity

Slide 8: Historical Map of Europe

Slide 11: “The Origins of National Consciousness”

Slide 12: Print Capitalism • print as a commodity • the printed book as the first mass produced commodity • within 150 years, the saturation of the Latin market leads printers to seek out new markets • vernacular languages represented “potentially huge” markets

Slide 13: Capitalism and Vernacular Languages • Changing character of Latin • Impact of the Reformation • Spread of particular Vernaculars as instruments of Administrative Centralization

Slide 14: •Changing character of Latin • Scholars began to emphasize Classical Works over Ecclesiastical Sources • Humanists turned to Cicero and other Roman rhetoricians, as well Ancient Greek works • This Latin was very different in character and usage than Church Latin and led to the decline of Church Latin as a lingua franca

Slide 16: •Impact of the Reformation • Martin Luther • 1517 - Posts the 95 Theses on the door of Wittenberg • The first author to sell works on the basis of his name • Within 15 days these were seen all over Germany • Opening of a “colossal religious propaganda war”

Slide 17: Vernaculars and Centralized Administration • Particular vernaculars became favored • Crowded out other vernaculars and dialects • This began prior to the advent of print • Print accelerated this process

Slide 18: Print Capitalism • Required the dominance of a few specific vernaculars • “if print capitalism had sought to exploit each potential oral vernacular market, it would have remained a capitalism of petty proportions” (43) • Varied dialects were assembled into print-languages far fewer in number

Slide 19: Print Capitalism laid the foundation for National Consciousness in Three Distinct Ways • Created unified fields of exchange - various dialects that would have had a hard time communicating could now relate via print • Gave a new fixity to languages - book form gave permanence to language - rate of linguistic change slowed • Created languages of power - certain dialects were inevitably closer to print language

Slide 20: The Role of Print in the Rise of the Nation-State • Rise of Vernacular Languages • Decline of Latin • Growth in Readership - due in part to Protestant Movements • Development of New Literary Forms • All factor into the consolidation of the Nation-State

Slide 21: “the convergence of capitalism and print technology on the fatal diversity of language created the possibility of a new form of imagined community, which in its basic morphology set the stage for the modern nation”

Slide 22: Literacy, Literature and the Nation

Slide 23: The Novel E.M. Forster: “A fiction in prose of a certain extent” An extended prose narrative Novel - New

Slide 24: Rise of the Novel 17th and 18th Centuries

Slide 25: Precursors of the Novel • Elizabethan prose fiction • French heroic romance--vast baroque narratives about thinly disguised contemporaries (mid-17th century) who always acted nobly and spoke high-flown sentiment • Spanish picaresque tales--strings of episodic adventures held together by the personality of the central figure; Don Quixote is the best known of these tales.

Slide 26: “horizontal-secular-transverse time”

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