Week 5: Archives Visit and Print/Literary History

    The Archives and Special Collections visit had a lot of interesting new topics to learn about. I was surprised that some of the papyrus found is from around 2500-3000 B.C., which was easily the oldest thing in the archive. It’s incredible that human culture can go so far back, being even more incredible that we can see it today right in front of us being preserved. And once again, I just really enjoyed seeing the many different forms that literature can take, between scrolls, tiny books, folded up pages into 8 squares, accordions, and more. The history of print strongly intersects with literary history in the sense that print is highly influential on how readers end up reading a book. As we saw with Antigone, entire lines can get changed when it comes to translations. Translating is a very difficult job, especially when authors implement subtext or ambiguity that the translator may be unsure about. It can even come to the point where a work has been altered from its original meaning so much that it’s more like the translator’s book inspired by the original author than the original author’s book. Older forms of print not having ways of mass production also means that there are truly limited numbers of copies circulating at the time, meaning that a book can be completely lost or heavily damaged with no means of fully recovering it. 

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