Genealogies of the Study of Material Texts

This essay is devoted to the different branches of the French material textual tree. Analytical bibliography was not one of them. The decisive elements were the attention paid by H.-J. Martin to the lay-out of the texts as a fundamental source for the history of reading, the reception of McKenzie’s sociology of texts and motto “forms effect meaning”, and the appropriation of Petrucci’s association between morphological description and social history of the written objects.

Introduction

The Introduction addresses the emerging study of Roman souvenirs and establishes a new framework for their analysis. Whereas prior studies have valuably considered the role of Roman souvenirs in curating memory and their relation to modern memorabilia, this book explores how their craftsmanship relates to perceptions of place. The book’s four case studies focus on artifacts that conjure particular destinations through a combination of words and images. These artifacts are simultaneously portable works of art and material texts. They can be held in the hand yet they evoke monumental buildings, cities, frontiers, and roads. They are Roman, Italian, and provincial in their sites of production and use. The book’s interdisciplinary analysis therefore draws on theories of place, globalization, materiality, and multi-sensory experience in order to answer the following question: how did souvenirs allow residents of the Roman empire to be in one place while imagining another?

Personality Disorder in Terms of Psychology and Linguistics

The article analyzes cases of multiple personality disorder (dissociative identity disorder) and their reflection in fiction. The purpose of the article is to classify various situations and identify the causes and prerequisites for this phenomenon. The process of splitting consciousness is accompanied by certain changes in the individual’s speech. This concerns the choice of words and grammatical forms (especially forms of the person’s category). The collected material (texts of novellas, short stories, poems, and screenplays) gives grounds for some conclusions. The main prerequisites for dissociative identity disorder are the versatility of the personality, the ability to look at it “from the inside” and “from the outside,” as well as the individual’s tendency to constantly evaluate his thoughts and actions. Past violence, severe stress, internal discomfort, etc. can act as a cause (“triggering mechanism”) of the phenomenon under study. The author shows cases of endoscopic and exoscopic disintegration of identity using literary facts. In the latter case, there is a connection with the Freudian concept of the “Ideal I”, which includes an observer. The topic of doubles, which is immensely popular in art, and the relationship between the author of a literary work and his pseudonym are also touched upon.

Equations as Unruly Objects

Specialized notation, complexity, and sheer length contributed to the unruly nature of 18th-century equations, whether in manuscript or printed form. By close examination of early modern material texts, this essay compares constraints and affordances of the pen and the composing stick for setting boundaries and imposing order on algebraic expressions. Drawing on French and British mathematical works, it considers typesetting practices and advice to readers in influential algebra textbooks, compares mathematical manuscripts prepared for print and the printed results, unpacks oversize pages brimming with derivations and multiple cases, and reflects on practices of mise-en-page in the Mémoires of the Paris Academy of Sciences and the Philosophical Transactions. It thus invites attention to the tools, gestures, and traces of amateur, expert, reader, writer, and typesetter in 18th-century algebra.