Houghton library presents a colloquium to celebrate its latest major exhibition “Landmarks: Maps as Literary Illustration.”
James Joyce’s novel Ulysses depicts precise coordinates of time and space—June 16, 1904, Dublin—while John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress is temporally imprecise and geographically oneiric. Yet both works have encouraged later efforts to create spatially sophisticated representations of their worlds, which speakers at this Houghton panel will discuss. A team at Boston College is developing a virtual reality version of Ulysses called “Joycestick” that allows players to enter the interior world of the novel off the page. Over the four-century history of its reprinting, Pilgrim’s Progress has inspired numerous literary cartographers to map its uncertain terrain. On the spectrum from realism to allegory, how do both these works succeed as mapped literature? Moreover how is reading a book mapping it and how does one read a literary map?
RSVP for Virtual Realities at bit.ly/2EFWFzt
Welcome:
Thomas Hyry, Florence Fearrington Librarian, Houghton Library
Introduction:
Peter X. Accardo is curator of Houghton Library’s exhibition “Landmarks: Maps as Literary Illustration” (on view through April 14)
Moderator:
Tom Conley, Abbott Lawrence Lowell Professor of Visual and Environmental Studies and of Romance Languages and Literatures, Harvard University.
Speakers:
Joseph Nugent, Professor of the Practice in Boston College’s English Department, works at the intersection of immersive technology and literary studies. “Joycestick” is one of a number of projects he has led at Boston College to consider Joyce’s work through new digital tools.
Porter White is a Ph.D. candidate in English at Harvard. Her dissertation argues that Victorian readers rewrote pilgrimage as a social practice in response to canonical texts by Bunyan and Byron.
Dr. David Weimer is Librarian for Cartographic Collections and Learning at the Harvard Map Collection. His current research focuses on connections between vision, spatial theories and education of the blind.
Themes: Digital Humanities, Cartography, Realism and Allegory in Texts, Mapping as Illustration
Program
Tuesday, February 27, 2018, 3-5pm
Houghton Library Edison and Newman Room
3.00 pm: Colloquium
4.15 pm: Reception and viewing of the exhibition “Landmarks: Maps as Literary Illustration”