Short notice (worth reading even if ou are not in PA)

[David Farber <farber () central cis upenn edu>]

PARC Forum
Thursday, December 9, 1993
Xerox PARC Auditorium, 4:00 pm


HISTORY, TIME, AND THE REMAKING OF THE MODERN
LITERARY SYSTEM IN THE ELECTRONIC AGE


Carla Hesse
University of California, Berkeley


What can the history of publishing in Revolutionary France tell us
about the future of publishing in the late twentieth century? What
does the French Revolution have to do with the Internet? During the
French Revolution, there were extensive experiments with new forms of
documents and intense debates about intellectual property. Arguing
that ideas could not be owned, the press was wholly deregulated in
1789, in the expectation that there would follow an efflorescence of
democratic debate. Instead the presses churned out great amounts of
seditious pamphlets and pornography, and many established publishing
houses went out of business. As a result, legislation was initiated to
recognize the rights of the author, for the first time grounding the
publishing industry in the principles of market commerce. The
parallels with current discussions are striking, and I will argue that
now as then, the development of new communicative forms will be
determined not by technologies, but by the conscious choices that
people make in deploying them.


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Carla Hesse is Associate Professor of History at the University of
California, Berkeley. Her research has focused on various aspects of
16th to 20th century Europe, including topics such as the Social and
Political History of Ideas, and Women Writers in Revolutionary France.
She is the author of "Publishing and Cultural Politics in Revolutionary
Paris".