The Information Management Public Lectures give attention to exciting advances in research and professional practice. The topics are diverse reflecting the importance and global extent of Information Management in today’s society. The lectures are open to all members of the Dalhousie campus and surrounding community. When feasible, recordings of the lectures are posted here for wider circulation. For the full schedule, visit the Public Lecture page of our website.

Why the Book is by Definition Better than the Film: The Utopian Significance of the Printing Press

Dr. Kevin Absillis
University of Antwerp

Lecture Details
Tuesday, November 4th from 1:00pm-2:00pm
Room 3089, Kenneth C. Rowe Management Building, 6100 University Avenue

You can listen to the presentation here.

Abstract

It is remarkable that all major early modern utopias – from Thomas More’s Utopia (1516), to Francis Bacon’s New Atlantis (1624) and Tommaso Campanella’s The City of the Sun (1623) – explicitly pay tribute to the invention of the printing press. At least as remarkable is the fact that in 20th century dystopic fiction the destruction of books and the decline of the printing press are a crucial part of the nightmare they represent. One immediately thinks of George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four (1948), Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 (1953) and, perhaps, of E.M. Forster’s short story ‘The Machine Stops’ (1909). This very motive is also taken up in a fair number of movies, e.g. Rollerball (1975, dir. N. Jewison), Minority Report (2002, dir. S. Spielberg), Equilibrium (2002, dir. K. Wimmer), V for Vendetta (2006, dir. J. McTeigh), The Book of Eli (2010, dir. Hughes Brothers). In my talk I will investigate this topical relationship between the printing press/books and utopian fiction in order to assess a by no means purely ‘fictitious’ fear that our so-called Gutenberg Galaxy is currently coming to an end.

Biography

Dr. Kevin Absillis is a faculty member in the Department of Literature at the University of Antwerp, Belgium. He completed his PhD in literature and linguistics in 2008 with a dissertation on the history of the famous Belgian literary publishing house A. Manteau. The book resulting from this study, Vechten tegen de bierkaai. Over het uitgevershuis van Angèle Manteau, 1932-1970, was published in 2010 and was awarded the triennial Pil Van Gastel-prize for History in 2013. Dr. Absillis was a scientific consultant and researcher on the staff of the Flemish House of Literature and a postdoctoral fellow of the Research Foundation Flanders before taking up an appointment at the University of Antwerp, where he has held a full-time tenure track position since 2013. He teaches courses on modern and contemporary Dutch literature, nationalism studies, book history, and literary studies. His research focuses on Flemish literature, Flemish and Dutch book history (19th-21st centuries), cultural nationalism in Flanders, and language ideology. Over the last few years he published several books, including Van Hugo Claus tot hoelahoep. Vlaanderen in beweging, 1950-1960 (Garant, 2007) dealing with Flemish cultural history in the 1950s; De manke usurpator. Over Verkavelingsvlaams (Academia Press, 2012) on language ideology; and Literatuurwetenschap en uitgeverijonderzoek (Academia Press, 2012) and De plicht van de dichter. Hugo Claus en de politiek (De Bezige Bij-Antwerpen, 2013).  He has contributed numerous papers to academic journals as well as to newspapers and magazines. In 2012, for example, he wrote a four-part New Year’s essay for the Flemish leading newspaper De Morgen. Recently, he was the co-chair of the 22nd annual conference of the Society for the History of Authorship, Reading & Publishing (SHARP) on the theme “Religions of the Book,” hosted by the University of Antwerp.