An English course offered over winter term allowed students to not only examine how publishing has evolved over the centuries, but to self-publish the class work into a book of their own.
The class, “Publishing: Future of Authorship,” is part of the professional writing and rhetoric concentration and was designed to help students move beyond the traditional concepts of books and newsletters. In an age of blogs and Wikipedia, the class description states, new technologies are changing the way writing gets published.
But predicting the future, according to the professor who led the course, requires understanding the past.
“One project was to mimic a philosophical treatise someone might have written in ancient Greece using only paper and ink,” said Rebecca Pope-Ruark, an assistant professor in her first year at Elon. The next steps, she said, modeled the life of texts over centuries of editors, commentators and illuminators.
“Authorship at that time was not about personal fame,” she said. “They didn’t put their names on anything, and many people added to texts.”
The class gave at least one of the students an appreciation for how easy it is to publish written work compared with the scrolls and manuscripts that would be copied by hand, on parchment, using quill pens, in the years before movable type was developed.
“You appreciate the changes in technology and how things are easier now,” said Calley Grace, a senior corporate communications major from Hershey, Pa., with plans to enter the publishing industry after Elon. “I think also, when you looked at an illuminated manuscript, you don’t realize how much work went into it.”
The three students and Pope-Ruark compiled their work – the treatises, manuscripts and self-reflection essays – and self-published the material on Lulu.com. That book, “On Manuscripts: An Experiment in Medieval Publishing,” is available for purchase through the web site.