Books & ideas

Debates Across the Board

Editorial Team — 2013-12-23T10:12:53Z

Over the past few months, Books and Ideas has been running a series of interviews with leading contemporary scholars, who took the time to discuss their particular topics of research with us. For the Christmas season, we have put together a selection of seven discussions with intellectuals across the humanities and sciences: sociology, history, comparative literature, neuro-biology, anthropology and political science.

The Book: Its Past, Its Future

Ivan Jablonka — 2013-10-14T09:15:31Z

Roger Chartier, a professor at the Collège de France, examines the upheavals of the digital age which now confront us with an unprecedented question about the future of the written text: in its electronic form, should a text be fixed and immutable like a printed book, or can it open up to the potentialities of anonymity and unbounded multiplicity? What is certain is that the multiplication of editorial media, of periodicals and screens is diversifying the reading and writing practices of a society which, contrary to what is often claimed, is reading more and more.

Take on the Color of the Dead

Christian Jouhaud — 2013-09-16T07:30:00Z

“Take on the color of the dead,” the Delphic Oracle said to Zeno, the founder of Stoicism, who took that exhortation to mean he should read the old philosophers. Roger Chartier's inaugural lecture at the Collège de France underscores the link between the history of written cultures and that of practices of reading and transmission.