VCP@LCP Awards 2008-2009 William H. Helfand American Visual Culture Fellowship

 

Christopher Hunter is a PhD candidate in Comparative Literature at the University of Pennsylvania studying the history of the book and the book trades in colonial America and the Early Republic. He has published essays on the freedom of the press and the bibliography of Benjamin Franklin’s Autobiography and is currently at work on a dissertation entitled “A New and More Perfect Edition: American Autobiography, 1790-1850.”

 

Using bibliography and economic history as well as literary analysis to uncover the labor of the wide range of people – from editors and publishers to compositors and pressmen – who gave material form to printed texts, Hunter’s dissertation questions the degree to which changes in literary form signify changes in broader categories like the self. The literary history of autobiography is often told as the struggle of individuals groping fitfully for new forms and idioms with which to tell the stories of their lives. Such narratives chart the change from older models that stress the subject’s representativeness and contiguity with tradition (including confessions both criminal and religious, and conversion and captivity narratives) to “purely autobiographical” texts that affirm the singularity of the modern self.

 

As the William H. Helfand Fellow of the Library Company ‘s American Visual Culture Program, Christopher Hunter will be working with the Library Company’s extensive collections of Frankliniana to study the images that appeared in many editions of Franklin’s Autobiography. In a seminal essay, Paul deMan argues that prosopopeia – literally, the giving of a face, or propon – is the privileged trope of autobiographical writing through which absent authors are made virtually present in their words. Likewise, portraits and illustrations work in conjunction with texts to give those absent authors a face. The artists and craftsmen who illustrated Franklin’s Memoirs had an unusually rich visual tradition at their disposal, from the iconic scenes of his boyhood to the well-known physical peculiarities and accoutrements of the aged philosopher. These images constitute readings of the texts they accompany, and though they are not always considered part of the text, they are both fascinating in their own right and absolutely crucial for a full understanding of the development of Franklin’s life story in its myriad forms, as well as for the development of the genre of autobiography more generally