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From the Dictated Lecture to the Printed Textbook: The Circulation of Notes in the Teaching of Philosophy in Denmark–Norway, 1790–1850
Thor Inge Rørvik
This chapter will take a closer look at an activity that, together with the disputation, has characterised European universities since the Middle Ages, namely the academic lecture. This way of teaching has not only survived all forms of criticism and attempts to modernise the institution, but it has also remained somewhat the same up until the present day, despite the abundance of digital aids at our disposal. This makes it all the more striking that the academic lecture seems to have received little attention from university historians, who rather focus on how a small number of well-known professors at a given institution have contributed to the scientific progress. Their role as teachers or, for that matter, the role of the university itself as an institution where knowledge is disseminated and transmitted to generations of students, thereby introducing them to an academic literary citizenship, has, among most scholars, simply not been regarded as a particularly interesting topic.
1 There are, of course, exceptions to the rule. See for instance J. McLeish, The Lecture Method (Cambridge, 1968), although the historical references here are sparse. More thorough is A. Bruter, ‘Le cours magistral comme objet d’histoire’, Histoire de l’éducation, 120:4 (2008) [Special issue: Le cours magistral XVe–XXe siècles] and B. Lindberg’s studies of the history of the lecture in a national context: ‘The Academic Lecture. A Genre in Between’, LIR Journal I (2011), 38–48 and Den akademiska läxan. Om föreläsningens historia (Stockholm, 2017). Far from arguing that academic lectures in themselves should be of interest to anyone occupied with the writing of university history, this chapter will suggest that there are nevertheless ways in which to treat this topic that justify its historical role and status without paying too much attention to its often-trivial content. One such approach could be book historical, in terms of investigating the ‘sociology of the texts’. However, the intention is not simply to replace one approach with another; that is, to replace university history with book history, because the latter does not seem to have been interested in the academic lecture either. What it nevertheless provides us with is the concept of circulation – or, rather, a circulatory model in which the interaction of text and society takes place. This model not only points to the social realities of print media (and other media of textual transmission). In the words of D. F. McKenzie, we can say that the academic lecture ‘also directs us to consider the human motives and interactions which texts involve at every stage of their production, transmission, and consumption. It alerts us to the roles of institutions, and their own complex structures, in affecting the forms of social discourse, past and present.’
2 D. F. McKenzie: Bibliography and the Sociology of Texts (Cambridge, 1999), p. 15. On the concept of a circulatory model in book history, see also R. Darnton: ‘What is the History of Books’, Daedalus 111 (1982), 65–83 and ‘“What is the History of Books?” Revisited’, Modern Intellectual History 4 (2007), 495–508. Without entering into the finer details of production and dissemination, the book historical approach enlightens the historical role of the academic lecture and provides a starting point for further analysis. First and foremost, it can contribute to a shift of focus from the content of the individual lecture to its general function as a disseminator of knowledge.
3 There will of course be examples of lectures where the content itself is of central importance. It should suffice to recall that several significant works in the European intellectual tradition such as Kant’s Anthropologie or Hegel’s Vorlesungen über Ästhetik are in fact based on student notes and not on a single authoritative manuscript by the lecturer. This in turn generates a set of issues that will not necessarily be relevant for a study of the history of the lecture, such as whether the notes represent a true reproduction of the lecturer’s words. See i.a. W. Stark: ‘Kritische Fragen und Anmerkungen zu einem neuen Band der Akademie-Ausgabe von Kant’s Vorlesungen’, Zeitschrift für philosophische Forschung 38 (1984), 292–310, and ‘Historical Notes and Interpretive Questions about Kant’s Lectures on Anthropology’, in B. Jacobs and P. Kain (eds): Essays on Kant’s Anthropology (Cambridge, 2003), pp. 15–37. Whether this process is based on a printed textbook or a written manuscript is, in this context, less important than the indisputable fact that any lecture will contain an oral component and that even the process of note-taking by students ‘constitutes a central but often hidden phase in the transmission of knowledge’.
4 A. Blair, ‘Note Taking as an Art of Transmission’, Critical Inquiry, 31 (2004), 85. Regarded as a tool of transmission or dissemination there is in principle no significant difference between the lecture and the academic textbook. They both remain anchored in a tradition that must be accounted for in order to understand their content. What they often have in common is a lack of originality that is all the more interesting as it reveals something about the type of knowledge that the university conveys to their students in order to initiate them into an academic literary citizenship.
However, this does not mean that the relationship between the lecture and the textbook – or between orality, note-taking and print – is unproblematic. Precisely during the period here in question, i.e. the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, there occurred a strong criticism of the traditional university and its role. This criticism, which was first voiced by German academics, soon also spread in a short time also to Denmark–Norway. A significant part of the critique, as well as the attempts to counter it, circled around the relationship between the spoken and the written word or – more precisely – between the academic lecture and the textbook and the question of which of these was the most appropriate means of transferring knowledge. Whereas the lecture had until then been seen as a natural part of the university’s activities and its presence too obvious for words, one now had to start justifying it.