Full Description
Contrary to the apocalyptic pronouncements of paper media's imminent demise in the digital age, there has been a veritable surge of creative reimaginings of books as bearers of the literary. From typographic experiments (Mark Z. Danielewski's House of Leaves, Steven Hall's The Raw Shark Texts) to accordion books (Anne Carson's Nox), from cut ups (Jonathan Safran Foer's Tree of Codes) to collages (Graham Rawle's Woman's World), from erasures (Mary Ruefle's A Little White Shadow) to mixups (Simon Morris's The Interpretations of Dreams), print literature has gone through anything but a slow, inevitable death. In fact, it has re-invented itself materially.
Starting from this idea of media plurality, Book Presence in a Digital Age explores the resilience of print literatures, book art, and zines in the late age of print from a contemporary perspective, while incorporating longer-term views on media archeology and media change. Even as it focuses on the materiality of books and literary writing in the present, Book Presence also takes into consideration earlier 20th-century "moments" of media transition, developing the concepts of presence and materiality as analytical tools to perform literary criticism in a digital age. Bringing together leading scholars, artists, and publishers, Book Presence in a Digital Age offers a variety of perspectives on the past, present, and future of the book as medium, the complex relationship of materiality to virtuality, and of the analog to the digital.
Contents
List of Plates
List of Figures
Notes on Contributors
1. Book Presence: An Introductory Exploration
Kiene Brillenburg Wurth (Utrecht University, the Netherlands)
I: Theory and Overview
2. Pagina Abscondita: Reading the the Book's Wake
John T. Hamilton (Harvard University, USA)
3. From Codex to Codecs
Garrett Stewart (University of Iowa, USA)
4. Bookwork and Bookishness: An Interview with Brian Dettmer and Doug Beube
Jessica Pressman (San Diego State University, USA)
Section II: Media Changes and Materiality
5. Infrathin Platforms: Print on Demand as Auto-Factography
Hannes Bajohr (Berlin's Center for Literary and Cultural Research, Germany)
6. Genre and Materiality: Autobiography and Zines
Anna Poletti (Utrecht University, the Netherlands)
7. Doing Things with Literature in the Digital Age: Italo Calvino's If on a Winter's Night a Traveller and the Material Turn in Literary Studies
Liedeke Plate (Radboud University Nijmegen, the Netherlands)
8. 'Book for Loan': S as Paradox on Media Change
Emma De Vries and Yra van Dijk (Leiden University, the Netherlands)
9. Book Presence and Feline Absence: A Conversation with Mark Z. Danielewski
Kári Driscoll (Utrecht University, the Netherlands) and Inge van de Ven (Tilburg University, the Netherlands)
Section III: Conceptual Possibilities of the Book
10. Learn to Read Differently
Simon Morris (Leeds Beckett University, UK)
11. Emoji Dick and the Eponymous Whale
Lisa Gitelman (New York University, USA)
12. The Demediation of Alphabetic Writing in Memory Palace and Fugitive Sparrows
Kiene Brillenburg Wurth (Utrecht University, the Netherlands)
13. Revisiting the Book-as-World: World-Making and Book Materiality in Only Revolutions and The Atlas
Inge van de Ven (Tilburg University, the Netherlands)
14. Books as Archives: An Interview with Ernst van Alphen
Kiene Brillenburg Wurth (Utrecht University, the Netherlands)
Index
