Abstract
In contemporary media culture, the printed book is no longer a medium of necessity; it is a medium of choice. Rather than become obsolete in the presence of digital and electronic media, as some have predicted, the codex has reinvented itself as an innovative storytelling medium in the wake of the digitization of writing, publishing, and reading. This introduction surveys recent literary, artistic, and critical discourses surrounding the printed book in the digital age, with a specific focus on North American cultural contexts and on scholarship in American studies and book history. It stakes out the disciplinary and methodological concerns of this volume, arguing for a media-focused critical approach that considers the materialities of print and digital literature to create more complex accounts of the book’s cultural agency.
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Notes
- 1.
For a useful overview of the recent evolution of digital infrastructure related to books, see chapter 4 “The Book as Interface” in Amaranth Borsuk, The Book (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2018), 197–258.
- 2.
Sven Birkerts, The Gutenberg Elegies: The Fate of Reading in an Electronic Age (Boston: Faber, 1994); Nicholas G. Carr, The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains (New York: Norton, 2010); David Sax, The Revenge of Analog: Real Things and Why They Matter (New York: Public Affairs, 2016).
- 3.
See Sax, Revenge of the Analog, 142–47 and the chapter by Bläsi in this volume.
- 4.
On the rhetoric of the book’s obsolescence and its long-term historical significance from the early nineteenth century to today, see the concise (and opinionated) essay by book historian Leah Price “The Death of the Book Through the Ages.” The New York Times, August 10, 2012. https://nyti.ms/2lLpiSF. Also see the nuanced account of contemporary challenges to the printed book in Kathleen Fitzpatrick, “The Future History of the Book: Time, Attention, Convention,” in Cultures of Obsolescence: History, Materiality, and the Digital Age, edited by Babette Bärbel Tischleder and Sarah L. Wasserman (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), 111–26. Fitzpatrick frames the present moment as “the hypothetical age of the codex’s obsolescence” (Fitzpatrick, “Future” 112).
- 5.
Jerome Rothenberg and Steven Clay, eds., A Book of the Book: Some Works & Projections about the Book & Writing (New York: Granary, 2000).
- 6.
Keith Houston, The Book: A Cover-to-Cover Exploration of the Most Powerful Object of Our Time (New York: Norton, 2016).
- 7.
Nicholas A. Basbanes, On Paper: The Everything of Its Two-Thousand-Year History (New York: Knopf, 2013).
- 8.
Simon Garfield, Just My Type: A Book about Fonts (New York: Gotham, 2011).
- 9.
A 2017 article in the British Guardian condensed this reversal in the following headline: “The digital revolution was expected to kill traditional publishing. But print books are ever more beautifully designed and lovingly cherished.” Alex Preston, “How Real Books Have Trumped Ebooks.” The Guardian, May 14, 2017. http://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/may/14/how-real-books-trumped-ebooks-publishing-revival
- 10.
Originating in media and communication studies (esp. drawing on the work of Marshall McLuhan and Neil Postman), the concept of media ecology has recently transformed into a useful interdisciplinary tool that has increasing currency in literary studies and book studies. For overviews, see Ursula Heise, “Unnatural Ecologies: The Metaphor of the Environment in Media Theory,” Configurations 10, no. 1 (2002): 149–68; Daniel Punday, Writing at the Limit: The Novel in the New Media Ecology (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2012).
- 11.
Michelle Levy and Tom Mole, “Introduction,” The Broadview Reader in Book History, eds. Levy and Mole (Peterborough, Ont.: Broadview, 2014), xvii.
- 12.
Michael Warner, The Letters of the Republic: Publication and the Public Sphere in Eighteenth-Century America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990). The early 1990s also saw the founding of the Society for the History of Authorship, Reading, and Publishing (SHARP), the leading professional association of book historians and print culture scholars. Apparently, the dispersed venues of research on the book had reached a stage at this time where a sufficient number of individuals would seek interdisciplinary coordination and identification.
- 13.
Warner, Letters, 5.
- 14.
Warner, Letters, 5.
- 15.
Warner, Letters, 9.
- 16.
In his outline of a new “sociology of association,” Latour differentiates between the notion of “intermediaries” and “mediators,” calling for a radical expansion of the latter concept. An intermediary, according to Latour, “transports meaning or force without transformation: defining its input is enough to define its outputs.” Mediators, conversely, “transform, translate, distort, and modify the meaning or the elements they are supposed to carry.” While Latour intends this binary pairing for the widest possible array of social entities, the applicability of this notion to communication media is readily apparent. See Bruno Latour, Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2005), 39.
- 17.
Latour, Reassembling 71–72.
- 18.
Barbara Hochman, Uncle Tom’s Cabin and the Reading Revolution: Race, Literacy, Childhood, and Fiction, 1851–1911 (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2011); Meredith L. McGill, American Literature and the Culture of Reprinting, 1834–1853. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003).
- 19.
Paula Rabinowitz, American Pulp: How Paperbacks Brought Modernism to Main Street (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2014); Ellen Gruber Garvey, Writing with Scissors: American Scrapbooks from the Civil War to the Harlem Renaissance (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013).
- 20.
Phillip H. Round, Removable Type: Histories of the Book in Indian Country, 1663–1880 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010); Lara Langer Cohen and Jordan Alexander Stein, eds., Early African American Print Culture (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012); Matt Cohen, The Networked Wilderness: Communicating in Early New England (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010); Raúl Coronado, A World Not to Come: A History of Latino Writing and Print Culture (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013); Janice A. Radway, A Feeling for Books: The Book-of-the-Month Club, Literary Taste, and Middle-Class Desire (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997).
- 21.
Jane P. Tompkins, Sensational Designs: The Cultural Work of American Fiction, 1790–1860 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), xi.
- 22.
See the section “Surface as Materiality” in Stephen Best and Sharon Marcus, “Surface Reading: An Introduction,” Representations 108, no. 1 (2009): 9–10.
- 23.
On medial close reading, see Alexander Starre, Metamedia: American Book Fictions and Literary Print Culture after Digitization (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2015), 64–65.
- 24.
Johanna Drucker, The Visible Word: Experimental Typography and Modern Art, 1909–1923 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 45.
- 25.
John Guillory, “Genesis of the Media Concept,” Critical Inquiry 36, no. 2 (Winter 2010): 322.
- 26.
See especially N. Katherine Hayles, Writing Machines (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002) and My Mother Was a Computer: Digital Subjects and Literary Texts (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005).
- 27.
N. Katherine Hayles and Jessica Pressman, “Introduction – Making, Critique: A Media Framework,” Comparative Textual Media: Transforming the Humanities in the Postprint Era, ed. Hayles and Pressman (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013), vii.
- 28.
Henry Jenkins, Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide (New York: New York University Press, 2006). On the simultaneous trends in literary culture towards media convergence and media divergence, see also Heike Schaefer, “Poetry in Transmedial Perspective: Rethinking Intermedial Literary Studies in the Digital Age,” in “Intermediality, Narrativity, Emotion,” ed. Agnes Petho, special issue, Acta Universitatis Sapientiae, Film and Media Studies 10, no. 1 (2015): 169–82.
- 29.
See for example Matthew G. Kirschenbaum, Mechanisms: New Media and the Forensic Imagination (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2012); Hayles, My Mother; and from a media philosophical angle John Durham Peters, The Marvelous Clouds: Toward a Philosophy of Elemental Media (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015).
- 30.
Nicholson Baker, “A New Page: Can the Kindle Really Improve on the Book?” New Yorker, August 3, 2009. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2009/08/03/a-new-page
- 31.
Ted Striphas, The Late Age of Print: Everyday Book Culture from Consumerism to Control (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011), 183.
- 32.
Alexandra Alter, “Your E-Book Is Reading You,” Wall Street Journal, June 29, 2012.
- 33.
John B. Thompson, Merchants of Culture: The Publishing Business in the Twenty-First Century, 2nd ed. (New York: Plume, 2012), 147–187.
- 34.
Thompson points out: “[T]he digital revolution has reduced costs for small independent publishers too and made it easier for them to start up and survive in the field of trade publishing. Over a period of two or three decades, the entire book production process, from the creation of the original text to the typesetting, design, and printing of the book, has been transformed by the digital revolution” (Merchants 155).
- 35.
On metamediality, see Starre, Metamedia, esp. 28–66.
- 36.
From a semiotic standpoint, the simultaneous usage of several forms of expression has been termed “multimodality.” The pioneering study to link multimodal narrative theory with contemporary print literature is Alison Gibbons, Multimodality, Cognition, and Experimental Literature (New York: Routledge, 2012).
- 37.
See Jessica Pressman, “The Aesthetic of Bookishness in Twenty-First Century Literature,” Michigan Quarterly Review 48, no. 4 (2009): 465–82.
- 38.
Some important studies are Naomi S. Baron, Words Onscreen: The Fate of Reading in a Digital World (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015); Anouk Lang, ed., From Codex to Hypertext: Reading at the Turn of the Twenty-First Century (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2012); Lori Emerson, Reading Writing Interfaces: From the Digital to the Bookbound (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014).
- 39.
Andrew Piper, Book Was There: Reading in Electronic Times (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013), 155–56.
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Schaefer, H., Starre, A. (2019). The Printed Book, Contemporary Media Culture, and American Studies. In: Schaefer, H., Starre, A. (eds) The Printed Book in Contemporary American Culture. New Directions in Book History. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-22545-2_1
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