Overview

Description

CALENDAR DESCRIPTION:

Introduces the history of print culture along with a variety of theoretical approaches. Students enrolled in the Print Culture program are required to take this course.

COURSE DETAILS:

Book History and the Materiality of the Book  

Amongst the recent and ongoing declamations on the death of the book in light of the popularity of digitized texts, e-readers and tablets, Jessica Pressman has written on the ‘aesthetics of bookishness’ in twenty-first-century novels; these bookish novels, besides participating in a kind of nostalgia, “provide temporary spaces in which to explore, critique, and challenge the changing world.” Media have always been in flux, and accordingly various ideas of the book have shaped literary fictions since the advent of writing as a material technology. By looking at relatively recent literary works that place the materiality of books or writing at their centres, or foreground the book’s material form, we will analyze the meaning of the book in literary studies: its authenticity, aesthetic presence or aura, as well as the ways that it shapes interpretation and invokes its production, making, and history. In turn, as we consider the effect of the aesthetic object on reception and meaning, we will explore more general critical definitions and uses of ‘materiality.’ By deeply engaging and subverting the book as a form, these authors press us to interrogate just what the book is and how it works.

COURSE-LEVEL EDUCATIONAL GOALS:

We will ground the course in the history of the book, surveying key essays and arguments in that field, before turning to the nuts and bolts descriptive bibliography, with hands on and technical training and practice in describing the book as a physical object. These skills will form the foundation of more critical and theoretical readings of the texts, especially in regards to reception and readership, aura and presence, and post-humanist valorization of materiality.  
The discipline of descriptive bibliography will used in concert with recent theoretical approaches such as paratextuality, posthumanism, theories of the archive, and residuality in media studies.

Grading

Materials

REQUIRED READING: