Book Presence in a Digital Age

Kiene Brillenburg Wurth is Professor of Literature and Comparative Media at the University of Utrecht, the Netherlands, and project leader of the VIDI project “Back to the Book” funded by the Dutch Research Council. She is the author of Musically Sublime: Infinity, Indeterminacy, Irresolvability (2009) and the editor of Between Page and Screen: Remaking Literature Through Cinema and Cyberspace (2012).Kári Driscoll is Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature at the University of Utrecht, the Netherlands.Jessica Pressman is Associate Professor of English and Comparative Literature at San Diego State University, USA. She is the author of Digital Modernism: Making It New in New Media (2014), co-author (with Mark C. Marino and Jeremy Douglass) of Reading Project: A Collaborative Analysis of William Poundstone’s Project for Tachistoscope {Bottomless Pit} (2015), and co-editor (with N. Katherine Hayles) of Comparative Textual Media: Transforming the Humanities in a Postprint Era (2013).

Book Presence in a Digital Age is that rare volume that reads as both the culmination and anticipation of a field. It reflexively brings together some of the most compelling critics and artists thinking about ‘the book’ as medium and cultural artifact – and the individual conversations, explorations, and interventions that result would have alone made for a worthy volume. But the cumulative effect is much more than this, for collectively they articulate the questions that will inform scholarship and artistic practice for some years to come.

• List of PlatesList of FiguresNotes on Contributors1. Book Presence: An Introductory ExplorationKiene Brillenburg Wurth (Utrecht University, the Netherlands)I: Theory and Overview2. Pagina Abscondita: Reading the the Book's WakeJohn T. Hamilton (Harvard University, USA)3. From Codex to CodecsGarrett Stewart (University of Iowa, USA)4. Bookwork and Bookishness: An Interview with Brian Dettmer and Doug BeubeJessica Pressman (San Diego State University, USA)Section II: Media Changes and Materiality5. Infrathin Platforms: Print on Demand as Auto-FactographyHannes Bajohr (Berlin’s Center for Literary and Cultural Research, Germany)6. Genre and Materiality: Autobiography and ZinesAnna 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 StudiesLiedeke Plate (Radboud University Nijmegen, the Netherlands)8. ‘Book for Loan’: S as Paradox on Media ChangeEmma De Vries and Yra van Dijk (Leiden University, the Netherlands)9. Book Presence and Feline Absence: A Conversation with Mark Z. DanielewskiKári Driscoll (Utrecht University, the Netherlands) and Inge van de Ven (Tilburg University, the Netherlands)Section III: Conceptual Possibilities of the Book10. Learn to Read DifferentlySimon Morris (Leeds Beckett University, UK)11. Emoji Dick and the Eponymous WhaleLisa Gitelman (New York University, USA)12. The Demediation of Alphabetic Writing in Memory Palace and Fugitive SparrowsKiene Brillenburg Wurth (Utrecht University, the Netherlands)13. Revisiting the Book-as-World: World-Making and Book Materiality in Only Revolutions and The AtlasInge van de Ven (Tilburg University, the Netherlands)14. Books as Archives: An Interview with Ernst van AlphenKiene Brillenburg Wurth (Utrecht University, the Netherlands)Index