Book Presence in a Digital Age

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.

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).