Writing Artifacts

This book is an interdisciplinary collection of concise investigations into everyday artifacts that matter to writers and writing.

With the collection’s 31 contributors and through the lens of material culture studies, the editors make a case that the study of writing is the study of artifacts. Each chapter centers on a distinct artifact, including an 1899 course notebook, the delete key, the graffiti spray can, indigenous paper, the Ouija board, and a retirement home noticeboard, as a means of exploring what each says about writing culture and writing lives. Together, the chapters show that, even if at first we don’t understand how or why, the artifacts that populate our lives deserve close attention. The close attention paid to artifacts in this book demonstrates both the particularity of possessions (this Ouija board or my delete key) and their universality, as so many people’s experiences with writing depend on similar possessions. In this way, each represents a moment in writing’s story and timeline, while also living in many stories and timelines, begging for artifactual study. While readers will easily recognize some artifacts in this book as writing artifacts, others illustrate how ‘writing’ must be understood expansively, to capture the range of symbolic human expression and mirror the complex ways writing is experienced in people’s lives, beyond the moment of inscription.

An accessible, cross-disciplinary archive of contemporary and historical writing artifacts that matter to writing practice, this book will be of interest to writers of all kinds, as well as students and scholars of writing in fields including Writing and Literacy Studies, Material and Popular Culture, Rhetoric, History, and Communication Studies.

Cydney Alexis is Associate Professor of English in Writing, Rhetoric, and Technical Communication at Kansas State University, USA. She is the co-editor of The Material Culture of Writing (2022) and her work has appeared in publications such as Bad Ideas about Writing (2017); Rhetoric, through Everyday Things (2017); and Slate.

Hannah J. Rule is Associate Professor of English in Composition and Rhetoric at the University of South Carolina, USA. She is the author of Situating Writing Processes (2019) and co-editor of The Material Culture of Writing (2022).