Friday 1 April 2016

Week 11: Back to the Past

For my final paper, I’m exploring the idea of format when it comes to books. The readings that I’ve done so far have really made me consider textuality beyond the book, specifically regarding the phonograph during the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century. Both the Ruberry article and a fascinating book by Lisa Gitelman, titled Scprits, Grooves, and Writing Machines, highlight the utter grip on the cultural and intellectual imaginations that the phonograph held. It’s my fascination with cultural narratives and influences on popular imaginaries that I would chose to return to late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century America.

What really stands out to me about this period is the quickness of mainstream imagination in eschewing the traditional textuality of the book for an aural experience. The ability to “read” in bed via phonograph enthralled people. Prior to the phonograph, insufficient lighting and fire hazards made bedtime reading a rarity. Throughout his adult life, Thomas Edison received thousands of letters from diverse people about ideas for inventions and particularly applications for the phonograph. In some circles, it would appear that the traditional book would soon become passé.  Or that paper records of meetings would not longer be necessary, as aural recording would fulfill the need to archive records. And to an extent, in the early twenty-first century, the success of the audiobook and the increasingly paperless (e.g. digital) repositories for records is a reality explored at quite some length during Edison’s time.

In my time travels back to this era, I’m not sure if I’d want to say anything about the future of the book. Rather, I’d be more interested in learning more about ideas about the future, and impart how these ideas about new writing, hearing, and reading inventors impact ideas of textuality at the turn of the twentieth-century America. Perhaps the one thing that I would mention that all these ideas about the future of the reading didn’t lead to the extinction of the traditional book, but rather complemented it through different forms (such as the audiobook). Just as there was a great diversity of ideas for inventions at this time, I think that it would be important to empathize that excluding the traditional book (e.g. a format that is actually read, not heard) leads to an oversimplification of the future of the book.

Gitelman, Lisa. Scripts, Grooves, and Writing Machines. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1999.

Ruberry, Matthew. "Canned Literature: the Book After Edison." Book History 16 (2013): 215-45. 


Week 11: Keeping the book modern

To take an alternative approach to this week’s blog question, I thought, “wouldn’t it be nice to go back in time and say, for once, ‘You were right.’”

Although history has been full of naysayers of the future of the book (just take a look at next week’s readings, or my fellow Futurama bloggers’ posts), and those who detest “change,” we shouldn’t forget that there are those who worked hard in their time to reinvent the book (or in this case “the novel”), to break traditional boundaries, and to demonstrate that the form and content of “the book” is fluctuating.

In this case, I am speaking of the literary modernists. Specifically those writers who observed a changing society and felt that the novel ought to reflect those changes in its essential structure. Instead of holding on to the ideals of what constitute the traditional novel or book, authors such as Virginia Woolf and James Joyce attempted to shape their works in a way that reflected the changes they saw in society, and even in “human consciousness,” in the modernist period.

I have always loved this statement by Woolf (2009) which highlights her view on literature, and “the book's”, ability to represent her lived experience:

“A shift in the scale – the sudden slip of masses held in position for ages – has shaken the fabric from top to bottom, alienated us from the past and made us perhaps too vividly conscious of the present. Every day we find ourselves doing, saying, or thinking things that would have been impossible to our fathers. And we feel the differences which have not been noted far more keenly than the resemblances which have been very perfectly expressed. New books lure us to read them partly in the hope that they will reflect this re-arrangement of our attitude--those scenes, thoughts, and apparently fortuitous groupings of incongruous things which impinge upon us with so keen a sense of novelty--and, as literature does, give it back into our keeping, whole and comprehended.” (p. 59-60)

While Woolf’s works retained the form of the codex, the way she structured and organized the content of her text varied greatly from her predecessors (The Waves is my absolute favourite of Woolf’s texts, in case you’re interested in taking a look for yourself). Similar statements can be made of Joyce’s modernist works, especially Ulysses and Finnegan’s Wake. In a book history class last year, I studied Joyce’s interest in the shape of the book. Specifically, I looked at his preoccupation with form and his attempts to manipulate and push the boundaries of the printed book. In fact, Joyce’s work in this area has been seen as a precursor to hypertext narratives (Groden, 2004). Indeed, scholarship has made a direct connection between modernist literature’s innovations in form and the capabilities of the digital text (Pressman, 2014). For the modernists, then, at least Joyce and Woolf, whose work I have looked at in some depth, the book was not just a stack of sewn and bound gatherings, but a vessel for expression and creativity, that was open to interpretation and reinvention as the need was identified.

What we have learned over the semester is that the book is in a state of flux. There is no “one” definition for what constitutes a book, and there is no one distinct format. Going back to Drucker’s (2009) “Modeling Functionality: From Codex to E-Book,” we should think about what a book does and not “what a book is” (p. 170).  For Joyce and Woolf, the book was meant to capture something of society, and in Woolf’s words “give it back […] whole and comprehended.” If part of what the book should do –or what the novel should do– is provide a view into our contemporary world, and give us tools to understand and critique it, then change is inevitable.

So, why the modernists? To say, "you had the idea," your work was meaningful, the sentiments you expressed, and the experiments you took, are still of great value today.  

***

This doodle on Woolf's most famous portrait spoke to me for this post.
It offers its own unique juxtaposition of media, time periods and expectations.
Retrieved from: http://booklips.pl/galeria/doodle-na-fotografiach-znanych-pisarzy/




As a related aside, I think I would also like to tell Woolf specifically that the future of reading and writing holds so much more for women. I would tell her that, while she had the privileged position of being in control of her writing, publishing, and printing, the future of the book makes it much easier for a woman’s voice to be heard in print (or more accurately, in text). That is, of course, an over simplification. This being the case, I would then suggest maybe we continue the conversation over lunch, because, heck, if I have Woolf’s attention, I might as well monopolize on it while I can.


References

Drucker, J. (2009) Modeling functionality: From codex to e-book." In SpecLab: Digital aesthetics and projects in speculative computing, 165-175. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Groden, M. (2004). James Joyce’s Ulysses on the page and on the screen. In The Future of the page, edited by Peter Stoicheff and Andrew Taylor, 159-176. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
Pressman, J. (2014). Digital modernism: Making it new in new media. New York: Oxford University Press.
Woolf, V. (2009). How it strikes a contemporary. In Thoughts on peace in an air raid, 53-65. London: Penguin.