Week 2: Form

In my attempt to answer this week’s blog post question, I got stuck at choosing a physical book, whose form, affected my engagement with it and the way that it affected my understanding of the author’s story/theories. There must be, at some subconscious level, a way that the materiality or form of books have struck a chord with me. At the very least, illustrations set off a certain way engaging with a text—they literally place an image in my mind, one that would surely be different then if the illustrations would be described by only text.

Reviewing the course readings—seeking inspiration for this blog post—I was struck by Johanna Drucker’s claim that “[a] book (whether thought of as text or physical object), is not an inert thing that exists in advance of interaction, but rather is produced anew by the activity of each reading” (170). Not only does this claims demonstrate that a cognitive relationship between a text and a reader is “codependent,” but also lends itself to “the critical legacy of poststructuralism’s emphasis on performativity” (170). By decentring the author from her text, “[w]e make a work through our interaction with it, we don’t ‘receive’ a book as a formal structure” (Drucker 170). This reminds me of my first time reading an ebook on my iPad and the anxieties that I had in engaging with this text. My first ebook was Jasper Jones, a YA novel that addresses questions of indigenity, gender, and racism in 1960s Australia. Before I even started reading, I worried about whether reading from a screen would impact my understanding of the novel. Would I skim, as I often do when reading from a computer screen? Would I pick up on the subtext? Could I read it closely?

While I think that my anxieties were overly fraught with a sense of (unproductive) panic about the future of the book, I am still interested in critically engaging how readers engage digital texts. Drucker argues that traditional books produce virtual space (169). How do these virtual spaces differ between a traditional book and an ebook. Is it possible to know this? Is it a question worth investigating? Throughout this course—and this blog—these are questions that I would like to answer.

References

Drucker, Johanna, "Modeling Functionality: From Codex to E-book." In SpecLab: Digital Aesthetics and Projects in Speculative Computing, 165-75. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009. 

Silvey, Craig. Jasper Jones: A Novel. Australia: Allen & Unwin, 2010.