Overview

Book, Text, Medium: Cross Sectional Reading for a Digital Age utilizes codex history, close reading, and language philosophy to assess the transformative arc between medieval books and today's e-books. It examines what happens to the reading experience in the twenty-first century when the original concept of a book is still held in the mind of a reader, if no longer in the reader's hand. Leading critic Garrett Stewart explores the play of mediation more generally, as the concept of book moves from a manufactured object to simply the language it puts into circulation. Framed by digital poetics, phonorobotics, and the rising popularity of audiobooks, this study sheds new light on both the history of reading and the negation of legible print in conceptual book art.

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9781108834599

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Reviews

'Garrett Stewart has produced a richly inclusive, nimbly attentive, celebration of the many dimensions in which reading is played out, across and between its different media and instruments, ear, eye and hand. It brilliantly diagnoses in the present conditions of reading, not a demise but an ongoing reprise of the many historical incarnations of 'bookhood'.' Steven Connor, University of Cambridge 'Dazzlingly brilliant. ... a great book [... of] grand ambitions and stunning achievements ... an amazing accomplishment.' N. Katherine Hayles, Distinguished Research Professor, University of California, Los Angeles

Author Information

Garrett Stewart is James O. Freedman Professor of Letters at the University of Iowa. He has written five books each on literary analysis, art history, and film theory, most recently The One, Other, and Only Dickens (2018), Transmedium (2018), and Cinemachines (2020). Stewart was elected in 2010 to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

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