At first, the move from in-person instruction to an online Zoom classroom seemed like it would hit us particularly hard in Dr. Matt Kirschenbaum’s “BookLab: How to Do Things with Books” course. The course focused not only on the theoretical affordances of reading textual materiality, but also on getting our hands dirty with the physical production of material objects: using clay tablets, making paper, playing with a 3-D printed type matrix and punch, collation exercises, bookbinding, letterpress printing. On our last day of class, the same day our university announced its plans for a campus closure, we were all huddled around one of the presses pulling prints of Walt Whitman’s “A Font of Type” on the paper we had made only a few weeks prior.
Tag: novels
David Letzler. The Cruft of Fiction: Mega-Novels and the Science of Paying Attention
In this thought-provoking, well-written study, David Letzler combines computer science and information theory with genre criticism to propose an innovative way of theorizing reader response to the excesses often found in postmodern and some modern mega-novels. These are “the extremely literate, erudite tomes around which one must plan one’s life for a month” (1) by such authors as Thomas Pynchon and David Foster Wallace, as well as James Joyce. Acknowledging that reactions to these novels range from passionate admiration to dismissive scorn, Letzler aims to delineate the ways in which they require modulation of readers’ attention and, in so doing, provide practical lessons for the information age.
Rebecca L. Walkowitz. Born Translated: The Contemporary Novel in an Age of World Literature
Rebecca L. Walkowitz. Born Translated: The Contemporary Novel in an Age of World Literature. New York: Columbia University Press, 2015….
Ardis Cameron. Unbuttoning America: A Biography of Peyton Place
Ardis Cameron. Unbuttoning America: A Biography of “Peyton Place.” Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2015. xiv, 223p., ill. ISBN 080145364X. US…