CAT 2: The Book in the Digital Age
Jessica Pressman
Rhetoric about the death of the book abounds in our digital age. Fears of the book’s demise encode larger concerns about current cultural shifts from attention to distraction, from serious art to video games, from respected information sources to crowd-sourced spaces like Wikipedia. This course approaches the topic of the book’s obsolescence in order to ask what work all this rhetoric is doing and why it matters.
We will pursue an understanding of the book medium, past and present, across a wide range of genres and medial formats: media studies criticism, fiction, bookwork sculpture, digital literature, archives, youtube animations, and more. We will study the history of the book in order to analyze the book as a medium, a technology for information transmission, as well as a cultural symbol. This knowledge will enable us to think critically about other, newer reading technologies such as e-readers, computers, cell phones, etc. and the reading practices they enable. Our goal is to better understand our contemporary digital age and the complicated rhetoric through which it operates.
