Matters of Reading, Shapes of Writing: Material Form and Social Practice

In the course of losing its privileged position as the default carrier of textual information, the book has received increasing and welcome attention in recent years as medium and material object through studies that are contributing to redefinitions of the “nature of the book.”¹ In a groundbreaking study of the library that brought information technology and literary scholarship into dialogue, Nikolaus Wegmann starts out with a revision of the traditional notion of the book as inert object for holding “content,” summarizing as his point of departure “that a book is not what one commonly thinks it is. Its handleable-handy (greifbar-griffige) form suggests a conception of the book as transport and storage container for thoughts (Gedachtes). As a mere receptacle that allows content to be placed in it.”² Lothar Müller extends the revision to paper in general, whose “openness to alliances and ability to insert itself into a multitude of routines place it in tension with the image of the closed-off container that so easily arises in the context of a metaphorics of storage, especially with a view towards the book” (Weiße Magie 99).

As competing multimedial and -modal forms of information storage and retrieval are rapidly encroaching on large swaths of their territory, books as well as other material forms of writing and reading are simultaneously coming into sharper relief as objects of disciplines as varied as book and media history, library and information studies, anthropology, memory/archive studies, cognitive science and neurophysiology, evolutionary psychology, digital and visual studies, reading research, and material studies. Interest in the physical “stuff” of reading and writing counterbalances an as yet amorphous emerging field of “digital humanities” that is reshaping our views of literary textuality in particular,³ even though it is too early to tell whether it will eventually define itself as a specific new subdiscipline or provide a broadly relevant new inflection of humanistic studies in general. On the other hand, the emphasis on material documents fits smoothly into the shift of attention from treasures of verbal art and thought to techniques and tool of knowledge production, to artifacts and their circulation, toward including the study of literature in more broadly defined cultural studies. Mirroring Müller’s resituating of literary texts within the overarching economy of paper, Stephen Greenblatt begins his latest book, on the impact of Lucretius’s De rerum natura, by narrating the adventurous rediscovery of the text in a single material copy in 1417.⁴ Greenblatt shares Wegmann’s interest in the library of Alexandria, and for him an investigation of Lucretius’s ideas and references to linen trade and paper production do not dwell in separate realms, but help delineate a broader frame within which cultural works and the material work of culture, as they manifest themselves in written form, are centered around paper and the book as human technologies, archives, tools, symbols, and artifacts—a realm in which the production, copying, archiving, disseminating, and depicting of objects...