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The Book Unbound

Overview

  • Credit value: 30 credits at Level 7
  • Tutor: Dr Luisa Calè
  • Assessment: a five-minute object and/or project presentation (0%) and 5000-word essay (100%)

Module description

In this module we explore the book as a cultural form under changing conditions of technical reproducibility. The materialities of the book have come under increasing scrutiny in the wake of electronic media and the new archival storage possibilities heralded by digital culture. Against millenarian talk about the 'end of the book' as a support for the act of reading, we will discuss practices that resisted and reinvented the book's physical properties at earlier moments of technological change, from Romantic cultures of the book to their recreations in twentieth-century artists' books.

Efforts to resist the book as a commercial object published in identical multiples for an anonymous reading public often took the form of handcrafted interventions, which highlight the bibliographical codes that define the operations of the book as a support for reading. The architectures and archeologies of the page indicate its functioning as a site of sociability, collaborative authorship, and composite art: from the expanded extra-illustrated page to the crowded walls of words of William Blake's plates, the emergence of embossed books for the blind, and the overwrought margins of William Morris's Kelmscott Press compared to the fin-de-siècle aspiration for a 'book all margin; full of beautiful unwritten thoughts'.

Bound and unbound formats speak out the horizon of the book in changing cultures of reading and viewing. The boundaries and partitions of books become dynamic; books nest inside other books, disbound plates trace unpredictable lines of flight and crystallise in hybrid configurations that subvert stable notions of the book as a condition of possibility for the production and circulation of knowledge. Such hybrid forms assemble objects from different periods, challenge distinctions between scribal and print cultures, mechanical and autographic forms. They register the changing visual cultures of the book supplemented by watercolours, prints, and later photographs, and situate it in relation to the archive, the collection and the gallery.

Rooting reading in concrete historical forms, this module opens up new ways of thinking about the composite arts of the book, its multisensorial aesthetics, and intermedial recreations.

Each session concentrates on a book practice that subverts, dismantles or recreates the codex as an alternative to the commercial book, concentrating on Romantic books and their artistic recreations, including works by Walpole, Gray, Sterne, Blake, Dickens, Morris, Stevenson, artist books by Tom Phillips and John Baldessari, and books in boxes from Marc Saporta and BS Johnson to Chris Ware's graphic novel Building Stories.

Indicative syllabus

  • What is a book? Scroll, codex (bound, unbound, disbound), archive, paper gallery
  • Book parts
  • Leaves: interleaves, inlaid, extra-illustrated, altered books
  • Margins
  • Bibles of Hell: William Blake’s prophecies in illuminated printing
  • Periodical books: Dickens in weekly numbers, monthly parts, bound
  • Ideal books: William Morris’s Kelmscott Press
  • Redacted/Cut-up books: Phillips, A Humument; Safran Foer, The Tree of Codes
  • Artists’ books
  • Field trip

Learning objectives

By the end of the module, you will be able to:

  • analyse books as material objects, identifying their component parts, formal constraints and possibilities, as well as variations and transgressions, under specific conditions of cultural production in changing media ecologies
  • reconstruct practices of book production, reading, alteration, and their afterlives in different communities, times, places, modes of circulation
  • identify the conceptual framework informing a book practice, and relate it to a range of discursive practices and theories
  • write a critique of a book practice.