Book Histories and Futures: Literature in Times of Media Change

Catalog description

The book is a long-established symbol of knowledge and a vessel of literary culture, but the digital revolution has complicated its meaning. This course explores the book's current cultural status and its longer history, as both an object and expressive form. Students will chart the book’s evolution through both historical and theoretical accounts, and literary works that embody and thematically explore these changes. Students will primarily use the techniques of traditional literary analysis, but will also incorporate methods from related disciplines such as visual and new-media studies, narratology, digital humanities, and book studies to address the course’s formally diverse texts.