ENGL 311H The Art of the Book in the Digital Age

The book’s role and significance within literary culture is being scrutinized today with an intensity unseen for five centuries. Nowhere is this questioning more acute, sophisticated, and nuanced than in the burgeoning field of the book arts, an umbrella term encompassing artists’ books, book sculpture, zines, and print-oriented forms of electronic poetry. This is an inherently collaborative and interdisciplinary field. Its practitioners skirt the thresholds between visual art and literature, technology and philosophy, producing uniquely bookish artifacts that defy easy categorization. These are artworks made not for the white walls of a gallery, but to be read and used; they are works of literature that engage the visual, tactile, and even olfactory senses. Difficult to reproduce in print editions or literary anthologies, they challenge our expectations of the codex as a platform for delivering and consuming textual information. Despite the diversity of the book arts, what brings these practices together is a shared interest in the potential of the book to model radical new forms of creativity, subjectivity, and political engagement. “if i can sing through my mouth with a book,” writes El Lissitzky in a treatise on book design, ”i can show myself in various guises.” Working directly with the Sloane Art Library’s extensive collection of artists’ books, this course will trace the book arts from their emergence as a semi-coherent set of avantgarde practices at the beginning of the twentieth century to their resurgence today with digital technologies. Because the book arts have not developed along a straightforward chronology, our route through time will not be linear. Rather, we will proceed by navigating the various social, political, and formal vectors that book artists have explored. Understanding how each artist situates her/himself along these vectors, and 2 what that placement can teach us about her/his aesthetic affiliations, will be the task of this course. When relevant, we will also be reading short stories, poems, and novels that address similar themes. By the end of the course, these vectors will together form a map detailing where the book has been, what it means to literary culture today, and the directions it is headed in the near future.