Around the Book

Amid radical transformation and rapid mutation in the nature, transmission, and deployment of information and communications, Around the Book offers a status report and theoretically nuanced update on the traditions and medium of the book. What, it asks, are the books current prospects? The study highlights the most radical experiments in the books history as trials in what the author terms the Prevailing Operating System at play within the fields of knowledge, art, critique, and science. The investigations of modern systems theory, as exemplified by Gregory Bateson, Anthony Wilden, and Niklas Luhmann, turn out to be inseparable from theoretically astute inquiry into the nature of the book. Sussmans primary examples of such radical experiments with the history of the book are Sei Shonagons Pillow Book (both the text and Peter Greenaways screen adaptation), Stphane Mallarms Un coup de ds, Walter Benjamins Arcades Project, Jacques Derridas Glas, Maurice Blanchots Death Sentence, and Franz Kafkas enduring legacy within the world of the graphic novel. In the authors hands, close reading of these and related works renders definitive proof of the books persistence and vitality. The book medium, with its inbuilt format and program, continues, he argues, to supply the tablet or screen for cultural notation. The perennial crisis in which the book seems to languish is in fact an occasion for readers to realize fully their role as textual producers, to experience the full range of liberty in expression and articulation embedded in the irreducibly bookish process of textual display.