Monday, February 01, 2021
Discontinuous Reading
Peter Stallybrass, "Books and Scrolls: Navigating the Bible," in Jennifer Andersen and Elizabeth Sauer, edd., Books and Readers in Early Modern English: Material Studies (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001) pp. 42-79 (at 46-47):
Hat tip: Eric Thomson.
Newer› ‹Older
Only certain productively perverse uses of the book have transformed it back into a scroll, most notoriously "gripping" novels or "page-turners," where the teleological drive from page to page mitigates against dipping about or turning back (although not, in the case of the unbearable suspense of a mystery, from skipping forward to find out "whodunit"). When cultural critics nostalgically recall an imagined past in which readers unscrolled their books continuously from beginning to end, they are reversing the long history of the codex and the printed book as indexical forms. The novel has only been a brilliantly perverse interlude in the long history of discontinuous reading.Mitigates (transitive) looks like a mistake for militates (intransitive).
Hat tip: Eric Thomson.
