Karen Schiff

iLiterature and Digital Technologies ii [On the other side of this page, the title of this book is written twice: once in English and once in a digital punchcard code. This code was used by library systems to keep track of circulation in the time before laser beams could read zebra stripes. The editor created the words by cobbling together letters from selected punchcards. Hundreds of cards were gathered by two circulation workers at the Clemson Uni-versity Library: former library technical assistant Jan Healy and night supervisor Audrey Scull. Many thanks to them for their patient and voluminous collecting ac-tivities. They found the cards during the checkout process, still lodged in their paper pockets in the backs of old books. The cards indicate data such as author, title, call number, and library acquisition number. Each letter or number in the “writing ” has a two-hole code, and each blank space is indicated by a “digit ” of one hole. The code proceeds from left to right.—KS] ...

This paper proposes that Picasso's landmark 1907 painting, Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, is full of images of books and pages, especially at the borders of the canvas. The curving shapes which are traditionally seen as "curtains" can alternatively be interpreted as the white pages and brown paper wrappers of open books, rotated 90 degrees. This "visual marginalia" supports the interpretation of Picasso's famous brothel scene as a semiotic construction, befitting the painting's early title (devised by Picasso's writer friends), "The Philosophical Brothel". The painting also contains iconographic representations of textuality. A slightly open book can be perceived in the middle of the painting, and along the bottom border, an open envelope and writing paper can be seen laid atop the tipped-up table, under the fruit. I claim that Picasso's images of texts derive from his acquaintance with the text-driven, monumental novel, Don Quixote. I give special attention to the narrative Author's Preface to the Spanish literary classic, in which the author describes assembling quotations from diverse sources to compose the first and last pages of his book. Picasso visually represents this allusion by depicting pages at the left and right "ends" of his canvas. Other texts and images are considered as sources for the bibliographic imagery, which generally reframes this canvas as a fictive tissue of quotations, akin to the overabundance of texts that Don Quixote is reading in Cervantes's novel. Picasso's painted image of a blank leaf of writing paper and its envelope, finally, encourages viewers to see the painting as a letter of communication, for which we ourselves must provide the writing that would represent our interpretations.

In the age of the novel, we read fiction sequentially and unselfconsciously. This practice requires us to ignore the materiality and appearance of books, for these factors disrupt narrative absorption. "The Look of the Book" explores specific books from England and America whose visual and material characteristics resist and redefine habitual experiences of reading prose. These specimens connect word and image in the book format, and they therefore resist the theories of critics since Gotthold Lessing that have separated visual and verbal modes.

Lessing's contemporary, Laurence Sterne, uses visual elements in Tristram Shandy (1760–67) to digress from the reading sequence while furthering the overall narrative. Sterne's techniques also establish a taxonomy of the book's constituent variables. In the twentieth century, as bookmaking technologies became more widely accessible, a printing renaissance brought artists into book design. Vanessa Bell creates images and designs page layouts to amplify her sister Virginia Woolf's ekphrastic fiction in the third "decorated" edition of Woolf's Kew Gardens (Hogarth Press, 1927). The illustrations change the pace of reading by integrating word, image and book structure. In Tom Phillips' A Humument: A Treated Victorian Novel and Sheherezade: A Flip Book, by artist Janet Zweig and author Holly Anderson, words are inseparable from the visual layout of the page, and the resulting written texts create temporally fractured narratives. These postmodern artists' books show that narrative fiction and the physical novel are both malleable structures.

In all of these works, the "book composer," who masterminds the visual arrangement of the text, influences the reading experience in ways that have not been explored in the context of literary criticism. As predictions about the 'death of the book' circulate in the academy and popular media, this dissertation suggests that books can make available complex modes of reading that we generally do not expect from novels. This interdisciplinary approach is essential at a time when images pervade the cultural context and are being integrated more thoroughly into print media.