Journal article
Visualizing Books, Virtualizing Readers
The Yearbook of English Studies, Vol.45(1), pp.262-279
2015
DOI: 10.1353/yes.2015.0012
Abstract
Five centuries of painted reading are followed by five decades of conceptual book art — the latter departing from artisanal traditions of the so-called artist's book into simulated or appropriated codex sculpture, with craft transferred to concept. Yet these separate aesthetic timelines converge on the question of an emblemized if displaced legibility for the reading effect. Extending the author's previous studies, especially The Look of Reading: Book, Painting, Text (2007) and Bookwork: Medium to Object to Concept to Art (2011), the essay explores how the reader on canvas (her textual immersion inferred from pose alone) and the prevented reading of the illegible book sculpture (all ‘reading deferred to the interpretive act of the viewer) each serve to virtualize reading through plastic metaphors for its mental impact. Whereas painting projects the pictured book into a scenography of geometric doubles and framed recessions, the 3-D bookwork refashions the effaced or occluded page into spatial tropes for the built zone — or overt foreclosure — of textual experience. Each deflection tends, therefore, to demediate the legible by way of a transmedial relation now between eyed page and pictorial plane, now between deactivated codex volume and its volumetric refiguration in another material form.
Details
- Title: Subtitle
- Visualizing Books, Virtualizing Readers
- Creators
- Garrett Stewart
- Resource Type
- Journal article
- Publication Details
- The Yearbook of English Studies, Vol.45(1), pp.262-279
- DOI
- 10.1353/yes.2015.0012
- ISSN
- 2222-4289
- eISSN
- 2222-4289
- Language
- English
- Date published
- 2015
- Academic Unit
- Cinematic Arts; English
- Record Identifier
- 9984398847902771
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