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Lunch Lecture - Evanghelia Stead: The Flesh of the Book – the digital vs. the material turn

When Feb 12, 2015
from 01:15 PM to 02:00 PM
Where Albert-Ludwigs-Universität, Kollegiengebäude III, HS 3042
Contact Name
Contact Phone +49 (0)761 203-97398
Attendees öffentlich / open to all
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Program Lunch Lectures WS 2014/15

The Flesh of the Book – the digital vs. the material turn

Evanghelia Stead
EURIAS-Fellow, Comparative Literature & Book Studies
Université de Versailles Saint-Quentin-en Yvelines

What is reading? Do we read only with our eyes and mind? In The Flesh of the Book (PUPS, 2012), Evanghelia Stead argued that we read books with all five senses and looked at them as complex multidimensional cultural objects. Cultural studies have allowed us to approach books comprehensively, and have made space for increasing dialogue between disciplines, following Jerome MacGann’s «linguistic» and «bibliographic codes» of a text (The Textual Condition, 1991). More recently the development of book and periodical studies has been attributed to both the «materialist» and the «digital turn» (P. Brooker). However, do these work necessarily together or against each other? Does intense digitisation offer book and periodical samples to read and peruse with all five senses? Is not digitisation in fact re-mediation? Are we not rather confronted with a new reading paradigm?