18Book and Media Theory

Abstract

The year’s work in book/media theory witnessed a return to three fundamental questions about the ‘book’: 1. What Is a Book? 2. Who Is a Book? 3. Why Books? The first section of this chapter, ‘What Is a Book?’, presents a group of scholars who view the book as an object that continues to elude or deny the ways in which we have come to understand it. No other thinker makes this clearer than Jacques Derrida, whose high-theory approach to the ‘book’ was the focus of Juliet Fleming’s masterful Book Theory seminar at the Folger Shakespeare Library in November 2019. Taking a more literal approach to deconstructing the book, Book Parts, a multi-author volume edited by Dennis Duncan and Adam Smyth, breaks down the book into its anatomical components. The next section, ‘Who Is a Book?’, brings together scholars from various literary disciplines—John Durham Peters, Patricia Badir, and Jonathan Senchyne—who collectively demonstrate how the book is always more than just an object to read or handle; it teems with thought, life, minds, and bodies. The final section, ‘Why Books?’, explores the enduring purpose, meaning, and future of books in society. Leah Price’s public-facing work, What We Talk About When We Talk About Books, and Michaela Bronstein’s PMLA article on archiving in light of climate change, reckon with the truths about our own changing human condition that only thinking about books can lay bare.