Technology of the Book Web Ring

By using the menu on the left, you can navigate this virtual discussion conducted by ENGL 696T: Technology of the Book during the spring semester of 2004. The class was led by Prof. Dino Felluga.

The course sought to understand how various changes in technologies of communication have transformed the very structure of human consciousness: from orality/literacy debates to the Gutenberg revolution to the industrial revolution of the nineteenth century to the digital and media technologies of the postmodern period. As a result, we examined a massive timeline over the course of the semester: 2,000 BCE to 2,000 CE. Our ultimate goal was to determine how our contemporary digital revolution has affected such traditional concepts as textuality, the archive, and the book. However, the contention of the course was that one cannot properly understand the changes occuring in the postmodern era without understanding the changes effected by past technologies of reproduction. The materiality of the text was thus interpreted in its most literal sense—fabric, pulp, film, pixel. The questions we asked speak directly to our own society of mass marketing, image dissemination, media advertising, and computer "literacy": What effect does the gradual diminution of the artisan's book into the pulp fiction of the paperback and finally into the flicker of a computer screen have on the literary artifact? To what extent do technological advancements manifest themselves in our cultural products? What role does literature play in postmodern society and what precisely should the function of literary criticism be in an age of computers and projection screens?

To see the original course syllabus, click on the Fra Lippo Lippi painting above right. You can find an image of the class below. Dino Felluga is in the very back. The six students on the next level (from left to right) are Martin Fashbaugh, Margaret Morris, Chris Berry, Charles Park, Kristi Embry, and Marc Santos; the four students on the next level are Sarah Johnson, Lucian Ghita, April Toadvine, and Neil Gill.