The goal of this session is to offer a range of critical perspectives on the role of contemporary experimental books in our theorization of the book and the novel for the present and future. Rather than relegate such works to the margins of the avant-garde, this panel argues to reposition such experimental books as central to our conception of the book form in the twenty-first century.
Though the inclusion of materially experimental books into the purview of contemporary literature scholarship is relatively new, this panel builds on a rich foundation of existing research and inquiry. Relevant publications include Amaranth Borsuk’s acclaimed The Book (MIT, 2018), Jessica Pressman’s oft-cited “The Aesthetic of Bookishness in Twenty-First-Century Literature” (Michigan Quarterly 48.4, 2009), Katherine N. Hayles Writing Machines (MIT, 2002), J. Yellowlees Douglas’s The End of Books—Books Without End? (Michigan, 2000), Espen J. Aarseth’s Cybertext: Perspectives on Ergodic Literature (JHU, 1997), and others.
Notably, a number of recent symposia around the country have been dedicated to the subject as well. These events include Strange Books hosted by Alan Liu and Alanna Bartolini at UC Santa Barbara in February 2019, as well as Unnam’d Forms: Perspectives on the Post-Digital Book hosted by BookLab and Comparative Literature at the University of Maryland, also in February 2019. Our panel hopes to continue and bring these important discussions to MLA in 2020.
With breadth as important to our topic as depth, our panel includes four presenters on four different books all from different historical, cultural, and artistic traditions. Presenters will be strictly limited to short papers of 12-15 minutes each to ensure adequate time for questions and discussion.
Paul Benzon will begin our panel with an example of how the artist’s book tradition can serve as a contemporary vehicle for deformative critique on classic texts. In “Notes on Notes on Notes: Glenn Ligon Reads James Baldwin,” Benzon considers how the book can speak materially to the history of race in America through artist Glenn Ligon’s Untitled 2016 series that includes augmented and deformed pages from “Stranger in the Village,” an essay from James Baldwin’s seminal 1955 Notes of a Native Son. Benzon argues that Untitled engages with the function and dysfunction of the codex form in ways that imagine a specifically African-American aesthetics of the book. Ultimately, Lignon’s work imagines the book as a site for storing, tracing, and excavating a material history of African-American identity.
Priya Wadhera builds on the idea of book-as-material-history through an examination of French experimental writer Georges Perec’s 1969 novel La Disparition (“The Disappearance”). The novel itself is a lipogram in “e,” meaning the novel is written entirely with words that do not use the letter “e,” the most frequently used letter in the French language. Wadhera argues that Perec’s artificial constraint of negation is a material-literary production of loss and absence, in regards to his own parents’ deaths, as well as the deaths of millions of others, in World War II and the Holocaust. The reader feels the constraint of negation as well, in a visceral discomfort and struggle with language that does not have all of its parts. The “badness” of the writing—the violent excision of the French language’s most used letter—shadows the unspeakable evils of the Nazis in this period of world history.
Sharon Tran explores another aspect of badness in a book that repeatedly calls attention to its failure to become a novel in a paper titled “Debilitated Forms and Forms of Debility.” British-Indian writer Bhanu Kapil’s 2015 Ban en Banlieue concerns a character, Ban, lying down to die during the 1979 Southall race riots in London. Tran recognizes that, as a narrative project searching for alternative forms, Ban en Banlieue itselfis written as an act of “lying down,” a refutation of the literary convention of turning trauma and violence into coherence and productivity. As a book, Ban en Banlieue presents as a fragmented collection of vignettes, performance notes, and paratext, and Tran argues this presentation reclaims the act of “lying down” as a powerful political-aesthetic gesture of solidarity.
Bradley Fest concludes our examination of experimental book forms with a work that pushes the human scale of the book and the novel to their breaking points. In “The Space of Megatexts,” Fest presents Mark Leach’s 2008 (2nd ed., 2013) Marienbad My Love, the world’s longest novel at seventeen million words across seventeen volumes printed in dense eight-point font. Though virtually unreadable at this scale, Fest argues that Marienbad My Love is a provocative push against the traditional conceptual, temporal, and physical boundaries of the contemporary codex novel. Such a provocation forces readers to reconsider the basic acts of reading and writing in the digital age, and to reflect on the future of literary writing and book production.
These papers all incorporate a recognition of the material production of the book form in understanding their literary subjects. As evidenced in these studies, deviation from standard book forms can provide authors and artists with a powerful platform for cultural critique. Perhaps most notably, the sheer range of cross-cultural and historical application indicates the “bad book” to be an essential genre of our shared literary present and future. Such books are ultimately about us, about how we think about reading and writing and their place in the world, for now and for the future.