Around the Book: Systems and Literacy - Hardcover

Even the capacious orbit of the title Around the Book does spare justice to the wild epicycles by which the author's reflections rim the limits of critical writing and the book form, from deconstruction to Chinese medicine, surrealism to systems theory, Kafka to the graphic novel. If Benjamin's Arcades Project is a "vast print-medium website," then Sussman's own heady scroll through contemporary cultural registers plunges him with vertiginous learning from one cognitive "platform" and "standard operating system" to another--all in a rapt defense, in this his tenth venturesome book, of analytic "noise" in the theory systems of our new millennium. -- -Garrett Stewart * University of Iowa * Henry Sussman is an incisive, original, and thought-provoking scholar. As Around the Book: Kafka, Benjamin, Derrida eloquently demonstrates, he apprehends sensitively the extent to which Kafka, Benjamin and Derrida are exemplary readers of the detail and all its uncanny contiguities and pulses, and engages in taking his reader on a detailed tour of various texts pertaining to the identity of the book, and what it means to think about books, to reflect on their ontological status, and to get up close and personal with textual materiality. Sussman's book about books is not only refreshing, rigorous, marvellously original, it is also quite undeniably necessary. -- -Julian Wolfreys * Loughborough University * A splendid addition to the now long list of Professor Sussman's admirable books. -- -J. Hillis Miller * University of California, Irvine *

Amid radical transformation and rapid mutation in the nature, transmission, and deployment of information and communications, Around the Book offers a status report and theoretically nuanced update on the traditions and medium of the book. What, it asks, are the book's current prospects? The study highlights the most radical experiments in the book's history as trials in what the author terms the "Prevailing Operating System" at play within the fields of knowledge, art, critique, and science. The investigations of modern systems theory, as exemplified by Gregory Bateson, Anthony Wilden, and Niklas Luhmann, turn out to be inseparable from theoretically astute inquiry into the nature of the book. Sussman's primary examples of such radical experiments with the history of the book are Sei Shonagon's Pillow Book (both the text and Peter Greenaway's screen adaptation), Stephane Mallarme's "Un coup de des," Walter Benjamin's Arcades Project, Jacques Derrida's Glas, Maurice Blanchot's Death Sentence, and Franz Kafka's enduring legacy within the world of the graphic novel. In the author's hands, close reading of these and related works renders definitive proof of the book's persistence and vitality. The book medium, with its inbuilt format and program, continues, he argues, to supply the tablet or screen for cultural notation. The perennial crisis in which the book seems to languish is in fact an occasion for readers to realize fully their role as textual producers, to experience the full range of liberty in expression and articulation embedded in the irreducibly bookish process of textual display.