Techno-Prosthetic Romantic FuturismThe Book is a MachineForget books. Forget literature. Forget Truth and Beauty. It ain't all ye need to know. The book is a machine. It's built more like a car than a statue. It's even mass-produced. All you teachers still teaching the Triumph of the Human Spirit in Keats--will you please remind your students what they already know: they paid good money for their Keatses--first at the registrar, then at the bookstore! [1] They should study him the way they would an automobile: with an eye to mechanisms of production and performance. Maybe the hipsters of the field today are the bibliographers, the history of the book geeks, the editophiles, the hermeneutophobes. [2] Notes1. Start by taking another look at Marjorie Levinson, Keats' Life of Allegory: the Origins of a Style (Oxford: Blackwell, 1988). 2. See Jerome McGann, A Critique of Modern Textual Criticism (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1983), or Joseph Viscomi, Blake and the Idea of the Book (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1993). Navigation |