The Death of the Book: Modernist Novels and the Time of Reading

by John Lurz

Overview

An examination of the ways major novels by Marcel Proust, James Joyce, and Virginia Woolf draw attention to their embodiment in the object of the book, The Death of the Book considers how bookish format plays a role in some of the twentieth century's most famous literary experiments. Tracking the passing of time in which reading unfolds, these novels position the book's so-called death in terms that refer as much to a simple description of its future vis-à-vis other media forms as to the sense of finitude these books share with and transmit to their readers.

As he interrogates the affective, physical, and temporal valences of literature's own traditional format and mode of access, John Lurz shows how these novels stage intersections with the phenomenal world of their readers and develop a conception of literary experience not accounted for by either rigorously historicist or traditionally formalist accounts of the modernist period. Bringing together issues of media and mediation, book history, and modernist aesthetics, The Death of the Book offers a new and deeper understanding of the way we read now.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780823270972
Publisher:	Fordham University Press
Publication date:	07/01/2016
Pages:	216
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.10(h) x 0.70(d)

About the Author

John Lurz is Assistant Professor of English at Tufts University.

Table of Contents

Introduction: Opening the Book
Chapter 1. The Books of the Recherche
Chapter 2. The Reader of Ulysses
Chapter 3. The Dark Print of Finnegans Wake
Chapter 4. The Pages in Jacob's Room
Chapter 5. The Binding of The Waves
Coda: The Afterlives of Reading

Notes

Bibliography

Editorial Reviews

The Death of the Book begins the important work of paying attention to reading and the material text in the modernist canon, and is full of fascinating and rewarding close readings.

Modernist Cultures

Lurz's close readings cut new paths through dense texts.

Review of English Studies

...The Death of the Book makes a vital contribution to current debates about modernist print culture, offering a refreshingly formalist lens on conversations too often dominated by the material determinism of book history and media studies alike.

Modernism/Modernity

...the extraordinary intimacy and tenacity of Lurz's interpretive excavations is all any reader could hope for. By bringing these qualities to bear on the literary object as literal object, Lurz provides a book that modernist studies has been awaiting for a very long time.

Novel: A Forum on Fiction

John Lurz believes not only that favorite modernist texts by Proust, Joyce, and Woolf exhibit a powerful awareness of mortality and temporality at a watershed juncture in the development of diverse media technologies in the early twentieth century, but that their novels exude a powerful sense of their own structures and finitude. Because these authors correlate their characters’ mental and bodily attributes to the status of the book, Lurz detects a pervasive epochal obsession with death and with the material basis of the narrating and reading of books as objects—no matter how complex—in time.

Modern Philology

The Death of the Book is an admirably detailed and unfailingly subtle meditation of the novels of Proust, Joyce and Woolf, works in which the image of the open book or the act of reading figure the relationship between the life represented within the novel and the extra-literary life of its readers.

Maria DiBattista

In The Death of the Book, Lurz demonstrates serious intellectual agility, moving between his objects of study with complexity and aplomb. In this formalist-materialist account of modernism, readers are treated to a delightful set of close readings of key modernist texts that want to take the book-as-object seriously. Crisp and lucid in argumentation, The Death of the Book is a fascinating account of modernist materialism, arguing that, as critics, we need to go beyond thinking about how literature began to act like emergent technological forms and instead turn our attention to the sensuous object of the book itself.

Dana Seitler

"The Death of the Book is an admirably detailed and unfailingly subtle meditation of the novels of Proust, Joyce and Woolf, works in which the image of the open book or the act of reading figure the relationship between the life represented within the novel and the extra-literary life of its readers."—Maria DiBattista, Princeton University

"In The Death of the Book, Lurz demonstrates serious intellectual agility, moving between his objects of study with complexity and aplomb. In this formalist-materialist account of modernism, readers are treated to a delightful set of close readings of key modernist texts that want to take the book-as-object seriously. Crisp and lucid in argumentation, The Death of the Book is a fascinating account of modernist materialism, arguing that, as critics, we need to go beyond thinking about how literature began to act like emergent technological forms and instead turn our attention to the sensuous object of the book itself."—Dana Seitler, University of Toronto

From the Publisher