Kathleen Fitzpatrick gave an excellent talk on \u201cThe Future History of the Book\u201d on Monday, March 28th, to the UB English Department. Fitzpatrick delivered a wide-ranging and lucid examination of how we in the academy, as readers and scholars, use the various forms of the book available to us at present and often resist \u2013 perhaps reflexively \u2013 digital ones. Rather than another mournful decline-of-reading narrative, which she characterized as \u201chighly conservative,\u201d Fitzpatrick’s presentation was a reminder that the book is constructed, used, and valued according to the economic and social realities of its time, not a unitary object of knowledge entitled to privileged status. Yet neither did she lead a cheer for the digital; forms of both are historically contingent, and ought to be treated as such rather than naturalized. While she acknowledged that we use different reading practices to attend to print and digital books \u2013 the former via \u201cdeep attention\u201d (per N. Katherine Hayles), which we as academics tend to valorize, the latter \u201con the prowl,\u201d typically regarded as a lower or \u201cdegraded\u201d form of reading \u2013 her point was that enforcing a hierarchical relationship between the two gets in the way of a serious engagement with either. Any authority that a printed book might have has been, and continues to be, a matter of negotiation; Fitzpatrick argued eloquently that rather than shunning digital books, humanities scholars must engage consciously in those negotiations by which these new forms of text acquire meaning, utility, and cultural weight.<\/p>\n
Josh Flaccavento, PhD Student, UB English<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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