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Abstract
The year's work in book/media theory witnessed a return to three fundamental questions about the 'book': 1. What Is a Book? 2. Who Is a Book? 3. Why Books? The first section of this chapter, 'What Is a Book?', presents a group of scholars who view the book as an object that continues to elude or deny the ways in which we have come to understand it. No other thinker makes this clearer than Jacques Derrida, whose high-theory approach to the 'book' was the focus of Juliet Fleming's masterful Book Theory seminar at the Folger Shakespeare Library in November 2019. Taking a more literal approach to deconstructing the book, Book Parts, a multi-author volume edited by Dennis Duncan and Adam Smyth, breaks down the book into its anatomical components. The next section, 'Who Is a Book?', brings together scholars from various literary disciplines—John Durham Peters, Patricia Badir, and Jonathan Senchyne—who collectively demonstrate how the book is always more than just an object to read or handle; it teems with thought, life, minds, and bodies. The final section, 'Why Books?', explores the enduring purpose, meaning, and future of books in society. Leah Price's public-facing work, What We Talk About When We Talk About Books, and Michaela Bronstein's PMLA article on archiving in light of climate change, reckon with the truths about our own changing human condition that only thinking about books can lay bare.

AbstractIn 2018, scholarship in book/media theory sketched the ways in which books embody time, shape our experience of time, and live in time. In particular, authors examine the book as a material object that resists being placed in a cohesive, progressive history (Whitney Trettien, Deidre Lynch, Michelle Sizemore, John Plotz), and that bends and textures linear temporality through the experience of reading (Christina Lupton). This review also discusses new theoretical discourses surrounding the material book, including new materialism (Jonathan Senchyne), the digital notion of 'interactivity' (The Multigraph Collective), and the concept of rarity (David McKitterick). Recurring through many of the works this year is a call to reconsider our definitions of the book and the archive, as scholars peer into the less well-known, cut-and-paste world of scrapbooks. This chapter is structured under the following headings: 1. The Time of Reading; 2. Books in Time; 3. Books in History; 4. Bookish Agencies.