Book Was There:
Reading in Electronic Times
Author: Andrew Piper
This book isn't a case for or against books. It isn't about old media or new media (or even new new media). It is an attempt to bring clarity to the seemingly endless debates today surrounding the future of our reading materials. It argues that we cannot think about the future of reading without contending with our bookish past. Only in patiently working through the entanglement of books and screens -- understanding their differences as well as their commonalities -- will we be able to understand how new technologies will, or will not, change old habits.
From medieval manuscript books to today's playable media and interactive urban fictions, from the scholar's study to the scene of bedtime reading, Book Was There takes readers on a journey of the rich and diverse ways that things have shaped how we read and thus how we think. It is about the intimate ways that we interact with our reading materials, how we hold them, look at them, navigate them, play with them, even where we read them. Reading isn't just a matter of our brains; it is an integral part of our lived experience. If debates about the future of the book often elicit visceral responses from readers, it is because of the way it belongs at such an intimate level to who we are.
Technology's Pulse:
Essays on Rhythm in German Modernism
Author: Michael Cowan
Modernity, as has often been observed, was fundamentally concerned with questions of temporality. The period around 1900, in particular, witnessed numerous efforts to define, discipline or 'liberate' temporal experience. Within this broader framework of thinking about temporality, 'rhythm' came to form the object of an intense and widespread preoccupation. Rhythmical research played a central role not only in the reconceptualisation of human physiology and labour in the late nineteenth century, but also in the emergence of a new leisure culture in the early twentieth. The book traces the ways in which notions of 'rhythm' were mobilised both to conceptualise modernity (narrate its origins and prescribe its directions) and, in particular, to forge a new understanding of temporal media that came to mark the mass-mediated experience of the 1920s: a conception of artistic media as mediators between the organic and the rational, the time of the body and that of the machine. Michael Cowan is Associate Professor of German and World Cinemas at McGill University. He is the author of Cult of the Will: Nervousness and German Modernity (2008), as well as several articles and collections on German literature, film, media and cultural history.
Dreaming in Books:
The Making of the Bibliographic Imagination in the Romantic Age
Author: Andrew Piper
This book is about the remarkable social investment that was made in books, both materially and imaginatively, at the turn of the nineteenth century across Europe and North America. As books streamed in ever greater numbers from publishing houses in London, New York, Paris, Stuttgart, and Berlin, romantic writing and romantic writers played a crucial role in facilitating readers’ adaptation to this increasingly international and overflowing bookish environment. Learning how to use and to want books did not simply occur through the technological, commercial, or legal conditions that made the growing proliferation of books possible. The making of such bibliographic fantasies was importantly a product of the symbolic operations contained within books as well.
Examining novels, critical and collected editions, gift books, translations, and illustrated books, as well as the communities who made them, Dreaming in Books tells a wide-ranging story of the book's many identities at the turn of the nineteenth century. In doing so, it shows how many of the most pressing modern communicative concerns are not unique to the digital age but emerged with a particular sense of urgency during the bookish upheavals of the romantic era. In revisiting the book’s rise through the prism of romantic literature, Dreaming in Books revises our assumptions about romanticism, the medium of the printed book, and, ultimately, the future of the book.
Cult of the Will:
Nervousness and German Modernity
Author: Michael Cowan
Cult of the Will is the first comprehensive study of modernity’s preoccupation with willpower. From Nietzsche’s “will to power” to the fantasy of a “triumph of the will” under Nazism, the will—its pathologies and potential cures—was a topic of urgent debates in European modernity.
In this study, Michael Cowan examines the emergence of “will therapy” and its impact on arts and culture in Germany after 1900. The book’s five chapters lead readers through cross sections of modern German cultural history, including not only literature and aesthetics but also self-help medicine, economics, body culture, and pedagogy. Modernity’s fixation on willpower helped prepare the way for fascism, but this trajectory is not Cowan’s main concern. His focus falls rather on more widespread “technologies of the self” and their role in the effort to reimagine agency for a modern subject caught up in increasingly complex systemic networks.
The Writings of Ulrike Meinhof
Ulrike Meinhof Edited by Karin Bauer
Preface by Elfriede Jelinek
Afterword by Bettina Röhl
Translated by Luise von Flotow
No other figure embodies revolutionary politics, radical chic, and the promises and failures of the New Left quite like Ulrike Meinhof (1934-76). In the 1960s, she was known in Europe as a journalist and public intellectual, leading an exciting life in Hamburg’s high society with her publisher husband and twin daughters. Ten years later, Meinhof gave up her bourgeois existence to form, with Andreas Baader and Gudrun Ensslin, the Red Army Faction (RAF). Also called the Baader-Meinhof Gang, the group was notorious for its politically motivated acts of violence, including bombings, kidnappings, bank robberies, and shootouts with police.
What impels someone to abandon middle-class privilege for the sake of revolution? Meinhof, who spent the 1960s writing a column for the popular leftist magazine konkret, began to see the world in increasingly stark terms: the United States was emerging as an unstoppable superpower and Germany appeared to be run by former Nazis. Never before translated into English, Meinhof’s 1960s columns published in konkret show a woman in transition, reflecting upon the major political events and social currents of her time. An essay by Karin Bauer contextualizes Meinhof’s writings and mesmerizing life story within the political developments of the German Left. Bauer also explores Meinhof’s afterlife and asks why Meinhof’s ghost still haunts us today.
A relentless critic of her mother and of the Left, author and journalist Bettina Röhl, one of Meinhof’s daughters, contributes an afterword that aims to tear down Meinhof’s iconic status. Noting the increasingly desperate tone of Meinhof’s writing, Nobel Prize Laureate Elfriede Jelinek reflects in her foreword on Germany’s missed opportunity to learn from Meinhof’s writings.