Summary
Derrida, a deconstructionist, speculates what a book will become in the future. We discussed that Derrida provides his definition of what a book is by telling us what it is not; books cannot exclusively be defined by systems of writing, technologies of printing, works, or supports (literally of what a book is made). He poses the question of how libraries will evolve to incorporate the new book. Libraries are all about storing and depositing; it is a place to immobilize. With digital media growing all the time, there will become less and less books to line the library shelves. He wonders what would be the use of the library without the physical book. Derrida terms the future of books as the "book to come," or "le livre a venir," which is a pun in French because it means both "the book to come" and "the future book." In dealing with the concept of the "book to come" we discussed how the iPad is remediating the book, yet, in order to keep the medium familiar, it mocks the format of the traditional book with media, such as sounds and videos of pages turning. The future of books in the traditional form must be non-linear. They will be impossible to read aloud because it would not read the same, like House of Leaves. These books will not be able to exist is another form, and in this way saves the traditional from and medium of the book. He eventually decides that the book is not in terrible danger, and neither is the library.
Word Count: 261
Passages
"This is in truth the question that we are being asked this evening. 'What about the book to come?' Will we continue for long to use the word library for a place that essentially no longer collects together a store of books?" (7)
Will there even be a use for libraries when tele-technologies take over the traditional book? There would be no use for a building in which to house books when there are no books to house. Derrida decides that, with the help of books like House of Leaves, the book as we know it will never become obsolete.
Key Terms
Metonymy: a figure of speech used in rhetoric in which a thing or concept is not called by its own name, but by the name of something intimately associated with that thing or concept.
Support: The physical materiality of the book; the physical thing itself
Comments (3)
Emily Burrell said
at 11:31 am on Apr 12, 2010
Here is a start. It is hard to only focus on class discussion when we wrote a summary of it ourselves...
Sydney Crawford said
at 11:58 am on Apr 12, 2010
K I did a bit more. Good start, I'd say!
Brian Croxall said
at 12:53 pm on Apr 23, 2010
You had a hard row to hoe with the assignment to write a summary of our discussion of Derrida, but you did an admirable job. You touch on his view of what a library has traditionally been for and the challenges that they are up against when books become interactive. It's worth noting in your discussion of the iPad that "remediating" the book is essentially the same thing as patterning it after the traditional format, including page turns. But the additions of the hypermediated aspects (sounds, for example, or the different apps that it runs) are the things that iPad offers in order to suggest that it's a more immediate experience than that which has been available to this point. Strangely, as Bolter and Grusin point out with rock concerts, the hypermediated folds into making something more immediate.
And Derrida is not saying that all books in the future must be non-linear. Rather, he's saying that it's only books like Mallarme's or HoL that provide a reason why texts cannot be converted into another medium. And it's not that the book or the library aren't in terrible danger; rather it's that the future they face will almost certainly provide some large shifts since the function of keeping things immobile disappears once things become digital.
You got the two key terms, but I was surprised to see only one passage used. And that passage's explanation doesn't necessarily correlate to what the passage actually says. It would have been interesting to see you include something about the history of the word "book," since we spent a fair amount of time there.
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