Abstract
My current book manuscript explores a contemporary cultural phenomenon and aesthetic practice that I call „bookishness“, wherein, in the moment of the book’s foretold obsolescence due to digital technologies, we see the proliferation of creative acts that fetishize the book. From cellphone covers crafted to look like books to decorative pillows printed with beloved book covers, furniture made out of old books to earrings, rings,
and necklaces comprised of miniature books, from store windows that use old books as props to altered book sculptures exhibited in prestigious collections to novels about books as objects, books are everywhere. They are things to love, own, and fetishize… not just to read. Bookishness is about loving books in the digital age, but its formative years are the period of
this conference’s focus: 1980s-90s.
The emergence of the Web, changes in book publishing, political events and literary discourse propelled anxieties about literature (what Kathleen Fitzpatrick calls „the anxiety of obsolescence“) and the medium associated with it: the book. „Every generation rewrites the book’s epitaph; all that changes is the whodunit“, Leah Price reminds us. Yet, the particular epitaph that emerged in the 1990s, with the emergence of digital technoculture, laid the foundation for twenty-first century concerns about books, literature, and literariness—and its expression in bookishness.
In this talk, I trace bookishness back to this cultural, literary, and discursive period to understand the historical cornerstone that set the foundation for loving books at the end of the millennium.