Section
Print/Screen
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Victorian Materialisms, Crip Realities
Raised-text print in the 19th century transformed literacy, reading practices, media representations of blindness, medical and journalistic discourse, and, most importantly, the everyday lives of blind people.
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The Material Life of Criticism
Three new histories of literary study draw attention to the critic’s material life. Literary Criticism: A Concise Political History, by Joseph North, Paraliterary …
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Reading as Inoculation
Filmmaker and artist Cauleen Smith has a few books to recommend. Her Human_3.0 Reading List, on exhibit at the Art Institute of Chicago through October 29, contains 57 drawings …
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Is Handwriting History?
Have you got a pen? My answer to such a question, following some clumsy digging in my backpack, is increasingly no. Sometimes, embarrassment giving way to defensiveness, I wonder why anyone bothers to ask. For years an “e-signature” has sufficed for my letters of recommendation; it’s months since I wrote a check. Presented with a…
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When Books Had Chains, and Pages Were Illuminated
In a side room of the Boston College site of the three-part exhibition Beyond Words: Illuminated Manuscripts in Boston Collections …
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Audio Companions
Some years back, the cultural critic Stephen Metcalf noted, in a smart review of a new essay collection by David Sedaris, that we turn to radio for companionship. Companionship might appear to be …
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Books after the Death of the Book
Last summer I decided to assign Ted Chiang’s The Lifecycle of Software Objects in the graduate course I was getting ready to teach. The title …
