The Book Unbound

• Credit value: 30 credits at Level 7
• Tutor: Luisa Calè
• Assessment: a 5000-word essay (100%)

This module explores the book as a cultural form under changing conditions of technical reproducibility. The materialities of the book have come under increasing scrutiny in the wake of electronic media and the new archival storage possibilities heralded by digital culture. Against millenarian talk about the 'end of the book' as a support for the act of reading, this module discusses practices that resisted and reinvented the book's physical properties at earlier moments of technological change, from Romantic cultures of the book to their recreations in twentieth-century artists' books.

Efforts to resist the book as a commercial object published in identical multiples for an anonymous reading public often took the form of handcrafted interventions, which highlight the bibliographical codes that define the operations of the book as a support for reading. The architectures and archeologies of the page indicate its functioning as a site of sociability, collaborative authorship, and composite art: from the expanded extra-illustrated page to the crowded walls of words of William Blake's plates, the emergence of embossed books for the blind, and the overwrought margins of William Morris's Kelmscott Press compared to the fin-de-siècle aspiration for a 'book all margin; full of beautiful unwritten thoughts'.

Bound and unbound formats speak out the horizon of the book in changing cultures of reading and viewing. The boundaries and partitions of books become dynamic; books nest inside other books, disbound plates trace unpredictable lines of flight and crystallise in hybrid configurations that subvert stable notions of the book as a condition of possibility for the production and circulation of knowledge. Such hybrid forms assemble objects from different periods, challenge distinctions between scribal and print cultures, mechanical and autographic forms. They register the changing visual cultures of the book supplemented by watercolours, prints, and later photographs, and situate it in relation to the archive, the collection, and the gallery.

Rooting reading in concrete historical forms, this module opens up new ways of thinking about the composite arts of the book, its multisensorial aesthetics, and intermedial recreations.

Each session concentrates on a book practice that subverts, dismantles, or recreates the codex as an alternative to the commercial book, concentrating on Romantic books and their artistic recreations, including works by Walpole, Gray, Sterne, Blake, Dickens, Morris, Stevenson, artist books by Tom Phillips and John Baldessari, and books in boxes from Marc Saporta and BS Johnson to Chris Ware's graphic novel Building Stories.

By the end of the module, you will be able to:

• situate, historicise, and theorise books, their production, circulation, and consumption, c. 1750-2010
• analyse the materiality of the book as an object and of book practices under specific conditions of cultural production and across different media
• identify the conceptual framework informing an artist's book or other kinds of book practice
• reconstruct the 'lives' of a book across different audiences, times, places, modes of circulation.