A place to start

Lerer, Seth. “Epilogue: Falling Asleep over the History of the Book.” PMLA 121.1 (Jan 2006): 229–234.

I expected this to be a polemic against the New Boredom, but I was drastically mistaken. It’s a love-song to the printed book, placing the reader in a position of power “over” the physical object, rather than “in front of” a screen, discussing the impossibility of curling up with a computer or electronic reader. The only part of that disparity in inclination that Lerer does not discuss is the likelihood of damaging something by falling asleep on one’s electronic device (yourself or the device); instead he focuses on the aesthetic detractions of such a past time. For much of this article, he treats the importance of studies of the physical object itself lightly, instead focusing heavily on the importance of post-production human interaction with texts (readers, anthologizers, teachers), spending the largest percentage of the article on the makers and consumers of anthologies. While I realize the space of this epilogue is limited, and given its scope it is perforce breezy and not able to treat any specific element in depth, I wish he’d pushed a little harder on the question of why there is so close a connection between Book History studies and canonicity.

In contrast John Guillory’s argument that canons are not composed of individual works, but of assembled value sets that form a literary system, Lerer argues that the history of the book “itself may qualify the claim. Much speculation on the idea of the canon, and in fact much of literary history as a whole, still goes on as if literary works were somehow unbound to the physical objects that house them. Books are objects, though, and canonization is as much a process of se¬lecting space as of selecting value” (231-232). Setting aside the problem of prioritizing space as an issue and then, at the end of the article, dismissing electronic formats on purely aesthetic grounds, I’m not entirely sure that I fully buy the argument that canon-status follows purely from space issues. This seems most applicable to the study of anthologies from a specific period, say early to mid nineteenth century to the late twentieth.

Are questions of the study of Canonization and the study of Book History a chicken and an egg problem? Do scholars examine canonical works because we’re inherently interested in the material history of canonicity (and as a byproduct, reifying the canon), as Lerer explains the study of Anthologies (using, for his example, the 1950 Oxford Book of American Verse), or does the canon itself blind us to other positibilities? Does this focus on Canonical works amount to a teleological view of the history of the book? What about the Also Rans? What about failures? Are they too numerous to be interesting? Can a story be defined by the negative space around it – ie, a piece of canonical literature by its companions on the shelves, the medical books, the trashy ballads, the pious stories that no one reads anymore?

Or is it just that we focus on the current canon, or currently accepted deviations from it (non-canonical works by women, or subject peoples, or children, etc -- and those only at risk of being pidgeonholed), because that is what the Academy currently demands, and we would all like jobs at some point?