A Review of Bookishness, by Jessica Pressman.
At this moment of post-digital culture (Cramer 2015), our feelings, attachments, and relationships with books often appear contradictory: we simultaneously hear and say “the death” and the revival of the book. While the rhetoric of death is filled with fear and hopelessness caused by the digital threat, to contend the revival invokes nostalgia and fetish for the book. The more we speak of the death of the book, the more we express our attachment to it. Although the relationship between the book and the digital is often told to be antagonistic or generational, the digital environment provides a new economic, cultural, and academic venue for books. Attending to this ironic proclamation, representation, and obsession with books, Jessica Pressman suggests that there is much to explore in this act of loving books in a digital age—even to the extent that we memorialize, fetishize, and aestheticize the book with/in digital media.
This online journal “electronic book review,” which networks us through the digital format of a book, also embodies and speaks to the revisit of the book in the post-digital era. Not only is its production and circulation rooted in the digital network, but it also serves as a digital archive where discussions about what it means to write, publish, produce knowledge, and create art in the digital environment take place (for instance Cramer 2012; Hosny 2023; Rustad 2012; Rettberg and Tabbi 2017). Along with those essays on electronic book review, we can see how Bookishness (Pressman 2020) examines this very relationship between “electronic” and “book” or in Pressman’s terms—“the digital” and “bookishness.” Putting the concept of bookishness at the center of her examination, Pressman demonstrates the way that our attachment to the book is not discontinued but rather reinvented in a digital age, making bookishness a potent technological and affective force actively shaping the digital culture.
With the concept of bookishness, Pressman urges us to realize how our post-digital world—the twenty-first century where digitality has become a condition of reading, purchasing, and sharing books—is full of “bookish” emblems that appeal to the physicality of books. Examples include “bookwork,” which is a genre of book-based sculpture, duvet covers featuring a canonical novel, “shelfies” showcasing bookshelves on social media, and iBook interface designs inspired by physical bookshelves. Investigating this diverse array of phenomena, bookishness encompasses “a complex constellation of technological, social, aesthetic, and affective forces that converge to present the book as an aesthetic artifact par excellence for our digital culture” (Pressman 2020, 21). Whether manifested as metaphors of shelter, a weapon, or the allure of kitsch and fetish objects, bookishness is a sensibility deeply embedded in and integral to digital culture. In response to the condition of digitality that compels us to renegotiate the thereness, privilege, and literariness—the very values that the book traditionally represented—bookishness emerges as nostalgia for the past, the future of the literary, and a critique of the digital present.
The emergence of bookishness is associated with and informed by power and politics, both historically and allegorically. Chapters 1 and 2, wherein Pressman situates bookishness with a critical perspective of class, race, and gender, address this issue of “the privilege of bookishness.” In the 1990s, the rhetoric of “the death of the book” proliferated, and the book continues to serve as an allegorical “shelter” against digital threats in novels. Within these narratives, bookishness works to translate social fears into aesthetic practices and allegorical tropes, the fear about threats to Western culture and power symbolized by the book. In this context, the book is a symbol of asserting mastery over the world, producing the liberal human subject, and claiming identities—even shown in the “shelfies” on social media as tools for self-fashioning and self-representation. Therefore, what “the death” fears and “the shelter” romanticizes is not print media or an act of reading per se, but signaling of the shifts in readership, literacy, authority, and class boundaries in the new media age. This leads to a question that resonates throughout the subsequent chapters: when the book becomes a locus of restoration, reconstitution, and reconnection, what exactly does it hope to recover? “Shelter for whom? … What privilege is presumed by bookishness?” (57)
While maintaining her focus on literature that depicts the book in distinct ways, Pressman also sheds light on bookish objects present in consumer culture ranging from souvenirs to fake books. Chapters 3 and 4 address the affective dimensions of bookishness, emphasizing books as aesthetic artifacts where their “thereness” matters. The book’s thereness lies at the core of the emotional force of bookishness, that is, the artifactuality that allows the feeling of nearness and identity formation. The fetishized book objects encountered in both literature and the marketplace emerge as cultural responses to the need to reinvent this “thereness.” Ironically, in an era where “real” books or bookshelves are subject to disappear and where digitization fundamentally questions the material nature of books, we find new ways to engage with the thereness of the book through its simulacra, fakery, and replica. In this scene, bookish souvenirs, fakes, and kitsch are not merely left over from the past heritage but the objects through which the digital operates, generating affective associations with literary culture and fostering bookish identity and community. As such, fake books and bookish kitsch enable our digital lives “in ways that fortify our bookish future by helping us transition to the digital without leaving book culture behind.” (108)
Returning to the close reading of literature in chapters 5 and 6, Pressman focuses on works that employ the book object as a weapon and a memorial. While doing so, her aim is to articulate the aesthetic of bookishness attuned to the bookish future of the literary. Here, envisioning the future becomes possible by turning back into our bookish past and present, memorializing bookishness and questioning digitality. While narratives in which the book serves as a powerful weapon against digital threats may seem similar to the allegory of the shelter, the way bookishness responds to the danger is rather to criticize the ideologies of digitality and to seek innovation in literature. Demonstrating the bodies, durability, and potentiality of the book medium, bookish aesthetics critique the notion of disembodied digital information and the dichotomy of the book and the digital. Likewise, when the book serves as a memorial, it fetishizes a cultural moment before digital ubiquity with an aesthetic of bookishness. This does not reject the digital, but rather shows how it can inspire literary innovation around a bookish sensibility. As such, through the aesthetic of bookishness, Pressman underscores that “we cannot think about our electronic future without contending its antecedent, the bookish past.”
While Pressman’s discussion is primarily drawn upon literary studies, her approach to the literary culture is also informed by a media perspective which she defines as considering “the relationships, networks, and infrastructure that constitute and connect” (20) objects and subjects. Covering a range of phenomena that include novels, artworks, hashtags, and e-book platforms, Pressman’s conception of bookishness extends the analytical scope to other fields of study. This makes bookishness a useful framework when investigating how the digital culture of knowledge, literature, and books relates to political implications with their affective circulation. For instance, as a reader interested in online feminist politics, I find myself asking how bookishness meets postfeminism both as a sensibility enacted in and through the media culture (Gill 2016). If what the postfeminist phenomenon signifies is “the aftermath of feminism” (McRobbie 2008) rather than its end, what bookishness presents similarly is not the death of the book but rather the reconstruction of bookish identities and culture. Both phenomena are intimately connected to neoliberalism and consumer culture, reflecting broader societal shifts.
An illustrative example of this intersection can be found in the trend of “popular feminist books” within the context of the Korean digital feminist movement that emerged around 2015. These essay books, written and read by young feminists, emerged as a kind of bookish object on social media, enabling feelings of connectedness and nearness. The connectivity that the “return to the book” phenomenon in digital feminism represented was both belonging to the online community and linking the gap between online feminist discourse and everyday lives offline. Yet alongside these continuities in their content, these books also exposed discontinuities with the older feminist generations and established feminist knowledge (Kim 2017). Hence, such books were circulated as both “the shelter” and “the weapon” for young feminist subjects combating online misogyny and everyday sexism. Here, bookishness and postfeminist sensibilities converge in a way that invokes feelings of dis/continuities with the past and that suggests the contradictory potential of the politics. As such, bookishness offers analytical potential and critical insights to reflect on feminist knowledge within digital culture and contributes to broader discussions on knowledge production in a digital age. Not only would this be the future discussion of bookishness, but it also inspires much discussion at the intersections of affect, technology, aesthetics, and politics in our post-digital world.
Works Cited
- Cramer, Florian. 2012. “Post-Digital Writing.” Electronic Book Review, December. https://electronicbookreview.com/essay/post-digital-writing/.
- Cramer, Florian. 2015. “What Is ‘Post-Digital’?” In Postdigital Aesthetics, edited by David M. Berry and Michael Dieter, 12–26. London: Palgrave Macmillan UK. doi:10.1057/9781137437204_2.
- Gill, Rosalind. 2016. “Post-Postfeminism?: New Feminist Visibilities in Postfeminist Times.” Feminist Media Studies 16 (4): 610–30. doi:10.1080/14680777.2016.1193293.
- Hosny, Reham. 2023. “Classifying the Unclassifiable: Genres of Electronic Literature.” Electronic Book Review, September. doi:10.7273/KPT5-4P57.
- Kim, Joohee. 2017. “A Study on the Autodidacts’ Feminism and Present Status of Feminist Knowledge Culture: Focusing on New Feminist Books.” Journal of Korean Literary History (63): 351–379. https://www.dbpia.co.kr/Journal/articleDetail?nodeId=NODE10787450.
- McRobbie, Angela. 2009. The Aftermath of Feminism: Gender, Culture, and Social Change. Culture Representation and Identity Series. London: SAGE.
- Pressman, Jessica. 2020. Bookishness: Loving Books in a Digital Age. Literature Now. New York: Columbia University Press.
- Rettberg, Scott, and Tabbi, Joseph. 2017. “A Digital Publishing Model for Publication by Writers (for Writers).” Electronic Book Review, April. https://electronicbookreview.com/essay/a-digital-publishing-model-for-publication-by-writers-for-writers/.
- Rustad, Hans Kristian. 2012. “Can the Web Save the Book? A Reply to Curtis White’s The Latest Word.” Electronic Book Review, August. https://electronicbookreview.com/essay/can-the-web-save-the-book-a-reply-to-curtis-whites-the-latest-word/.