Reading Typographically by Geoffrey Turnovsky

Reading Typographically by Geoffrey Turnovsky

Anxieties about the fate of reading in the digital age reveal how deeply our views of the moral and intellectual benefits of reading are tied to print. These views take root in a conception of reading as an immersive activity, exemplified by the experience of "losing oneself in a book." Against the backdrop of digital distraction and fragmentation, such immersion leads readers to become more focused, collected, and empathetic.

How did we come to see the printed book as especially suited to deliver this experience? Print-based reading practices have historically included a wide range of modes, not least the disjointed scanning we associate today with electronic text. In the context of religious practice, literacy's benefits were presumed to lie in such random-access retrieval, facilitated by indexical tools like the numbering of Biblical chapters and verses. It was this didactic, hunt-and-peck reading that bound readers to communities.

Exploring key evolutions in print in 17th- and 18th-century France, from typeface, print runs, and format to punctuation and the editorial adaptation of manuscript and oral forms in print, this book argues that typographic developments upholding the transparency of the printed medium were decisive for the ascendancy of immersive reading as a dominant paradigm that shaped modern perspectives on reading and literacy.

"This book will shift discussions of the public sphere, imagined communities, and the role of the public intellectualIn the looming controversies surrounding AI in education, this book makes the case against fetishizing one historically specific kind of reading."
—George Hoffmann, University of Michigan
"This is a fascinating study. Reading Typographically is an important contribution to our histories of reading, and essential for students and historians of reading."
—Jennifer Richards, University of Cambridge
"This provocative and exciting book considers how typographical devices were used for erasing the perception of the materiality of the text and create an unmediated relationship between the reader and characters' voices or the writer's heart. Important and innovative."
—Roger Chartier, Collège de France

Geoffrey Turnovsky is Associate Professor of French at the University of Washington, Seattle. He is the author of The Literary Market: Authorship and Modernity in the Old Regime (2011).

SKU	Unavailable
ISBN 13	9781503637214
ISBN 10	1503637212
Title	Reading Typographically
Author	Geoffrey Turnovsky
Series	Stanford Text Technologies
Condition	Unavailable
Binding Type	Hardback
Publisher	Stanford University Press
Year published	2024-06-18
Number of pages	328
Cover note	Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.