Description
Book SynopsisOffers a status report and theoretically nuanced update on the traditions and medium of the book. This study highlights some of the most radical experiments in the book's history as trials in what the author terms the 'Prevailing Operating System' at play within the fields of knowledge, art, critique, and science.
Trade ReviewA splendid addition to the now long list of Professor Sussman’s admirable books.
---—J. Hillis Miller, University of California, IrvineHenry Sussman is an incisive, original, and thought-provoking scholar. As Around the Book: Kafka, Benjamin, Derrida eloquently demonstrates, he apprehends sensitively the extent to which Kafka, Benjamin and Derrida are exemplary readers of the detail and all its uncanny contiguities and pulses, and engages in taking his reader on a detailed tour of various texts pertaining to the identity of the book, and what it means to think about books, to reflect on their ontological status, and to get up close and personal with textual materiality. Sussman's book about books is not only refreshing, rigorous, marvellously original, it is also quite undeniably necessary.
---—Julian Wolfreys, Loughborough UniversityEven the capacious orbit of the title Around the Book does spare justice to the wild epicycles by which the author’s reflections rim the limits of critical writing and the book form, from deconstruction to Chinese medicine, surrealism to systems theory, Kafka to the graphic novel. If Benjamin’s Arcades Project is a “vast print-medium website,” then Sussman’s own heady scroll through contemporary cultural registers plunges him with vertiginous learning from one cognitive “platform” and “standard operating system” to another--all in a rapt defense, in this his tenth venturesome book, of analytic “noise” in the theory systems of our new millennium.
---—Garrett Stewart, University of Iowa
