Author Archives: Avery Simone

Wonder Woman and the Power of the Page: An Analysis of Ms. Magazine’s First Cover

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“I will fight for those who cannot fight for themselves” (Wonder Woman 37:18). This declaration of promise has echoed across American public consciousness from the birth of the Wonder Woman comics to the character’s resurgence in the 2017 title film. More than a heroic tagline, this statement presents a broader necessity to advocate and intervene in uplifting marginalized groups who have faced historic and cultural exclusion. Books, magazines, and print media are deeply embedded sites of power that are never neutral and impact public consciousness. Who is able to hold space in these mediums and how their message becomes translated after moving through the publishing circuit comes a central force of shaping a society’s cultural awareness and narratives. While historically this power has resided within patriarchal control, Ms. magazine became the first modern magazine publication to hit newsstands in 1972. As the magazine broke through prior power structures to claim editorial authority for women and reimagine journalism as a possibility for feminist leadership, it disrupted male mediation of authorship and circulation and redefined the public perception of the contemporary woman to support the era’s feminist movement. By using the image of Wonder Woman on the inaugural cover of the first woman-ran publication, Ms. magazine heroizes deviations from the traditional male-dominated communications circuit to champion female leaders and narratives. This branding of the cover not only elevates female leadership, but reengineers the magazine as an opportune media for female control that grants active entry into the editorial sphere instead of passive participation. 

Founded in 1972 by Gloria Steinem with pioneering female journalists and editors, Ms. magazine was a revolutionary and daring publication for women’s rights and mass journalism. In an age of restricted women’s rights, limited protections for women, and a dominating culture of domesticity, Ms. launched as a one-shot sample funded by New York Magazine and sold out nationwide in eight days. Prior to Ms., women’s magazines were male-ran and reinforced female subordination as articles supported advertisers’ interests and these works presented as catalogues for women to befit desirability for the male gaze. With the feminist movement finding its legs again for the Second Wave emergence in the 1960s, Ms. stood as a spearhead for independence, as Steinem’s aim with her team was to translate the movement into a magazine accessible to the everyday woman afflicted with such struggles. As the publication’s all women team presented taboo topics like pornography, abortions, and sexual pleasure, “Ms. was the first national magazine to make feminist voices audible, feminist journalism tenable and a feminist worldview available to the public” (Ms.). In understanding the significance of Wonder Woman running into the feminist conversations via the cover, it is crucial to acknowledge this historical significance of Ms. breaking female silences that had been muted or obscured through traditional publishing and prior women’s magazines that did speak the truths of their lives. Whereas many of the founding women of Ms. had prior journalistic expertise, in their roles at male-controlled publications, they recall experiences of being viewed as professionally inept and directed by male editorial authority on how to write on women. Thus, by establishing this new female channel of where women are able to organize and amplify their political voice, they seize greater control of the communications circuit that Darton explains, “runs full cycle. It transmits messages, transforming them en route, as they pass from thought to writing to printed characters and back to thought again” (Darnton 67). As Darnton points to meaning not being fixed and it being both amassed and subject to altering at each stage of production, the creation of Ms. not only resulted in a new magazine, it allowed women to seize control of this cycle for the first time and restructure frameworks of representation. As such, women’s work was not presented with the approval of male authority and it became a continuous loop of female governance, a feat that Wonder Woman represents on behalf of all the female contributors.

With the depiction of Wonder Woman on the first cover, Ms. magazine utilizes a superheroine whose mythology valorizes the liberation of the oppressed and women to represent their founders’ mission of fearlessly asserting female power through the page. Though not the first female superhero, Wonder Woman’s creation in 1941 by psychologist, William Moulton, and artist, Harry G. Peter, for DC Comics was profound for being an independent titular character rather than a male counterpart with her own profound strength and magical capabilities. As Moulton believed in ushering in a “new type of woman” to correct issues he observed in his practice, “He proposed that Wonder Woman, a character sprung from a matriarchal utopia, might serve as an antidote to what he saw as the destructive and domineering practices of male politicians” (Smith). Mirroring the same frustrations, Ms. utilizes the symbolism of this superheroine and her origin stories of female empowerment as an emblem of structural resistance against the communications circuit and larger society that pushed women into secondary or background positions. With this selection of recognizable iconography for the first cover, Wonder Woman communicates the values Ms. and offers a point of entry through the image offering an invitation. This selection was especially crucial for the magazine’s founding as the publication was not yet established and readers may have been unfamiliar with feminist theory as a rising movement of the period. Thus, through the creation of a bridge between popular culture and feminist critique, Ms. utilizes the collective knowledge of Wonder Woman as a communication mechanism for the immediate establishment of women’s narratives, leadership, and power.

Although Wonder Woman’s costuming has been the subject of great debate over whether her limited clothing is truly empowering to women, in the context of Ms. magazine, her dress can be understood as intrinsically tied to American identity, connecting women to ideals of independence and liberation. Modeled after a pin-up girl in her conception, Peter described his collaboration with Moulton as “intended to represent a bold, independent, and strong female character” (De Daux 62). It is worth noting, however, that first iterations of Wonder Woman resulted from two men imagining how female embodiment of these traits appear. Still, the costume with its golden eagle, star-spangled shorts, and patriotic palette works as nationalist motifs that show women as civic participants in America’s founding values of democracy. Through this stance in the feminist struggle being a democratic pursuit instead of a fringe issue, Wonder Woman connects female liberation to being an American endeavor relevant to national identity. In considering how this fashion impacts feminist interpretation of Wonder Woman’s character, American feminist and historian, Jill Lepore, suggests, “Wonder Woman isn’t only an Amazonian princess with badass boots. She’s the missing link in a chain of events that begins with the woman suffrage campaigns of the 1910s” (Marcus 56). On the cover, rather than denying Wonder Woman her small leotard, Ms. acknowledges the dual possibilities of womanhood by combining her identities of a pin-up and suffragette to make her powerful both in her civic role and personal embodiment. Additionally, the depiction of Wonder Woman in Ms. allows her to keep her female figure with breasts but the cartoon line that runs down the center of her chest in the original cartoon to create cleavage is removed. This compromise allows for the preservation of femininity and reduces potential for sexualization by exemplifying beauty in agency and challenging the false dichotomy of appearance affecting capability. As Ms. does not reject popular imagery created by men but reclaims and redefines what femininity looks like from a feminist perspective, they redirect Darnton’s male-defined communications circuit to one of female governance. The cover of a work being a reader’s first entry point into the communications circuit of a work informs how this work should be engaged, thus, Wonder Woman on the cover visually announces female leadership. This representation reorients not only who may participate in the communications circuit, but who can lead it and how these channels can be transformed into spaces of sustained female power.

In continuing from who Wonder Woman is and how she appears as a woman in the context of Ms., it is important to zoom out and consider how she is depicted in the surrounding America that she serves. The scale of her body in this image is giant as she towers above the town and the civilians in the street look microscopic under her magnitude. Her presence as she runs forward is dominating and unable to be dismissed even with the chaos of the surrounding scene. Comic book historian, Tim Hanley interprets this scene:

She was a giant, striding forward, with half of her body in an average American street on the left and the other half in a Vietnam War scene on the right. The image suggested that Wonder Woman could be a force for good in both worlds; in one hand, she rescued a group of buildings with her golden lasso, and with her other hand she swatted a fighter plane out of the sky. (Hanley 172)

Taking in her size and this resulting ability to split-scene between America and the Vietnam War happening at the time of this publication, Wonder Woman reveals how women are present and larger than the expectations placed on them in the sociopolitical spheres they inhabit. This borderless imagery presents how female leadership is capable and relevant on all scales from domestic to global. The military, a male-dominated and often still sexist entity of power, has historically excluded female participation entirely or placed women in roles away from combat and leadership. As Wonder Woman, in this scene, has one hand in saving Americans with her golden lasso of truth and the other swatting a fighter jet out of the sky, she communicates the omnipresence of women and how their labor and efforts impact all areas of life. Additionally, with one foot extended backwards out of the scene and the other coming forward almost off of the page, Wonder Woman reveals how women have presence in the past and will have presence in the future as active agents in progress.

The visual excess of Wonder Woman in size, motion, and reach amidst the surrounding scene of chaos implies the crisis that has ensued from male dominance and reveals how a large female intervention is needed to fix society’s plaguing issues. This intentional forceful and forward movement mirrors that of Ms.’s entry into the male-dominated publishing industry and communications circuit. In this breakthrough, like how Wonder Woman is visible in this context as an active agent of change rather than a passive participant in the domestic, Ms. magazine argues for women as producers of meaning rather than subjects of male narratives. Like in Darnton’s communications circuit where power does not stem from participation but from production and circulation of messages in each stage of the process, Wonder Woman does not ask for entry into this scene, she dominates it and it reshapes around her. Likewise, in its initial creation, Ms. did not ask for inclusion in the preexisting editorial hierarchies, they made their own channels for women to control their messaging and participate in the media without preapproval. As Wonder Woman bounds onto the scene like Ms.’s imposition on newsstands produced and controlled by men, barriers of entry are lowered for women in publishing with female-made opportunities. Female leadership in this format is not supplemental, it is corrective. Carrying the American town in the lasso of truth, the magazine’s honest sharing of all facets of women’s lives results in saving society from one voice that has shown results of crisis rather than stability. This act of rescuing the female voice and through the magazine works to defeat structural violence that results from the distortion and silencing of marginalized voices by extending the presence of female publication practices into the lived public political consciousness.

Observing further the political circumstances of the cover, the release of this issue came at a time when women were organizing to gain political voice such as the National Organization of Women (NOW), New York Radical Women, and the Redstockings had emerged in the late 1960s. Across the top of the cover, in a bold red block reads, “Wonder Woman For President” as a direct call that is unmistakable and can not be misconstrued by interpretations of meaning. This proclamation situates Wonder Woman as a potential national leader, which, in part, was inspired by Shirley Chisholm making history as the first Black woman elected to Congress who was running for the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination at the time of Ms.’s first issue. As the city below has raised a sign calling for “Peace and Justice in ‘72,” the people in the street are not neutral to Wonder Woman’s presence as they raise her arms up to her as if celebrating her heroism. As this ask for peace and justice has not been achieved through the world being male-controlled, the society shows an openness and desire for societal intervention. The timing of this issue’s release also coincides with the Fourth of July, tightening the connection between Wonder Woman’s and American ideals of liberty and justice. With the cover’s imagery revealing a national need for new leadership for the betterment of American society, the imposition of Ms. offers its publication as a way forward and solution to previous issues of marginalization in the traditional communications circuit. Like Wonder Woman crashing into this comic scene, Ms.’s break into the public news cycle caught great media attention, showing the strength of this cover in functioning as symbolic and material advocacy of feminism. Therefore, feminist media and its production not only represents women’s experiences but it alters societal structures and has the capacity to shift political landscapes that fail those marginalized by power.

The appearance of Wonder Woman on the inaugural cover of the Ms. extends far beyond symbolic empowerment and has had lasting implications in public action and female publishing opportunities–a shift that Ms. defined and was the vanguard of. Shortly before the release of this first issue, DC Comics had revoked Wonder Woman’s superpowers which came as a great disappointment for Gloria Steinem who had been a fan of the character since her girlhood and was a prominent leader of the feminist movement at the time of this decision. With choosing Wonder Woman as the magazine’s cover and the issue featuring an essay on the heroine’s history and role to feminism, the magazine did significant work in initiating a lobbying for the restoration of the superheroine’s abilities which would occur a year after the publication’s release in 1973. In the time since the first cover, Ms. has continued to use Wonder Woman on the covers of their anniversary issues to represent female achievement and steady resilience shown by women actively producing, shaping, circulating, and correcting meaning as needed. Such successes of the magazine to accurately represent female narratives and interests and resist dilution speaks to the over fifty years of strength upheld by Ms. and the significance of woman-ran publishing. Through scholarship on feminist periodicals, the impact of works like Ms. can be understood as American Periodicals presents:

Contemporary feminist periodicals are important political and historical documents for much more than the textual traces they leave behind. (1) they examine the political commitments and practical impacts of often low-budget production; (2) they consider the capacity for periodical publishers, contributors, and readers to build and narrate communities both imagined and real; and (3) they integrate frequently forgotten and marginalized texts and narratives into feminist theories and ways that expand current understandings of the past.  (Jordan and Meagher 96)

Despite struggles with maintaining advertisers to contribute to the funding of the magazine and its liberal stances, Ms. has upheld its political commitments to feminism which has had modern-day impacts in publishing and the larger American society to view women as fully formed figures without male intervention. Additionally, while Ms. now has enough longevity that its early issues may be studied as archival models of feminist study and the history of female publishing, the magazine is not merely an archive. Considering how it is “much more than the textual traces they leave behind,” the existence of Ms. and female periodicals effectively perform feminism through halting the erasure of female stories and platforming the voices that tell them as foundational, not supplemental to history. Wonder Woman’s cover appearance enacts this practice both in the scene by centering women as necessary to all areas of society and politics, and off the page in the powerful ability of Ms. to provide entry to women in publishing and maintain Wonder Woman’s relevancy in pop culture. Taking Darnton’s framework of the communications circuit with the impacts outlined by Jordan and Meagher, the female construction of a feminist magazine reveals how meaning does not end with the finished production of a publication, rather it circulates out to readers and integrates into social consciousness. The Wonder Woman cover, in imagery and its story of conception and resulting impact, narrativizes this process of meaning’s mobilization and how magazines actively do the work of feminism more than just describing or reporting it. In seizing control of the publishing process, Ms. presents a pathway forward for feminism and female authorship from gendered oppression to liberation. In heroizing the departure from a traditionally patriarchal communications circuit to champion the female voice and leadership, Ms. magazine positions the magazine as a site of female media control with Wonder Woman representing this forward movement. By transforming this familiar icon on female strength that already preexisted in public consciousness, Ms. asserts that women can not only be subject to sociopolitical discourse, but have the ability to lead it. In reflecting on the magazine when it reached its fifth anniversary of production, Steinem reflected on its founding, “There was no national voice for those of us who had the radical idea that women are people” (Steinem). Speaking of her founding of Ms. due to large gaps in representation, Steinem reveals the urgent and ethical need she found in American media for women’s voices to be acknowledged as fully capable of speaking to women’s issues. Much like Wonder Woman’s promise to “fight for those who cannot fight for themselves,” Ms. carries Steinem’s mission as a commitment to collective structural advocacy when patriarchal entities limit or deny pathways to authorship, visibility, or accessibility. By insisting on a woman’s full humanity and dismantling the guise of marginalizing women’s voices as needed for marketability, Ms. did not place their content in an old circuit; it restructured the circuit to demolish the gatekeepers. As a young woman beginning my pursuits in the editorial industry, the legacy of Ms. to the ability of women to work in publishing makes my entry and work in the magazine space possible. Though the industry is still heavily gatekeep, Ms. has set the groundwork for magazines to be taken seriously as scholarly representations of female leadership and has women’s self-sufficiency to produce and represent their own work. By creating my own female-ran and feminist magazine, I have entered a lineage begun and made possible by Ms. that presents women as heroes of their own voices.

Works Cited 

“About Ms.” Ms. Magazine, Feminist Majority Foundation, https://msmagazine.com/about/

Darnton, Robert. “What Is the History of Books?” Daedalus, vol. 111, no. 3, 1982, pp. 65–83.

De Dauw, E. Hot Pants and Spandex Suits: Gender Representation in American Superhero Comic Books. Rutgers University Press, 2021.

Dear Ms.: A Revolution in Print. Directed by Salima Koroma and Alice Gu, HBO Documentary Films, 2025.

Jordan, Tessa, and Michelle Meagher. “Introduction: Feminist Periodical Studies.” American Periodicals, vol. 28, no. 2, 2018, pp. 93–104. JSTOR, https://www.jstor.org/stable/26528615. 

Marcus, Jaclyn. “Wonder Woman’s Costume as a Site for Feminist Debate.” Imaginations (Edmonton, Alberta), vol. 9, no. 2, 2018, pp. 55–65, https://doi.org/10.17742/IMAGE.FCM.9.2.6.

Smith, Philip. “Wonder Woman for President.” Feminist Media Histories, vol. 4, no. 3, 2018, pp. 227–43, https://doi.org/10.1525/fmh.2018.4.3.227.

Steinem, Gloria. “We Are Not Alone: 50 Years of Ms. Magazine.” Literary Hub, 20 Sept. 2023, https://lithub.com/we-are-not-alone-50-years-of-ms-magazine/Wonder Woman. Directed by Patty Jenkins, Warner Bros. Pictures, 2017.

Final Project Proposal

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For my final project, I plan to examine the undervaluing of women-made work as “lesser scholarship” due to categorization practices and its relegation within the domestic sphere. Historically, much of literary works made by women have been viewed as less technically refined and socially significant as public perception renders these works as “craft” rather than “art.” Such examples like scrapbooks, chapbooks, and women-made journals reveal how the creativity and intellect of female narratives have been excluded from the literary canon as this work was seen as amateur and of the private sphere. With the distinct character of these female voices as often intimate and communal, understanding the richness of their practices and multimodal forms of craft in publication is critical to understanding female authorship, visibility, and cultural contributions that have been barred by gatekeepers.

My project will be completed through a scholarly essay to thoroughly explore this topic and represent the aforementioned research in the most straightforward manner. I will begin by situating female authorship within historic contexts, tracing how the domestic sphere shaped the material form and cultural perspective of female work. With this foundation of women-made texts, I will then explore how such perceptions of women-led genres like journals and magazines are taken as less serious works; however, these publications are vital to literary culture, intersectional scholarship, and the circulation of the female voice. The examples I’d like to observe are journalistic works of the Modernist period as this era signified women assuming more dominant roles within publicly recognized works despite lack of critical acknowledgement and Ms. Magazine, a landmark feminist publication of the 20th century. Across different time periods, these works highlight women’s continued output of literature in journalistic forms which assert intellectual authority and build a communal voice despite being categorized outside of “serious scholarship.” The purpose of this paper will be to acknowledge the scholarship of women that falls outside of the normative canon and suggest a necessity to push the boundaries of what constitutes scholarship for inclusion of all voices through representation by their characteristic mediums.

As a creative portion of this project, I am considering including the new issue of the magazine that I am working on as I feel like this is a modern-day representation of the issues that I am presenting. I have personally edited all the writing within the magazine and designed the page layouts, but I’m not sure if this will be acceptable for submission as it was not made for the direct purpose of this project. Another creative element that I am considering is creating a scrapbook page and taking inspiration from Woman’s World in connecting the medium with my project’s message.

Thesis: By examining the historic roots of female literary scholarship and how such material forms of scrapbooks and chapbooks have been dismissed as “craft” due to confinement within the domestic sphere, this paper observes how historic cultural perceptions and oppression have perpetuated marginalization of later female-produced works. Thus, by acknowledging the significance of these formats as characteristic of female scholarship, the legitimacy of these multimodal formats is vital in correcting absences of women in the literary canon and understanding the representation of their “art” through their own craft which has been excluded by male-defined categories.

Annotated Bibliography

Baxandall, Rosalyn, and Linda Gordon, editors. Dear Sisters : Dispatches from the Women’s Liberation Movement. Basic Books, 2000.

Together, Baxandall and Gordon have compiled in their novel broadsides, cartoons, manifestos, and other forms of media that influenced the women’s liberation movement in the 1960s and 1970s. Included in this collection is Ms. Magazine which is analyzed by this source as an intellectual hub for female scholarship and gathering for the movement. By analyzing works by women for the betterment of women, this source analyzes the significant ties of medium and message in female scholarship and creates these various modes as worthy forms.

Black, Jennifer M. “Gender in the Academy: Recovering the Hidden History of Women’s Scholarship on Scrapbooks and Albums.” Material Culture, vol. 50, no. 2, 2018, pp. 38–52. JSTOR, https://www.jstor.org/stable/27034312. Accessed 15 Nov. 2025.

The article examines what is considered “high” and “low” forms of media and how such work created by men is professional while comparable work by women is deemed amateur. In this source, scrapbooks and albums are studied to argue that men have been hierarchically privileged in academia while women have been pushed to the margins. This source will demonstrate how the view of women’s work as inferior stems from issues of gender rather than medium of materials alone.

Gilbert, Sandra M., and Susan Gubar. The Madwoman in the Attic : The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination. Yale University Press, 1979, https://bac-lac.on.worldcat.org/oclc/421550916.

The Madwoman in the Attic is a foundational work in considering female literature as it acknowledges the “double bind” female authors are positioned within as they position themselves against the male literary canon while also needing to rely on it for scholarly acknowledgement. Key female authors including Mary Shelley, Charlotte Brontë, and Emily Brontë are cited for their works and the maddening they are placed in within the private sphere as the novel’s title suggests. Through characteristics of these female authors’ texts, Gilbert and Gubar point to female literature having distinct traditions outside of a male-defined literary tradition. This work is important to my research in critically acknowledging the hypocrisy in the vitality of female works despite dismissal. Gilbert and Gubar set the foundation for gendered cultural hierarchies dismissing all work by women because of creation by female and that this is not dictated as a result of medium selection.

Huyssen, Andreas. “Mass Culture as Woman: Modernism’s Other.” Media Studies: A Reader: Media Studies, 2019, pp. 124–37.

In considering mass culture, like magazines, Huyssen considers it to be gendered as feminine in the ways that it is devalued against modernist art. This gendering of mass culture is connected historically as genres like romance and drama are associated with women while modernist principles stand for autonomy and intellectual rigor. Despite women being key players in the Modernism movement, their lack of recognition reflects modernism’s roots in misogyny and elitism as illustrated by its fears of commodification into popular culture and falling outside of “true” art. Huyssen’s argument that modernism’s aesthetic can not be separated from gender politics helps illustrate the devaluation of women in production.

Jordan, Tessa, and Michelle Meagher. “Introduction: Feminist Periodical Studies.” American Periodicals, vol. 28, no. 2, 2018, pp. 93–104. JSTOR, https://www.jstor.org/stable/26528615. Accessed 15 Nov. 2025.

This article examines feminist periodicals through the lens of scholarship with the aim of examining how “print culture tell[s] us about feminism’s past(s), its present articulations, and its future aspirations” (Jordan and Meagher). In defining feminist print culture, this work includes zines, periodicals, feminist presses, scholarly periodicals, popular periodicals, textbooks, and blogs to understand how these sources expanded feminism politically and culturally. Utilizing this article will be beneficial in my examination of 20th and modern day female publications as sites of scholarship.

Marek, Jayne E. Women Editing Modernism: “Little” Magazines and Literary History. 1st ed., University Press of Kentucky, 1995. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt130jcxv. Accessed 15 Nov. 2025.

Women Editing Modernism: “Little” Magazines and Literary History acknowledges the work of women in the Modernist literary movement and the critical underexamination of their labor. Citing many female contributors and the “little” magazines they worked on, Marek gives credit to these women as being guiding hands in pushing key authors of this period, like Ezra Pound. This novel restores women’s editorial effort in literary history and challenges narratives of these women as “only” editors and not influential contributors to the movement, creativity, and history. In relation to my work, this source confirms the marginalization of women even in periodical culture due to gendered separations rather than effort. This reinforces my work to establish women as characteristic to the publications they work on in adding to what is culturally recognized as legitimate scholarship 

Rawle, Graham. Woman’s World : A Novel. First Counterpoint edition., Counterpoint, 2008.

Woman’s World is a mixed media novel as Rawle took 40,000 fragmented words sourced from women’s magazines to create a narrative which reflects on the female experience of fragmentation and how society views women. This work is a powerful piece as it legitimizes women magazines as the novel is constructed by such material and the subject of the novel, Norma, compares her life to these magazines that are said to be made for her. Woman’s World exemplifies why multimodal work by women deserves space within the canon as a form or scholarship that pushes creativity and women’s stories to combat the rigidity of genres that consequently marginalize.

Senchyne, Jonathan. The Intimacy of Paper in Early and Nineteenth-Century American Literature. University of Massachusetts Press, 2020.

Senchyne’s novel is the piece that inspired my research as I was interested in how women in the home produced writing. In his book, Senchyne looks at the earliest form of paper production and what materials groups who did not have access to paper would use to write. In relation to women, textile workers would weave cloth and housewives would save rags. This archival evidence contains work by many lesser-known figures, many of which were women, and sets forth a new perspective on literary periodization founded on materiality. In this look of paper, the page is seen as political in its relation to gender, labor, and race access.

Week 13: Unpacking

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Completing our final reading of the semester, I couldn’t help but reflect on the aspect of humanity that exists in the creation and keeping of books. In Walter Benjamin’s reflection of books and the collecting of them in “Unpacking my Library,” he also alludes to the significance of owner to object and how books exist nostalgia and memory. This is described, “Every passion borders on the chaotic, but the collector’s passion borders on the chaos of memories” (Benjamin 60). By situating the collection in memory, it becomes not a place for accumulation, but rooted in emotional engagement with the past. Though from a scholarly perspective the archive is often revered as a site of self, personal collections extend this ideal to present these collections as a site of self- of the things we love, our fears, the stories we find self in, etc. 

Books have meaning because of the worth we give them. Benjamin shares this by wisely sharing the fate of a book lies with its owner which may give it a new life. Owning books, therefore, is not a passive experience as the significance of books is granted through personal contexts. 

The last time I visited home, I took notice of an old children’s book, The Town Mouse and the Country Mouse, residing on the counter of my family home. As my siblings and I are now all adults and there are no grandchildren in the family, I asked my mom why this had been taken out from wherever she stored books. To this, she told me that when she was babysitting a neighbor’s kid for the evening, she had read this book, the copy being an original print from her childhood and the same one that her mom read to her. As I watched guilt play out on her face, she told me the little girl she was watching had asked to keep the book but that she couldn’t part with it. At fifty is my mom often reading The Town Mouse and the Country Mouse? No, but her experience of emotional attachment towards this book and having a sentimentality towards keeping it in her collection illustrates Benjamin’s argument that books gain value through the person who owns them. To most, this book, worn and weathered, probably is worth nothing, but to my mom, that book connects her to her past and, thus, herself. This is the beauty of the “chaos of memories”– though cliche, one book owner trash is a collector’s treasure.

P.S. For anyone wondering, my mom bought the little girl her own copy of The Town Mouse and the Country Mouse to enjoy. Thus, a new collection was born and books live on.

Week 12: Bookishness

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Though I was unaware of the term to categorize my thoughts at the time, it was during my undergraduate years when I first began to recognize the phenomenon of bookishness when living with non-humanities students. As my roommate and I sat on the couch and finished the show, Daisy Jones & The Six, we went back and forth on how good the show was and wishing we could experience it for the first time again. Having read the book before it became a TV series adaptation, I offered her my copy to have the reading experience, to which she told me that she wasn’t “into books.” As she headed to her room, I took note of the decorative coffee table books stacked on her nightstand and the movie poster for Call Me By Your Name, another book to screen adaptation.

In a contemporary world sped up by the digital and self-proclaimed “nonreaders,” the book as an object may not carry the same prestige of its early days, but bookishness is alive and well. In reading the beginning of Bookishness: Loving Books in a Digital Age by our own Dr. Pressman, I took particular interest in the book as an active agent as it was described, “In this case, “bookishness” suggests an identity derived from a physical nearness to books, not just from the “reading” of them in the conventional sense. The ‘-ishness’ also indicates that objects rub off on us” (Pressman 10). As a culture, we are so deeply engrossed in storytelling and the book whether it be recreating it into visual formats, creating aesthetic objects inspired by it, or replicating it into digital formats. Though someone may not perform the action of reading, it is impossible to understand the full extent of how books have “rubbed off on us.” Whether it is of conscious choice, the book remains near to us whether through material object of the performance of cultural identity and aesthetic. I use my roommate as an example not to judge her personal commitments to literature, but to illuminate ways we experience bookishness in daily practice even if it’s on a subconscious level.

When we began this course, I had great anxiety that books were becoming obsolete. In the ways through which media has progressed in society, book usage dwindles in comparison to technology which most of us can not work, communicate, or leave our homes without. How greatly we rely on technology was just illuminated by the Amazon web browsers outage that prevented countless from work and school. Bookishness, however, gives me hope for the future of books as it has made me realize how deeply books are engrained in our culture that they will not die.

Week 11: Archives and Design

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As we observe digital literature and how humanists are generating work in an electronic age, it is critical to consider the impact of archiving and the possibility of preserving such works, or if these projects are truly ephemeral and exist only for the purpose of creation. From our Thursday class last week, I am still grappling with the concept of creating work for it not to be remembered or lasting as I support experimentation but feel disconnected from willingness to lose time and effort. This tension is inherently echoed in the archives themselves as without rules of what should be saved, it is hard even as scholars to understand what we deem as historically, culturally, and/or creatively worthy. While the digital is frequently glorified as being an answer to such questions as seen in the rise of digital archives, Bode and Osbourne reveal that with a new frontier comes new challenges. As such, “While digital archives and methods for reading them have enormous potential for book history, this trend presents its own challenges for reading the archival record. The emphasis that is sometimes placed on the ‘seemingly infinite’ potential of digital archives – including ‘unprecedented access to rare or inaccessible materials; comprehensiveness… [and] consolidation’-downplays the many aspects of our cultural heritage that are not being, or cannot be, translated to digital form” (Bode and Osbourne 233). Even through the most sophisticated digital methods and prestigious institutions, the digital can not save all aspects of human creativity for a variety of reasons. Through our time in Special Collections and bibliographic work, the experience of materiality can not be underscored to scholarship and understanding, which is lost in digital archives. Conversely, materials that were never physical, like electronic literature, can lose their ingenuity from their original creative process with the loss of certain technologies and features like Flash. The joint challenge of physical and digital preservations reveals the fragility of archiving that has always been inherit which helps me rationalize the ephemerality of digital humanities when I consider all the born-physical humanities creations that have already been lost.

Digital Literature

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In our analysis of what earns a given work the classification of “book,” I am unsure if I would consider digital literature the next evolution of the book or its own entity of scholarship entirely. A large part as to why I consider electronic literature separate from the book is due to its inability to fit print publication and the traditional book format, especially because it requires technology for the literature executed by user request. As Ted Nelson describes, hypertext is “a body of written or pictorial material interconnected in such a complex way that it could not conveniently be presented or represented on paper” (Ryan, Emerson, & Robertson 170). This observation by Nelson establishes a critical separation between traditional print and born-digital literature on the basis of material fixity and the necessity of user interaction. With hypertexts, users must engage with navigation and do not always receive the same stories based on their choices which defies the constraints of the page. When Nelson outlines the “inconvenience” of formatting hypertexts onto the page, this is not just a logistical issue but a conceptual one. 

From studying Patchwork Girl in Digital Humanities last semester and seeing how different table groups interpreted the work in the DH Center, it is clear that with hypertext reader interaction radically changes narrative structure. Without a linear structure or page numbers like the traditional book, Patchwork is meant to be lost in and disorienting as a part of the user experience. I would not consider this a goal of the traditional book, however, which emphasized a separation between print and literary work made explicitly by and for the digital. In this way, the purposes of the medium present themselves as books more typically transmit information while digital literature is a heavier experimental and creative pursuit. 

As a Books class, I still consider it important to study electronic literature to understand what a book is and what it is not. The purpose of this is not to solidify the category of “book” as an elite title with prerequisites, but to interrogate our understanding of what a book does and doesn’t. With our world moving into and already in an increasingly digital age, we must ask ourselves what counts as a book when we move away from the physical page? This is also vital to consider as we prepare for what our future of reading and writing behaviors will look like.

Week Nine: Methods of Studying Book

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As our study of books nears the modern, digital-age, it is necessary to recognize the challenges that come with what we consider media archaeology. As a field, media archaeology is hard to define as it has no founding institution or principles which scholars may refer to and the advent of today’s ever-evolving digital landscape furthers the ambiguity. 

A strength and a weakness to digital creation is accessibility and its ability to support experimentation by any scholars and creators who can access such technology. The digital democratizes media production and includes more voices in scholarly discourse, however, with a surplus on information comes voices falling into the margins. As highlighted in An Archaeology of Media Archaeology, Huhtamo and Parikka present, “Media archaeologists have concluded that widely endorsed accounts of contemporary media culture and media histories alike often tell only selected parts of the story, and not necessarily correct and relevant parts. Much has been left by the roadside out of negligence or ideological bias” (3). While media archaeology aims to uncover media history that dominant narratives overlook, Huhtamo and Parikka warn against “widely endorsed accounts” as being notable but not neutral. Though such certain aspects of media culture may be widely accepted, they “often tell only selected parts of the story” with what is “selected” being a site of politics and power. What is “correct and relevant” will always be subjective, but it points to exclusion occurring in media archaeology though the discipline having best interests in preservation of varying backgrounds and perspectives. 

In the digital age, accessibility presents an illusion of inclusivity as algorithms and platforming of certain voices make it impossible for all to be heard. While conversations of AI replacing human creativity is ever prevalent today, as a scholar I feel more concerned about what information and narratives are already lost. I will be interested as we move forward into experimental and digital literature to know more about who are the creators behind the archives we observe and if their backgrounds are different than those of traditional literature.

Extra Credit: Searching the Stacks

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Prior to our class, I had never stopped to consider that I did not know how to physically go and find a book in the library. I reflect back on the entirety of my education and realize that at no point was this system taught to me as I’ve been educated in a digital age. When asked to look at the call number in Special Collections, I recognized the significance of this number to find a book in the library system, however, without the help of a librarian, I did not think that I could find the book myself. For this reason, I felt it was important for me as a scholar to learn how to use the librarian and understand the experience of trying to find a source through physical means and not the digital I have been accustomed to.

I decided I wanted to try to find Her Body and Other Parties by Carmen Maria Machado as I am currently working on writing a paper about this novel and still need sources to support my thesis. To begin this process, I first went on the library’s website to find where the book could be found, which I now recognize is a privilege in granting me a starting point. The library’s website was very convenient as it gave me a map to follow on the fourth floor.

Once I made it to the fourth floor, I began looking for the section “PS” as the book’s call number listed and subsequently section “3613”. This was not particularly challenging, moreso, it just took time for me to find the correct stack as I am not familiar with the library.

The most tedious part of this process was once I found the correct stack was scanning the shelves for the correct book and call number. To fit on the books’ spines, the call numbers were very small, which took a close eye, but I did ultimately find the book I needed and another book by Machado next to it which was a helpful find.

This process made me have a greater appreciation for easy access to digital libraries, though it gave me greater confidence in my research abilities if I need to access a physical source of information. Due to being more accustomed with the digital library than the physical one, I took note of my discomfort in having to find a source myself without a search engine to assist me, however, it was important to me to know I could achieve this task through a learning mindset and without asking for help. Though it would have been easier to find the book online, this physical experience of taking myself to the library, walking through the aisles, and searching for information forced me to be more engaged with research and critically think about what information I needed to know to find what I needed, like the call number. In today’s age of access to information being such a quick process due to technology, this act of slowing down made me reflect on intentionality with research and form greater academic self-reliance.

Book as Interface

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In considering books as an interface, it is important to recognize the parts of this humanitarian whole and understand the material that allows for information transmittal– paper. As paper has shifted form and composition across cultures, its significance in transmitting ideas and sharing ideas remains unwavering yet flexible in its strength to sustain changing messages and mediums. One aspect I have been interested in over the past few Special Collections labs is marginalia and later additions to books that were not present in the work’s initial printing. As the blank spaces on the page allows for marginalia to be added, it allows for insights outside of the author to be contributed and conversations are fostered with the original work produced. As Bonnie Mak describes, “these patterns remain fluid as readers-cum-designers marked up their pages as they were inclined. Thus revised and augmented by different hands over time, the page emerges as evidence of its own production, performance, and consumption. The markings on the page are part of the ‘cultural residue’ left by a battery of authors, scribes, artists, booksellers, book owners, and readers, and can be read as a compelling narrative about the social history of thought,” (15). As readers add marginalia and mark up pages, they join the act of creating through their contributions rather than remaining in a state of passive consumption. With these additions, readers reshape and add new contexts to a given work, making the page a living artifact, as Mak points, “the page emerges as evidence of its own production, performance, and consumption”. Through the many hands it reaches, the page continues to “perform” its production duties of transmitting information, yet it also “performs” the thoughts of its readers as they go through the consumption process that is reading. Such “cultural residue” suggests that the page may be continually expanded beyond its initial message to carry cultural and historical insights and contexts that add to the initial story at hand. Marginalia, thus, informs us of the page’s ability to represent many voices and keep record of differing “social history of thought” across time and cultures.