Category Archives: Week 16: Conclusion- What you learned this semester

Takeaway – Changing What a Book is

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What I took away from this class is that I didn’t understand how much the physicality of the book mattered until this class. I thought that the only thing that mattered to a book was its story and maybe the cover so I could judge whether I wanted to read it or not or whether I thought it was an accurate representation of the theme of the text. I didn’t know how much what materials that were used to make the book, or how the book influenced trends and the commodification of it, truly meant anything.

I’m glad I took this class because it really pushed me to think beyond what a book is and how it connects to the world and history around us. I thought the only connections I could make between past and present were the types of stories and characters presented. Now I know that there’s a plethora of connections through the type of ink, paper, layout of the book, and how a book can be used as an object for more than just reading. Books represent us through art, through dress, through legal systems. They all tell us different narratives about people all around the world now and before us. I learned that all books are narratives of who, how, and what made them. They all tell stories; I just needed to understand that stories can be told in different forms than just text. In this class, I was taught to crucially examine what was in front of me like I hadn’t done before. It taught me to be analytical and theoretical, I am able to now not look at books, but everything in a new perspective. I now ask, how and why, instead of what.

My New Perspective on Books

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This class has truly been a cornerstone in my education so far. Coming into my first ECL course, I wasn’t sure what to expect. I had always thought of books as simple vessels of knowledge, objects whose primary purpose was to deliver information from the author to the reader in a straightforward, linear way. Because of that, I initially felt skeptical about what more there was to say about “bookishness.” But after our first class session when we discussed, “Marginalia in the Library of Babel” by Mark Marino, where I was getting lost in the hyperlink marginalia, I knew this class was going to challenge me to think beyond the dominant norms of learning. This course opened an entirely new world for me, one that reshaped how I think about books, reading, and materiality.

I want to thank Dr. Pressman for guiding us through that shift in perspective. Her approach pushed me to think beyond the norms taught to us, especially regarding books as physical, cultural, and even ideological objects. For the first time, I found myself discussing course readings at the dinner table because they felt so thought-provoking and had me thinking about our course at all hours of the day. My dad even started reading The Book by Amaranth Borsuk after I wouldn’t stop talking about it

What I valued most was how each reading felt purposeful and built toward a larger understanding of bookishness as more than just “loving books.” I learned to see the book as an interface and a dynamic space where meaning isn’t just absorbed but actively co-created between reader and object. The material aspects of books that I once ignored, like binding, typography, cutouts, and format, now feel central to the stories they tell. A book isn’t just the text written on a page. it’s a historical artifact, a piece of art, and an archive of cultural practices and personal relationships. By the end of this course, I realized that reading is never passive. Every book invites an embodied interaction, and the form carries a narrative beyond the words. This class expanded my understanding of what literature can do and what books can be, and I’m incredibly grateful for how it challenged and transformed my thinking.

What Will Be Saved?

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I don’t have to live forever, and neither does my work. I don’t necessarily want most of my work to outlive me. Someone might save it, anyway.

I think, when I started writing with the intent to be published, some part of it was because I wanted to be known, remembered, maybe immortalized. When I first started writing as a kid, I don’t think I put much thought into whether my stories would survive the test of time. I did want to be famous, though. I wanted to be known by strangers. I wanted to change someone’s life. Maybe subconsciously I wanted to be remembered, but I wasn’t really thinking about what would happen after my death. I wanted to feel it all while I was still alive.

At some point, though, I started writing for the future. It stopped mattering whether I become well-known in this life. I began to write for future archivists, scholars, students, and writers (sometimes addressing them directly). I write so that my words can speak for me when I’m gone.

That vague maybe-future wasn’t my only reason for writing, though. I write for the people around me. I write for my friends and family who want to read my writing. I write for my fellow writers in the creative writing MFA. I write for my classmates, professors, and mentors. I write for the living writers whose work I adore. I write so that people might respond to my work, and I might get to read those responses.

Mostly, though, I have to write for me. I have to write to get these ideas out of my head and onto the page, because I’m the only one who can. That’s why I write hypertext and other e-lit. Hypertext is how my brain works. I use Twine/HTML because it allows me to make the whole book, not just the text inside it. Digital Humanities last semester gave me confidence that my hypertext could be considered literature. Now, BOOKS!! has given me the confidence that I am writing books when I write hypertext. Not just writing books, I’m following in a long line of bookmakers who use whatever technology is available to them in order to show their ideas to the world. I know much more about that history after taking this class.

In this class, we saw hundreds of books and other book-ish objects in the archives. We saw a whole collection of zines, which were made to be read immediately, by people in the zinester’s immediate vicinity, not necessarily to be saved for the future. My midterm project was on Typo Bilder Buch, a book with no intended purpose, printed on paper towels, a work of ephemerality, saved by the archive. One work from the additional class readings, Agrippa (A Book of the Dead), used computer code to convert an electronic poem into genetic code as it’s read. Over time, it would lose all meaning. However, archivists have preserved the work and its meaning for future readers. This is the power of archivists. Archivists can and will and do save these works, and other works like them.

We can all be archivists. We can all, in the spirit of Benjamin, cultivate a collection of these memory-storing objects we call books. My archive includes my favorite books from childhood, my favorite textbooks from undergrad, my favorite novels and collections of poetry and short stories and essays. It includes programs from readings that I’ve attended and where I have read my own work. It includes about a dozen notebooks which I’ve filled with story ideas, poetry, journals, drawings, and absolute nonsense. I saved it all for myself, not because I expect that someone else will want it someday. However, someone might try to save it. Same with hypertext. Maybe it will become obsolete, but someone might try to emulate or recreate it.

This is what this class has taught me. Once the book is published, neither the author nor the publisher gets to decide what happens to it. It may be loved, criticized, remembered, forgotten, uncovered, taken out of context, stolen, pirated, plagiarized, or archived. What I want saved will likely be lost, and what I want burned after my death will likely be the things people most want to save. A terrifying idea to some, but to me, it’s half the fun.

Remediated Thinking-Final Thoughts

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As a graduate student, this class has really opened my eyes to things I’ve never really even thought about. Despite working so closely with literature and books, I never once took a step back to see how books take on different forms and mediums. I now have a greater understanding and a broader perspective on what a book is, not just what I thought it was or what I was told it is. But to me, the thing that really struck me was the remediated fears. Questions that come up at the dawn of a new revolutionary age have already been asked and will continue to be asked.

I remember my first day when we were all asked what brought us to this class, and I remember answering that it was because I was scared of AI and where that direction in the future seemed to be taking us, which frightened me. From what I’ve seen and continue to see is how this new tool is almost like a Pandora’s box, and we really have no idea where it can go and how we use it, but learning that this fear was, in fact, not a new one at all, was almost shocking. And the fact that the book itself was also a sort of disruptor was even more shocking. That quote from Victor Hugo’s Notre Dame de Paris really struck me: “Ceci tuera cela.” “This will kill that,” and now I feel like I, too, stood there like Claude Frollo, realizing the death of something and the birth of something new. But that was before this class. Because we examined and questioned everything about the book as an object, interface, all different kinds of media, I feel more comfortable and optimistic, as this has happened before, and it led to a renaissance, industrialization, and political change, etc…In other words, the written word is integral to us, in whatever form it is delivered to us.

I now have a completely different understanding of a poetry book I read before and after this class. But during a chapter in Borsuk’s book, I was reminded of it and really excited to use it in my final project. I’m happy to have taken this class and that it had this impact on me. I don’t think I’ll ever see a book the same without deconstructing it.

Existential Questioning—Final Thoughts

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The main thing I’ve gained from this class is more questions—a deeper understanding yes—but also a profound perspective switch.

A sample of some questions I have yet to answer:

What should be archived? What is a book? How do I get out of Babel’s library? What is to be ‘trusted?’ What does trusted even mean? What does anything mean?

I will say, for sure, that I have a new appreciation when it comes to books as an artifact (and artifacts in general). I think this story will give an adequate example of what I learned in this class.

I was going through my grandpa’s safe with my mom the other day, and found my great-grandma’s stamp collection book. Now this is a hefty and thick book, and you want to know my first reaction, BECAUSE of THIS CLASS? It was to read its life story. I flipped through the dusty pages (which coated my fingers btw) to discover some interesting things. 1.) Some stamp spots had glue residue, indicating there were stamps there at one point (I told my mom, and she was like :how did you know that? I felt like Sherlock Holmes in that moment). 2.) I also gathered that most of the stamps collected were from the US, Australia, and Austria. 3.) Some of the stamps are from the early 1800s. 4.) There were also countries that no longer exist in the world today. This made me wonder when the book was from. One piece of writing told me all I needed to know. 4.5) It referred to the ‘Great War,’ not World War I or World War II, which means it was published after World War I and before World War II. My mom was yet again amazed by my detective skills (which I learned from this class). Those were just some of the things I noticed, but before this class I would’ve thought it was just ‘cool’ and moved on. But I didn’t, and it made me appreciate the book even more, and gave me so much more joy/curiosity than previous me would’ve gotten out of it.

I also now have so much more curiosity in terms of the digital world that I didn’t before. This class was like opening my eyes underwater, and being able to see Atlantis with 20/20 vision.

I honestly learned everything…that’s all I can really say—is just everything—which is why I say Existential Questioning because how do you even explain everything? You can’t, so you just sit with it. Anyways, so sad this class is coming to an end. I’ve never been so upset for a class to end.

post-book!! class me>>>>>>>>pre-book!! class me