Index

The Book

A Bit of Barthes

Modernism

Postmodernism

Decentred

Author Options

Hypertechniques

Bibliography

Almost all western religions, philosophies, literatures, indeed our very conception of the world itself are inextricably woven into the idea of The Book.

A book is only in the first place a physical object, "a collection of sheets of paper or other substance, blank, written or printed, fastened together as to form a material whole" (OED). More abstractly, a book, with its front and back cover, its first page and last, is a model of our desire for completion, wholeness, and closure. The very physical organisation of a book, with pages bound to a centre spine, invites us to proceed through a text in linear, pre-determined manner, moving first form left to right across the page, then from page to page and chapter to chapter. The Book thus upholds our mutual fascinations with etiology and teleology, with beginnings and endings.

The idea of The Book that has come down to us through the study of the Book of God, The Bible, and its corollary, The Book of Nature; both are perceived to have fixed beginnings (Creation, or the Book of Genesis) and ends (Apocalypse, or The Book of Revelation) and to unfold in time according to a divinely ordained plot. The idea of The Book is devoted to the idea of an author who, existing prior to his or her book and standing outside language, guarantees its "true" meaning. "I am Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the end, the first and the last," announces God in Revelation 22.13. Readers of The Book are thus conceived as passive recievers of the undiluted truth its author intended. Recently, some writers have announced The End of The Book, considering it the model of a readerly text and thus the antithesis not only of the open-endedness of hypertext, but of writing itself.

Built by Scott Spicer. [email protected]