Dreaming in Books - uncopy

Bibliographic Subjects / 9
generation a naïve and antiquarian point of view. He was also showing just
how important the printed book remained in continuing to shape how
we think about the category of literature. As Seth Lerer has asked, “Is the
modern conception of literature inseparable from the conception of the
book as the physical, commercial artifact as we know it?” 38 Dreaming in
Books is, in a more specialized sense, about the emergence of this nexus
between the book and literature. When Friedrich Schlegel argued that “a
novel is a romantic book” (ein Roman ist ein romantisches Buch), 39 he was
highlighting how Llosa’s conviction and Lerer’s concern were both fundamentally
romantic ones. The very hegemony that the book achieved during
the romantic period and that was articulated in the tautology at the heart
of Schlegel’s statement elided the complex mediations that were required
to make literature’s location in the book seem both natural and immediate.
This book seeks to reverse that process of naturalization.
Armed with the tools and training of bibliographers and book historians,
numerous literary scholars today have begun to draw our attention to
the ways that bibliographic details are key determinants, but also key multipliers,
of textual meaning. As N. Katherine Hayles has written, “To change
the physical form of the artifact is not merely to change the act of reading
. . . but profoundly to transform the metaphoric network structuring the
relation of word to world.” 40 Or as Jerome McGann has more fl atly stated,
“There is no such thing as an unmarked text.” 41 Such work has inherited,
whether explicitly or not, the challenges posed by poststructural theory, reformulating
the fundamental semiotic openness that was ascribed to the
literary work in Barthes’ seminal essay “From Work to Text,” to the level of
the material text. 42 It replaces an “eruptive” notion of the literary work—one
based on a kind of destabilizing singularity—with a notion of the work as
a “circuit,” “process,” or “event,” as some thing that takes shape in motion
across time and space. 43 Attention to the book does not aim to reproduce a
textual stability and singularity that were in fact never there, the once contested
ideals of early twentieth- century Anglo- American analytic bibliography
(Greg, Bowers) or nineteenth- century Germanic philology (Lachmann,
Wilamowitz). Instead, it foregrounds the multiple and dynamic material
identities that constitute any literary work. The book as a space of analysis
underscores the very constructedness of the imaginary unity not only of the
category of the “work” itself but also of that between the “work” and the
“book.” As F. W. Bateson challengingly asked over thirty years ago, “If the
Mona Lisa is in the Louvre, where is Hamlet?” 44
The more we come to see literature as a social process and not as a singularly
generative (or autopoetic) moment, 45 the more we can begin to “re-