Dreaming in Books - uncopy

Bibliographic Subjects / 11
works of literature have contributed to our understanding of books—and
to a potentially different, or at least more heterogeneous understanding at
that. If there is, as Johns tells us, a continuity between the scholarly publishing
practices of the early modern Tyco Brahe and the modern Ludwig Wittgenstein,
what Goethe was doing in Wilhelm Meister’s Travels or Mallarmé in
Dice Thrown Will Never Annul Chance fi t in an altogether different story. As
Garret Stewart has argued, literature becomes a social fact precisely because
of the powerful ways that it is tied to learning to read books. 55 A history of
literature is thus integral to a history of books. 56 Literature makes books as
much as books make literature.
To address this question of how literature thinks in and about books,
Dreaming in Books takes as one of its principal sites of attention scenes of
communication in romantic literary texts. I am interested in exploring how
the symbolic movements in texts, whether of speech, things, or people, functioned
as interpretations of the bibliographic environments through which
such texts circulated. My work is indebted in this regard to Bakhtin’s suggestive
proposal that the “utterance” and not the “sentence” should constitute
the main site of literary analysis and to Michel Serres’s attention to the
“phatic” function of language—language use that is designed not to convey
content but to establish a connection. 57 The larger aim of this study is to
identify what we might call a bibliographic poetics—a coherent set of stylistic
and formal concerns—that attempt to make the medium of the book
intelligible and thus legible to romantic readers. 58 How did literature make
sense of the book so that it in turn made sense to its readers?
If one of the central features of romantic literature was a deep attention
to mobility (as in Hölderlin’s notion of “the streaming word” [das strömende
Wort]), I want to ask how such circulatory energy was deployed to interrogate
new conditions of communicating in books. How did prevalent modes of
speaking and listening in romantic literature—such as whispering, betraying,
renouncing, reporting, retelling, projecting, overhearing, confessing,
or speaking “from the heart” versus “by heart”—work in concert with the
circulation of objects (purses, maps, prostheses, pendulums, dossiers) and
bodies (wandering, pilgrimaging, or dissected) to grapple with the changing
nature of social interactivity brought about by the book’s growing ubiquity?
Conversely, how did the interruptions that commonly populated romantic
texts—the loud noises, the parasitical guests, the intimidating followers
(Irving’s “dreadful monitor”)—all point, in Bernhard Siegert’s words, to a
more general cacography, a “reference to the channel” itself? 59 In combining
an analysis of the movements and fi xations of texts with the movements and
fi xations within texts, the chapters that follow try to illustrate the extent to