Histories of the Future of the Book (2008)

Undergraduate: James Daniel Elam

Faculty Advisor: Sarah Sharma
Department: Communication Studies

---

My project attempts to investigate the formation of a particular discourse that surrounds the book as it is threatened into obsolescence. The book serves as an interesting technology to study within the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Threatened by the emergence of film, television, and the Internet, the book was defended and upheld in several sites of popular cultural criticism. As a new technology achieves popular, widespread use and consequently “threatens” to replace the book as a new technology of entertainment (or education, or worker management), critics raise their hands in fear at the sight of rapid, drastic change. For these critics, the future looks grim. I trace these discussions over three separate decades (1925-1935 for film, 1945-1955 for television, and 1995-2005 for Internet) in three periodicals (The New Yorker, Harper’s, and The Atlantic Monthly).