Both of these texts construct meaning through a material manipulation of the codex form itself: print stops being a translucent conduit of meaning and becomes meaning itself. Specifically, I will examine Tom Phillips’ A Humument (1970) and Jonathan Safran Foer’s latest novel, Tree of Codes (2010).
What role, if any, will printed literature have in the coming years? This is exactly the question that I hope to address. The question that must be asked of print, then, is what its place is in our digital age. The e-book, on the other hand, has seen an incremental and at times unheard of expansion, which averages a combined growth rate of 71.1% sales have rocketed from 7,337 in 2002 to 313,167 in 2009. Certainly, the latest figures taken from the Association of American Publishers do appear to corroborate sentiment such as this: between the years of 20 the combined growth rate for adult hardback and paper bound fiction was 3.9%. Book historian and hypertext critic, Jay David Bolter, triumphantly declares that that those living in the twenty first century belong to ‘the late age of print’. The title of this paper, The End of Print, will be a phrase that many of us have heard over the past decade. These examples will show how literary texts can use their own mediality and materiality to reflect on the general relation between all three.
Johnson (House mother normal) and Mark Z. I will contrast different techniques of "framing absence" in texts by David Mitchell (number9-dream), Jonathan Safran Foer (Tree of codes), B. There are some narrative texts that use their medial form as text printed on a page and bound in a codex not only to narrate absences, but also to stage them outside of the text proper, or rather, through the actual absence of text leading the recipient's awareness to the page as a frame of reference that potentially carries semantic value. In this paper I will look at the narratology of the empty page by analyzing and comparing a number of texts that stage or emphasize the actual absence of text from the page. But when they do, they considerably expand the narrative range of expression of the printed page. Only rarely do texts stage emptiness through the actual absence of text. Silences and absences are usually created semantically, with a present text telling about an absence. Printed text is largely determined through its physical presence on the page, it defines itself by where it is, and the performance of the present text determines the flow of narrative time. Narrative experimentation has seen many forms, but among the most radical strategies might be the complete absence of text.
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