Handiwork & Material Poetics Between Page and Screen Amaranth Borsuk Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in the Humanities MIT

Text Teks- To weave; also to fabricate, especially with an ax; also to make wicker or wattle fabric for (mud-covered) house walls. 1. TEXT, TISSUE; CONTEXT, PRETEXT, from Latin texere, to weave, fabricate. […] 4. craft (of weaving of fabricating). TECHNICAL, POLYTECHNIC, TECHNOLOGY, from Greek tekhnē, art craft, skill. 5a. DACHSHUND, from Old High German dahs, badger. American Heritage Dictionary of Indo-European Word Roots. Ed. Calvert Watkins (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2000)

Artists’ books “[An artist's book] integrates the formal means of its realization and production with its thematic or aesthetic issues. […] It has to have some conviction, some soul, some reason to be and to be a book in order to succeed.” –Johanna Drucker, The Century of Artists ’ Books (New York: Granary Books, 2004) 2. “ Focusing on materiality allows us to see the dynamic interactivity through which a literary work mobilizes its physical embodiment in conjunction with its verbal signifiers to construct meanings in ways that implicitly construct the user/reader as well. ” N. Katherine Hayles, Writing Machines (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2002) 131.

Between Page & Screen