Hinged, Bound, Covered: The Signifying Potential of the Material Codex

Christina McCarter, Purdue University

Abstract

The idea of “the book” overflows with extraneous significance: books are presented as windows, gateways, vessels, lighthouses, and gardens. Books speak to us and feed us, and they are a method of escape. From their earliest appearances in the western world, the book has signified much more than a static, hinged, bound, covered object inscribed with words. Even when a book is not performing an elaborate, imaginative function, the word “book” very often signifies the text it holds or even the text’s author. You can open The Bluest Eye or carry Octavia Butler in your bag. Fourteenth-century author Geoffrey Chaucer invokes a book by “Lollius” as authoritative source of his Troilus and Criseyde, though no person exists; twelfth-century chronicler Geoffrey of Monmouth claims to be translating from an unlikely “very ancient book.” When a book makes an appearance in narrative, it is rarely just a book. This dissertation asks what is it about the book, in the shape of the codex, that has helped the book become such a metaphorically rich signifier. In scholarship, despite a renewed appreciation for the book as both material and cultural object, the frequency with which the book represents something other than itself has, ironically, exiled these bookish metaphors into the land of the common trope. When the book does something miraculous, it is just a narrative device.Indeed, books have become to significantly meaningful that attempts to define “the book” evade simplicity, rendering books as everything and nothing at the same time. In light of this overcomplication, my inquiry is based on a simple premise: Metaphors are based on some element of physical truth. Though the book has sprouted in a variety of metaphorical directions, many of those metaphors are grounded in the book’s material realities. Acknowledging this, especially in an age of fast-evolving media and bookish fetishism, offers a valuable and novel perspective of how and why books are both semantically rich and culturally valued objects. This dissertation attempts to unravel the various threads of meaning that make up the complex “idea of the book.” I focus on one of these threads: the book as a material object. By focusing on how the book as object—not the book as idea—functions within narrative, I argue that we can identify what about the book object enables some of these metaphors. I analyze moments in literature, television, and film for when metaphorical functions are assigned, not to an ephemeral, complex idea of the book, but rather to the material realities of the book as an object. In these moments, the codex’s essential, material shape (what I am calling its bookishness) enable metaphorical functioning; when bindings, pages, covers, and spines initiate metaphorical action in their very mundane physicality, we can identify how the material book has come to mean so much more than itself.

Degree

Ph.D.

Advisors

Malo, Purdue University.

Subject Area

Linguistics|Language|History|Literature

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