Adversaria (33)
‘With the rise of universities and humanist inquiry into Latin and Greek literature and rhetoric, a picture of the author as an originator began to take shape. This shift, coupled with mechanization, would prove instrumental to reframing the book as content rather than object—its form a mere vessel for the information it contained’ —Amaranth Borsuk (The Book, p. 62)
‘Whether the volume in question is a travel guide or a romance novel, the perception that books are little worlds enclosed in covers remains the same. We think of ourselves as disappearing into them, only to emerge hours later, changed by what we have read’ —Amaranth Borsuk (The Book, p. 84)
‘When the aesthetic of bookness itself is fetishized to such a adegree that it can be bough and sold (as cell phone cases, home safes, and printed sportswear, for example), we’ve come full circle to the commodification of the book as object’ —Amaranth Borsuk (The Book, p. 113)
‘The battles and politics of the Hittites are as dead as a nail in Hector’s coffin, but their verb forms and pronouns and common words are matters of live interest in American universities at this moment, since the accurate facts of the Hittite language revealed by careful decipherment are completely revolutionizing our concepts of Indo-European linguistics’ —Benjamin Lee Whorf (‘Decipherment of Maya Hieroglyphs’, in Language, Thought, and Reality, p. 176)