What began as an historical account of the distortions that occur when narrative content is transferred to a new medium from an older one grew of necessity to include counter-arguments to speculative theories of writing, reading, and simulation proposed by Vilém Flusser, Jacques Derrida, Martin Heidegger and Jean Baudrillard.
The engine of media change that I propose is defacement, a term I borrow from the British scholar, Albert W. Pollard, the Shakespearean scholar and student of early print who complained that the addition of color by hand was a âgreat defacement of the outlinesâ of early printed books. I have generalized the term to apply to all media change. My use of the term is broader and intended to be applied to the transfers of content between any media. For that reason, you will find chapters dealing specifically with a number of mediaâmedieval books, early print, radio, television, the Internetâand others in passing. In addition, attendant issues of production and receptionâwriting, reading, viewing, listeningâare discussed.
This is not meant as a discussion of media theory alone. As you will see, attention to minute material aspects and functions of a particular medium are set within grander philosophical contexts. Epistemological, ontological, and aesthetic concerns repeatedly frame practical questions of concrete media technology and practice. The methodology employed swings between static, phenomenological description and dynamic historical dialectics. It is both synchronic and diachronic.
The central thought in Titivillusâ Bag of Tricks has been with me for decades and some of the material included has appeared less amply and in preliminary form in philosophical journals since 1999, but this is a book of digressions, its unity the confinement of those tangential digressions between a front and back cover. The thought in Titivillusâ Bag of Tricks is accumulative, repetitive, and at times repetitious. Repetitio mater studiorum est.
