Material Noise

“In Anne M. Royston's hands we find that the absent center of the High Theory project may have been beneath our fingertips all along. Tracing the allure of 'the' book as both trope and material medium in the work of Duchamp, Bataille, Derrida, Ronell, and others, Royston's own book opens up media studies, a lineage of design, and an inheritance of critical thought.”

Matthew Kirschenbaum, author of Track Changes: A Literary History of Word Processing and Mechanisms: New Media and the Forensic Imagination

“How do we read theory today? This daring book asks us not to dismiss as mere noise the aesthetic design of the page and book especially in works like Derrida's Glas or Ronell's The Telephone Book—composed page by page rather than written in a traditional format. Rather than see the skin or package of these books as mere masks to the truth of the argument, Royston meticulously folds back these books' art into their theoretical claims. Although we previously saw the material design only as ancillary noise or ornamentation, Royston gives us imaginary decoder glasses to highlight those unconventional theory books' signifying noise.”

Craig Saper, Professor in the Language, Literacy and Culture Doctoral Program at UMBC; author of The Amazing Adventures of Bob Brown

“In this artful appraisal of work at the intersection of scholarship and artists' books Royston peels back the self-reflexive layers of these creative-critical hybrids—from hypertext to letterpress, encyclopedia entry to collage—revealing the way such ostensible noise in fact amplifies the work's signals. Astonishing in its scope and invigorating in the new critical vocabulary it provides, this volume, like the works it confronts, will, in Royston's words, 'startle … readers into an awareness of the permutations and possibilities of the page.'”

Amaranth Borsuk, Associate Professor at the University of Washington, Bothell; author of The Book

“Tuning into the rattle and chatter of the codex, Anne Royston's Material Noise channels new vectors for creative-critical reading on and beyond the page. From the collaborative 'nonknowledge' of the Encyclopedia Da Costa to postdigital publications like Johanna Drucker's Stochastic Poetics, Royston brilliantly examines the reflexive tactics of artistic argument. Here, the static page rematerializes within the crackling instabilities of nonsemantic space. Listen carefully: the noise is the point.”

Daniel Snelson, Assistant Professor of English at the University of California, Los Angeles