A study of the signifying potential of paper, the foundational material for literary texts in the modern era.

For ease of reading, the paper of a printed page must recede far enough into the background to make ink legible. Yet paper—the primary substrate for literary texts—has its own signifying potential, its own poetics. Craig Dworkin shows that looking at the page, rather than through its illusory withdrawal, can unlock interpretive insights that readers would otherwise miss. What often seems incidental can prove to be as semantically important as the words of the text themselves.

Substrate argues that the material affordances of paper in general—its pliability, fibrous weave, and capacity to fold, tear, crumple, and shuffle—variously inform the poetics of William Blake, Stéphane Mallarmé, Jen Bervin, and Susan Howe. For all four of these poets, the qualities of paper serve as models for structuring the language of their poems in innovative ways. Dworkin further shows how each poet in turn engages paper at another level by incorporating it within the thematic ambit of key poems. The full meaning of these poems is thus inextricable from their printing. Substrate is a brilliant inquiry in poetics and the logic of media more generally.