English / 한국어
The book reproduces selected pages from other books, classifying them into seven categories: Black Pages, Blank Pages, Drawing Pages, Photography Pages, Text Pages, Number Pages, and Punctuation Pages. The result is a richly documented “typology of self-reflexive pages.” The pages are self-reflexive because they disrupt the “natural” flow of reading and draw attention to the spatial dimensions of the narrative, thus signaling the artificiality of the texts of which they are a part. The pages reproduced in Lüthi’s book are not treated as framed illustrations but instead remain pages, albeit of a new book.
On the Self-Reflexive Page is a modest paperback, but with over one hundred examples organized into categories, a thoughtful essay and a painstakingly compiled bibliography, it exudes a sense of thoroughness (though it does urge readers to refer to the source publications to examine the examples in their original context). The reader is perhaps left with the impression that the use of non-textual elements in fiction has by now been comprehensively exploited, if not quite exhausted.
This impression may come as a disappointment if you are planning to deploy such devices simply to introduce a “new” multimedia experience to reading, or—even worse—breathe a “new life” into the book as a media. But if you are concerned with the kind of work that reflects “an author’s humane skepticism,” you need not be discouraged: for to that end “the use of such elements may yet shift and evolve, may yet find space to maneuver in contemporary works,” as Lüthi suggests.
