Reorienting Ourselves toward the Material: Between Page and Screen as Case Study

Amaranth Borsuk and Brad Bouse’s Between Page and Screen (Siglio Press, 2012) is an augmented-reality book of poetry: a codex filled with Quick Response codes that, when activated by a web-camera connected to the Internet, project the appearance of text between the book’s pages and the reader’s computer screen. The work’s title suggests its formal aesthetic and also the type of reading practice it promotes: a comparative textual media approach. This essay uses Between Page and Screen as a case study for considering what new possibilities and orientations are opened up by the conjunction of comparative literature and comparative textual media and why we need such approaches now.