Imprint and Trace: Handwriting in the Age of Technology

by Sonja Neef

Today, writing by hand seems a nearly archaic process. Nearly all of our written communication is digital—our letters are via email or text message, our manuscripts are composed using word processors, our journals are blogs, and we sign checks to pay bills with the push of a button. Sonja Neef believes that what we have lost in our modern technological conversation is the ductus —the physical and material act of handwriting.             In Imprint and Trace Neef argues, however, that handwriting throughout its history has always been threatened with erasure. It exists in a dual able to be standardized, repeated, copied—much like an imprint—and yet persistently singular, original, and authentic as a trace or line. Throughout its history, from the first prehistoric handprint, through the innovations of stylus, quill, and printing press, handwriting has revealed an interweaving, ever-changing relationship between imprint and trace. Even today, in the age of the digital revolution, the trace of handwriting is still an integral part of communication, whether etched, photographed, pixelated, or scanned.             Imprint and Trace presents an essential re-evaluation of the relationships between handwriting and technology, and between the various imprints and traces that define communication.

365 pages, Hardcover

First published June 15, 2010

Reviews

[Scribal · Rating 3 out of 5]

Anybody else read or reading this book? I need help with the style--one review called it "cultural studies speak." I think I've decided not to worry that I don't get more than the "gist" of what she's saying because the gist is probably all there is.

For example, when the running on the page of the trace of the hand that's writing demotic Egyptian script is compared to the running of the Nile and its tributaries and the running of an Egyptian courier in service to the pharaoh, it's an evocative image but is there some deeper serious meaning there I'm not getting? I mean she spends several pages on that analogy....

Update: so now I'm fine, I just forgot to bring my Derrida crib sheet to the table--now I can safely ignore the webs of unresolvable deconstructionist tension that the author feels required to spin--noting perhaps the subjects she chooses for this tension because that choice might be interesting--but remembering not to get sucked into the problems as posed because they are by definition unresolvable.