This chapter explores the connections of orthography to paleography and codicology, and the dependence of historical orthography on the materiality of writing and printing environments. It explains that orthography is one of the tools of paleographers, and a key to understanding (deciphering) the written language of ancient and medieval texts, whereas codicologists investigate nonlinguistic (and nonorthographic) peculiarities of early manuscript books (codices). Orthographic research, however, in some cases helps estimate more precisely the origins of codices (time and location). The chapter also presents some of the ways in which the materiality of writing and printing historically has directed the development of orthographic features (e.g. symmetricity of upper and lower cases, dependence on the limitations of printers’ type sets). The author introduces the dichotomy between the perceived durability and perishability of a text at its creation phase, and reveals its impact on the differentiation of orthographic approaches such as the historical simultaneous double orthographies of various European languages (i.e. printed versus handwritten manuscripts, books versus newspapers).

In order to outline W.G. Sebald’s perspective on media technology, it is instructive to consider the similarities between Sebald and Friedrich Kittler, who is generally considered the founding father of German Media Theory. Sebald’s use of the photocopier – in order to intentionally degrade the images used in his works – is reminiscent of Kittler’s interest in ‘noise’, i.e. disturbances that distort the information a medium is supposed to relay. Also, the portrayals of visual apparatuses in Sebald’s texts – as found in painting, photography, film, and video – often focus on these disturbances or ‘noise.’ The reader’s attention is thus directed away from the medial messages and onto the materialities involved in conveying them. Furthermore, Sebald’s descriptions of photography, film, and video repeatedly illustrate how medial noise intereferes with practices of memory. Against this background, media technologies in Sebald appear as a transitory and stubborn materiality which refuses to convey universal meaning.

This chapter is concerned with locating and defining writing in the context of communication in general, and in the more specific domain of human communication. It emphasizes the linguistic basis of all writing systems, examining their underlying characteristics, how their invention works as a representational resource and how they are intimately connected with social, material and cultural conditions. It clarifies basic concepts about writing, to establish some terms of reference and to find a language for subsequently talking about writing. Writing is seen as a system of visual communication that uses symbols that have a particular relationship to the world. The chapter underlines the materiality of writing as a visible language.

This essay presents congruities between Sebald’s juvenilia and his major works of prose fiction to reveal a portrait of a budding artist who never wandered far from his personal and literary origins and yet learned his lessons from these youthful ventures into writing. It introduces selections from his unpublished and fragmentary literary writings from the 1960s, which are housed in his literary estate at the DLA. These include the short narratives ‘Wartend’ (‘Waiting’) and the untitled story about Herr G. (Mr G.), along with the six-page play Der Traum ein Leben oder die Geschichte des Fr. v. Sch. (The Dream A Life, Or The Story of Fr. v. Sch.), and the two versions of his untitled novel. In these texts, one finds Sebald’s early critiques of capitalism and consumer culture, his interest in the uncanny, the agency of material objects, the crisis of the artist, the horrors of the past, the influence and violence of the totalitarian personality, the power of images, and the destruction wrought by nature. Sebald’s juvenilia make clear that they foreshadow the philosophical, historical, and sociological considerations in his mature prose fiction.

Taking the narrow notion of manga outside of Japan as its starting point, this chapter refrains from introducing the diversity of comics in Japan in support of a transculturally open approach. From a form-conscious perspective, it conceptualizes manga as a highly affective type of comics that share characteristics with non-Japanese comics far beyond the “manga” label. Following a brief historical survey of what “manga” has meant in English since the 1980s, the device of affective eyes takes center stage. Graphic narratives by Osamu Tezuka, Keiji Nakazawa, Keiko Takemiya, and Jirō Taniguchi serve as examples for how extreme close-ups of eyes have operated across periods and genres, namely, not only as representations of interiority or ethnicity, but also as material signposts and guides of visual perception: eyes draw attention, get readers involved prior to critical interpretation, establish intimacy with characters, provide a node for a page’s visual fragments, help to obscure the divide between inside and outside, subject and object, self and other. Moving gingerly into an ocular history of manga as an affective form of comics, the chapter seeks to turn away from essentialist, as well as culturalist, definitions of what manga is in favor of how it operates.

As popular print ephemera, comics hold a complex and precarious relationship to preservation and duration, which has marked their status as “archivable” (or “non-archivable”) materials. This chapter sketches some of the different ways that institutions, producers, and audiences have coped with this fragility and have defined practices of preservation and collection. The chapter subsequently analyzes comics in libraries and archives, collecting practices by readers and fans, uses of archives in comics production. At each step, it pays particular attention to the importance of materiality, senses, formats, manipulation in the preservation of comics, connecting them to matters of copyright, library policies, and commercial interests. The importance of these parameters is set out against changing notions of archives and archival practice, especially under the impulse of their digital transformation. The broader picture considers the importance of medium specificity in an age of online archival plenitude.

The conclusion recaps the various chapters by considering what the backward look of contemporary graphic novelists can mean for comics studies today. This archival impulse in the graphic novel inevitably confronts us with our own practices as comics scholars and the extent to which we are also indebted to a range of vernacular archivists and historians of the form. It highlights both the possible blinkers that we repeat from that heritage and how these various gestures of transmission can make comics scholars more cognizant about the materiality of their own engagement with historical archives, possibly paving the way for different forms of academic research.

Surveys in trademark, trade dress, and false advertising cases often focus on liability. For example, in trademark cases, the focus of survey evidence has often been on whether consumers confuse the two marks. Similarly, survey evidence in false advertising cases has focused on whether the at-issue advertising claim misleads or deceives consumers. Surveys that address these issues of alleged confusion or deception measure consumer “perception,” and the results are often the centerpiece of a plaintiff’s liability arguments. While such questions may be central to cases that seek an injunction or aim to prevent the issuance of a new trademark, they are less relevant in questions of impact or injury.

Poised between attentive ethnography and urgent critique, the chapter asks whether politics can be re thought by combining or seeing the connections between phenomena normally considered irrelevant and separated by scale. Specifically the politics that might emerge from a haircut. By tracing unruly affects and effects of the radiate outwards from the material presence of a bob cut.

The study explores the materiality of clock towers to understand how temporal order was constructed and changed in the late Ottoman Empire. It takes a microhistorical perspective with a critical realist lens. Specifically, it focuses on the 24 clock towers constructed between 1876 and 1909 outside Istanbul, remaining within the national borders of Turkey. In addition, the study has developed case studies of three “exceptional typical” clock towers at Kastamonu, Çorum, and Izmir. Results indicate that these clock towers were symbols of continuous and hybridized changes in the temporal construction of Ottoman societies. The study illustrates how alternative time conceptions can exist, combine, and transform autonomously, constituting a polychronous context. In addition to the Ottoman state, the local elite was central in negotiating and contesting the diffusion of modernity into their realms. The study contributes to understanding the politics of time from a non-industrialized and non-Western historical context.

Drawing on a combined ethnographic and historical case study of BLOX, a landmark building in Copenhagen, this chapter advances a processual understanding of buildings by exploring the intersection between materiality, temporality, and politics. We analyze organizing processes unfolding between the material building and public, private, and philanthropic organizations. We distinguish between three dimensions of the building’s material temporality, which we analyze drawing on an event-based approach: historicizing the building through time, projecting the building over time, and enacting the building in time. While the ‘projecting’ and ‘enacting’ dimensions are inspired by prior work on material temporality, our study adds the ‘historicizing’ dimension. We develop an empirical model showing the interplay between these three dimensions. A main implication of our study is to show how the organizing effects of material buildings emerge not only from their material durability, but also from their temporal malleability. In closing, we discuss implications for a temporal understanding of affordances and propose a temporally relational view of affordances.

The second chapter explores the music behind the poetry of Homer, looking at the melodic part of poetry – that is, the part that makes poetry song – in the Iliad, Odyssey, and two Homeric Hymns. It suggests that the early conceptualization of music borrows from the fields of artisanal objects and animal sounds, using these two different kinds of materiality to enact the presence of melody avant la lettre. These modes of conceptualization both place song within the material world, suggesting a presence that can shift and change, but that it will persist by way of such change.

Chapter four investigates archaic inscriptions and the interplay of song and stone in the poetry of Simonides. The tradition of Simonides gives us both epitaphic inscription and choral epinician, two poetic genres whose means and methods might be seen as so widely divergent as to be unrelated. However, I will explore how the substance of song and the fixity of objects are both in play on both sides of the song and stone divide, through a situatedness that allows Simonides to make claims that memories of the past will endure into the future.

The introduction argues that ancient Greek poetry exhibits a particularly acute awareness of change, decay, and ephemerality inherent in mortality. It stresses the fact that these poems have assumed at least two forms of materiality: one in relation to performing bodies and another as inscribed texts. After reviewing prior scholarship in these areas, it looks at definitions of the body and the word ephêmeros in Greek poetry, including Homer, Pindar, and other lyric poets, and in Ps.-Aeschylus’ Prometheus Bound, before offering summaries of the chapters of the book.

This chapter presents and discusses key developments in corporate sustainability reporting (CSRep). It shows that the nature of CSRep and its governance have been subject to fundamental changes over the last decades. The chapter introduces students to the rationales for and challenges to companies’ engagement in CSRep. At its core, the chapter explores different alternatives for governing CSRep, distinguishing between voluntary standards and legally binding measures such as disclosure requirements by governments and stock exchanges in European and other countries. Particular attention is given to the most widely used standard for CSRep, the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) Standards, and the concept of materiality. Finally, countries and industries in which reporting has become a more institutionalised practice are described in more detail.