Abstract
This dissertation analyzes the competing discourses and media representations that attend independent bookstores, the Amazon corporation, and public libraries as a means to interrogate the concept that “books are magic” in the digital age. By comparing and contrasting different approaches to book production, distribution, acquisition, consumption, and evaluation in the 21st century, I substantiate my claim that the book-bound, spatialized, past-oriented “magic” of indie bookstores and the digital, placeless, future-oriented “magic” of Amazon operate synergistically, rerouting material and imaginative resources away from the present of our increasingly underfunded public library systems and the “un-magical” books that they contain. Ultimately, I demonstrate that one of the primary utilities that literature can provide in the era of the internet derives from its ability to metaphorize, and in some cases logistically disrupt, the imaginaries and distribution systems that sustain literary production and consumption under capitalism. Taking its title from the beloved Brooklyn-based indie bookstore Books Are Magic, this dissertation contends that engaging with the claim that “books are magic” can help readers to recognize and reappropriate the aesthetic, social, affective, and political potentialities often coopted and commodified by the discourses of magic that animate our ever-evolving relationship with books, bookstores, and libraries. Though I criticize indie bookstores and Amazon, I intend for those critiques to highlight how these private enterprises can supply us with what Ernst Bloch calls “wishful images,” the glimpses of a future in which a more complicated perception of how we produce, acquire, and use books can allow libraries of all kinds to feel magical again.