Performing the History of Writing in Jordan Harrison’s futura

This essay examines Jordan Harrison’s unpublished playscript, futura (2010), as a response to early aughts concerns about digital media shift, fears of the death of the book, and capitalist threats to privacy and individualism. The article reads the “bookishness” of Harrison’s play as a commentary on how the future of writing in digital culture necessitates a historical, artifact-based awareness of how media technologies and practices entangle one another over time. Drawing on concepts of “inscription” and “metamedia” developed by Johanna Drucker and Alexandre Starre, I argue that Harrison’s own media history-informed dramaturgy reflexively integrates textual-material practices performed on the page and embodied on the stage. Sections focus on the typesetting of Harrison’s PDF script; in-play citations of thinkers and practitioners of typography such as Eric Gill and Robert Bringhurst; and Harrison’s interweaving of allegorical motifs that reference key moments in the history of the book, including the Great Library of Alexandria, Gutenberg’s 42-Line Bible, Baskerville’s edition of Paradise Lost, and Paul Renner’s design of Futura.