Jonathan Safran Foer’s Tree of Codes: book design and digital sculpturing

Abstract

The intricate literary experiment Tree of Codes, in which American author Jonathan Safran Foer reworks a story originally written by Jewish-Polish writer Bruno Schulz, enforces a haptic as well as textual experience of the destruction caused during the Shoah. At the same time, it re-evaluates processes of writing, book-making, and reading, showing the interactive traits and possibilities of the ‘classic’ material book as it inserts itself in a medial context determined by digital and computational techniques.