This course will use a single text, Mark Danielewski’s postmodern novel, House of Leaves, to consider the state of the book and of the various practices of reading at the present moment. House of Leaves is a novel that requires us to reconsider the material and social facts of the book—how it feels and looks, and how it functions as an object—along with the reading practices it both requires and complicates. Understanding how we have learned to read—the practices of reading books, websites, and others texts—and how reading has changed over time will require us to enter into the labyrinth of theory. But this is not a “theory” class, since House of Leaves is a novel that undoes what we normally think of as the difference between “literature” and theory. Rather, I want to use our experience of reading the novel to reflect on the ways that it offers us creative possibilities for building new and creative forms of understanding and experience