ABSTRACT
At various periods, Western cultures have chosen to embody writing in vari ous technological forms, and these choices have in turn affected the organi zation, style, and genres of writing and our expectations as authors and as readers. The physical unit of a writing technology helps to define the con ceptual unit-what comes to be regarded as a written volume. For centuries in the ancient world, the papyrus roll, about 25 feet long, constituted a vol ume. (Our word “volume” comes from the Latin volumen, which means roll.) The codex, which replaced the roll, was more effective in enclosing, protecting, and delimiting the writing it contained. A whole work could be contained in a single codex, which was less often the case with the smaller papyrus roll, which might hold only segments or “chapters” of a work. The writer was and still is encouraged to think of his codex as a unit of meaning, a complete verbal structure. The codex has been associated with the idea that writing should be rounded into finite units of expression and that a writer or reader can and should close his text off from all other texts.
