ABSTRACT
The bridge' is an image of transition, reflecting the process of partial, fragmented, variously paced evolution from manuscript to print. On the other hand, the bridge recalls an important twentieth-century novel, which points towards a productive way of considering the parts that authority played in that evolution. Printing can produce techniques of power to be exercised over itself: the sixteenth-century Indices emerge precisely as a response to the new methods of dissemination, which indeed are easier to police. The Yugoslav novelist Ivo Andri published his best-known work, The Bridge Over the Drina which chronicles the Bosnian town of Viegrad through the life on and around its bridge, completed and partially destroyed. Andri's novel reads almost like an allegory of the historical processes that have been identified as taking place over a shorter period, due to different socio-political conditions in early-modern Western culture.
