Difference between revisions of "Textual Closure (Formal)"

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Figure: Father, murderer  'mother literature'
 
Figure: Father, murderer  'mother literature'
  
Closure (Opening): Implicit truth of codex-codified protocol
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Medium and function: the codex.  Compilation, indexical (digital);  as compared with the radically serial (analog) scroll
  
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Literacy: functional protocol as social norm
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Closure (Opening?): Implicit truth of codex-codified protocol
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Agency structure: Legal administrators hold agency through law; subjects are compelled to conform
  
 
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Figure: erotic, primal mother - and indulgent child
 
Figure: erotic, primal mother - and indulgent child
  
Serial medium: the book
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Medium and function: the bildungsroman novel, the scientific treatise.  The serial aesthetic, or scientific whole.  As compared with 'random' aspects of compilation codex.
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Literacy: Alphebetization
  
 
Closure / Opening: Unity of subjective experience realized in imagination
 
Closure / Opening: Unity of subjective experience realized in imagination
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Dynamic: Authors hold agency through 'works'; yet subjects are enabled to 'hallucinate' these in imagination in any way, and to derive pleasure from this experience
  
 
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Revision as of 14:44, 3 May 2010

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The semiotic marker of textual closure present in a folio of Shakespeare's works from the early 1600s.

Formal closure is a property the printed text exhibited, at different pre-modern moments, by the text as a complete and unified whole, bound in the format of the printed book. The contemporary spread of the computer's digital text has opened texts to change and modification, which has profound consequences for the textual work as an aesthetic entity. Comparisons with the digital text are instructive, as the digital text brings to light technological qualities which compose the printed book but have been rendered invisible by over 500 years of circulation.


530: Roman Legal Administration

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Justinian I's "Corpus Juris Civilis" ("Body of Civil Law")

Cornelia Vismann

Work: Legal codex - Distinguish from scroll

Representative figure: Roman Emperor Justinian I

Emergent whole: writ and force of law

Figure: Father, murderer  'mother literature'

Medium and function: the codex. Compilation, indexical (digital); as compared with the radically serial (analog) scroll

Literacy: functional protocol as social norm

Closure (Opening?): Implicit truth of codex-codified protocol

Agency structure: Legal administrators hold agency through law; subjects are compelled to conform



1800: German Bildungsroman

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Goethe's "Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship"

Friedrich Kittler

Work: Bildungsroman novel - distinguish from law, which is literal?

Representative figure: Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Emergent whole: unity of fiction novel

Figure: erotic, primal mother - and indulgent child

Medium and function: the bildungsroman novel, the scientific treatise. The serial aesthetic, or scientific whole. As compared with 'random' aspects of compilation codex.

Literacy: Alphebetization

Closure / Opening: Unity of subjective experience realized in imagination

Dynamic: Authors hold agency through 'works'; yet subjects are enabled to 'hallucinate' these in imagination in any way, and to derive pleasure from this experience



2000: Computational Sociality

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Editing History of Wikipedia's "Evolution" article

N. Katherine Hayles

Work: Clustering dynamic texts

Representative figure: Jimmy Wales of Wikipedia

Emergent whole: Materiality of digital text - a heterogenous clustering unity?

Figure: Universal motherboard "of us all"

Opening (Closure?): Computation as fluid, but with infinite memory



References

Barthes, Roland, [1971]. “From Work to Text,” from Hale, Dorothy (ed) The Novel: An Anthology of Criticism and Theory, 1900-2000. Wiley-Blackwell. Print.

Genette, Gerard. Paratexts: Thresholds of Interpretation. Cambridge University Press: Cambridge, UK. 1997. Print.

Hayles, N. Katherine (2005) "My Mother Was A Computer: Digital Subjects and Literary Texts." The University of Chicago Press: Chicago. Print.

Hesse, Carla (1996), "Books in Time," pp. 21-36. From Nunberg, Geoffrey (ed) The Future of the Book. University of California Press: Berkeley and Los Angeles. 1996. Print.

Kittler, Friedrich. (1990) Discourse Networks, 1800/1900. Stanford University Press: Stanford. Print.

Miah, Andy, (2003). “(e)Text: Error… 404 Not Found! Or The Disappearance of History,” Culture Machine, Vol. 5. Text available at: http://www.culturemachine.net.

Thompson, John B (1981). “Editor’s Introduction,” pp. 1-26. From Paul Ricoeur: Hermeneutics and the Human Sciences. Cambridge University Press: Cambridge. Print.

Vismann, Cornelia. Files: Law and Media Technology. Stanford University Press: Stanford. 2008. Print.