Category Archives: Vol 2o

Mihaela Haşu

Babes-Bolyai University, Cluj-Napoca, Romania

mih81@yahoo.com

Cell Phone Novels – A Digital Form of Literature?

Abstract: In twenty-first century Japan, cell phones challenge literature by developing a type of fiction written on their tiny screens: Keitai shousetsu. High school girls have begun to write love stories based on their experience and their fantasies, posting them on a novel web site and successfully being published as bestseller paperbacks. Digital devices have enlarged their functions, allowing large texts to be written on, uploaded to or downloaded from the Internet. The impact on the younger generation has been major. Most criticized by the literary world, this type of fiction writing has filled up the bookstores’ shelves. Although it is not literature, teenagers felt encouraged to write and fictionalize their fantasies, temptations and fears, communicating with one another the best way they knew how: through a virtual Internet window. Thus they have created a marked point in the history of high technologies and of artistic creativity.

Keywords: Cell-phone novel; Digital technologies; Japanese language; Bestseller; Teenagers; Interactive fiction; E-commerce.

The Japanese culture, which gave the first longest novel in the world, namely “The Tale of Genji”, written by Lady Murasaki Shikibu at the beginning of the 11th century, astonishes the world with a mixture of artistic creativity and high technology: keitai shousetsu – novels written on a cell phone.

In the high-tech era of the twenty-first century, the mobile phone has enlarged its possibilities by offering, along with calling, also music, photos, records, access to the internet and written messages, later uploaded on a novel web site. Through a process of posting novels and receiving feedbacks from readers, best-selling novels are being published as paperbacks and sold in millions of copies.

It all began around 2000 when Maho no i-rando offered along with homepage features like blogs and diaries, also a Book section, which gave everyone the possibility of either write easy novels, or just read the ones already posted. “According to its owners, the site has meanwhile 5.2 million registered users, hosting more than 1 million (begun) novels (cf. Kusano in Da Vinci Nr. 159: 211)”[1]. In 2002 a young man, whose pen name was Yoshi, wrote a novel on his mobile phone and downloaded it on the internet site. Deep Love: Ayu no monogatari (“Deep Love: Ayu’s story”) turned out to be a big success both online and in paperback. Moreover, it was adapted for film and manga (Japanese comics). For almost a decade, many youngsters, mostly women in their teens and twenties, have created such novels, easy to write, to post and to publish, and earned a lot of money. Reaching its peak in 2007, the phenomenon has now cooled down.

Still, things are not so pink-coloured. This creative boom has its positive and negative implications. The easiness of becoming a published author (not novelist, and we’ll see why) comes from the longing of the young generation for happy endings, the whirl of passion and challenging youth’s bounds. A major problem that today’s society is facing is the lack of interest among youngsters in improving reading and writing skills within a literary education. Thus, although most criticized by literary men as well as parents, concerned with the poor quality of both vocabulary and the content of ideas, this type of creative activity may be the handiest way to stimulate them towards reading and writing.

Essentially, the cell phone novel is a twenty-first century creative method by which high school students can practice language and imaginative potential. In a world conquered by computers, robots and machines, the Word has less and less power; not to mention that handwriting has become obsolete. The human imaginary, defined by the imagistic power of words, is outrun by high technological devices such as multifunctional cell phones.

Concerning the Japanese literary tradition, it gave the world’s first and longest novel – “The Tale of Genji”. Passing through time and fashion, both prose and poetry have been very prolific in the Land of the Rising Sun. A means of Buddhist meditation, poetry has developed different species like renga, tanka, and haiku, nowadays all “locked up” in the pages of dusty books. Likewise, prose has a very long tradition, coming up to the twenty-first century with valuable novels and writers. Still, a quality shift has been marked between high-literature (junbungaku[2]) and mass-literature (taishūbungaku). The last junbungaku novelist is considered to be Kenzaburō Ōe. The next generations of writers, among which we can name Haruki Murakami, Ryū Murakami, Banana Yoshimoto, Randy Taguchi, are best-selling novelists of taishūbungaku or J-literature. They fictionalise in their work the present day reality – a dark, alienated, disoriented society, whose youngsters find refuge in alcohol, sex and drugs, rejecting the old way of life and embracing an outside one – namely the American. Westernisation, mostly imposed from USA, affected their lives in the long term; thus the young generation felt uprooted from the world of their ancestors, yet not ready for the new world they were building.

Within this social and literary context, the cell phone novel is gaining popularity among teenagers. They not only read it, but also write, improving language skills. The gap between generations is marked in terms of both content and writing techniques. Keitai shousetsu differs entirely from the classical way of creating literature: it is first written on a cell phone, using elliptical sentences, few characters, slang, meaningful blank spaces and even emoticons. It is created by the serial criteria and, chapter by chapter, transferred from the mobile phone to a novel site, so that readers can step in and even change the flow of the narrative. Moreover, the editorial process is reversed by being first popularised and eagerly read online and then published on paper and sold in millions of copies.

In a very short time, the species has turned into a national phenomenon and it tends to spread in other countries, too. South Africa, for example, has launched the project “m-novel”, very much appreciated by school teenagers: “University of Cape Town (UCT) researchers said schools should make better educational use of teenagers’ cell phone and internet access”[3]. This educational aspect will be discussed later on.

The worldwide press has shown great interest in this spectacular invention. The articles are generally enthusiastic with little caution regarding the Japanese critical approaches, especially in the case of literary characteristics. Los Angeles Times (www.latimes.com), New York Times (www.nytimes.com), The New Yorker (www.newyorker.com), CNN (www.cnninternational.com), among many others, write on the subject. The latter posts on February 26, 2009, the article Cell phone stories writing new chapter in print publishing, where is presented Yume Hotaru, a pen-named male author, who wrote the novel First Experience and became the top title in one of Tokyo’s biggest bookstores in 2008[4]. Norimitsu Onishi writes for the New York Times on January 20, 2008, about the keitai shousetsu boom[5], depicting the most relevant characteristics of writers such as Rin, novel web portals such as Maho no i-rando, cell phone companies like DoCoMo. He points out that one of the most important factors in the development of keitai shousetsu was the irresistible offer of the major cell phone service providers like DoCoMo and their “decision to offer unlimited transmission of packet data, like text-messaging, as a part of flat monthly rates”[6]. The Independent (www.independent.co.uk) writes, Japanese embrace the mobile phone novel on February 8, 2008, and with a brief characterization of the phenomenon, it underlines that “the thumb generation” (oya yubi seddai)[7], addicted to cell phone usage, has launched an ubiquitous and accessible type of fiction and nevertheless a profitable business. The journal’s question “Is the cell phone the library of the future?” points out very accurately an important issue: will digital literature replace paper books? We believe not. Another question, “Will cell phone novels kill the ‘author’”, raised by the New York Times, overestimates the importance of this type of writing.

The inside press like Asahi Shimbun (www.asahi.com), Sankei Shimbun (www.sankei.jp.msn.com), Mainichi Shimbun (www.mainichi.jp), Yomiuri Shimbun (www.yomiuri.co.jp) Japan Times (www.japantimes.co.jp), Japan Today (www.japantoday.com), to name just some of them, have reflected the evolution of this “literary craze”[8]. The general idea is that these newspapers , the same way as the Western newspapers, treat the subject in a sensational manner, offering general, incomplete information, giving too much credit to these cell phone fictions, while the literary world is not only reserved, but especially critical. Mizuho Kawaharazuka and Kayo Takeuchi write in the educational journal “Developing International Communication Skills in Japanese Cultural Studies” the article Considering the cell phone novel (Keitai Shousetsu)[9], describing the novel’s features and analysing the best-seller Koizora (harshly translated “Sky of Love”).

The literary world and literary criticism have also studied the phenomenon with the intention of classifying it. Its content and language shortcomings have induced a negative position, considering it a social communication issue of the young generation. The name of “novel” is somehow inaccurate, because, though basically it is plot structured, the fiction has diary like features and, though diaries can be literature, these ones can hardly amount to that. Works that analyse the Keitai shousetsu movement are: Hayamizu, Kenro, Keitai shosetsu teki. ‚Futatabi yankii-ka’ jidai no shojotachi (“Cellphone novel style: Girls become Yankees’ Again“), Hara Shobo Publishing, Tokyo, 2008; Honda, Toru, Naze keitai shosetsu wa ureru ka (“Why are cellphone novels sold successfully?“), Softbank Creative, Tokyo, 2008; Ishihara, Chiaki, Keitai shosetsu wa bungaku ka. (“Are cellphone novels literature?“), Chikuma Shobo Publishing, Tokyo, 2008; Matsuda, Tetsuo, Japanese Literature Today: Publishing Trends for 2006, in JAPAN FOUNDATION, Japanese Book News No. 51, S. 2–3, 2007, Tokyo: Japan Foundation.

Internet sites that provide software for creating personal websites which can be used on the computer or cell phone and on which cell phone novels are uploaded, chapter by chapter, are, among others, Maho no i-rando (Magic Island), Mobage town, Magic library Plus, TextNovel, the latter being the first English novel web site. Maho no i-rando, the first and largest mobile novel portal in Japan, records a million titles, 3.5 billion monthly visitors and six million registered users, according to the company[10]. Another type of web sites is that of the big publishing companies and distributors, like Goma Books, Asuki Media Works, Tohan, Starts Publishing Co., which offered for sale hardcover books that were originally written on mobile phones.

A short overview of keitai shousetsu takes us back to 2002 when Yoshi, a young male author in his twenties, posts on a web site the first mobile phone novel, entitled “Deep Love: Ayu no monogatari” (“Deep Love: Ayu’s story”), considered even today “the father of keitai shousetsu”[11]. His explicit intention was to attract the young generation to read novels and even write themselves. Very much aware of his public’s literary level, he proposed a different type of writing fiction. And he had success, his novel selling more than 2.6 million copies and being adapted for film, television drama and manga (Japanese comics). The fact that he is the creator of a new genre lies in his strategy to imperceptibly make youngsters become interested in novel reading: he studied high-school girls and boys’ lifestyle, “interviewed young girls and strategically planned what he would write and how he could capitalize on the media”[12].

In this way, youngsters, mostly women, started to write on their tiny phones and upload on the internet. The surprise was the lively feedbacks from readers and their hunger for more. The stories, many with a great realistic touch, were voraciously read thanks to the non-literary language and content. The similitude of keitai shousetsu with story telling among close friends makes the reader empathize and even identify with the protagonist. High-school life can be very challenging for most teenagers because temptations like alcohol, drugs and sex are a part of being cool.

An innovation shift from the traditional literary “pact with the reader”[13] is represented by the more direct and touchable reader-writer relationship. This interactive type of writing fiction, although poor in literary characteristics, helps today’s teenagers to get into writing and reading “cool” novels, not imposed by school or parents. This is their literature, which they will leave behind together with the teenage life.

Surrounded by high-tech devices that make all activities easier and faster, reading a traditional book requires time and knowledge, while this easy fiction is not educative and can be read/written in any place at any time, like during long commutes, in a class break or just before going to bed. This virtual communication between writer and reader through an internet “window”, as well as the specialized content and language (for teens), makes the genre so popular and best selling, the readers’ intrusion in the fiction giving them a strong motivation for buying the novels when become paperbacks.

Mizuho Kawaharazuka and Kayo Takeuchi classify the evolution of the cell phone novel into three ages in the article cited above. The first period is called “the Yoshi’s era”[14] and it includes the birth of the phenomenon in 2002 when Yoshi published his novel Deep Love and sold “2.7 million copies (cf. Starts Publishing press release no. 30.08.2005)”[15]. And it increased during the next two years with Yoshi’s prolific novels, when “his works were in the top ten best sellers of novels”[16]. Yoshi’s writing style has had a colossal impact on the novels written after him, most of them embracing the pattern.

The next age is called “the golden age of cell phone novels”[17] or riaru-kei[18] (realist). This period goes from 2005 to 2007, when it reaches its peak. The name of “real cell phone novels” marks its essential content feature: the writers tell their real love experiences, fictionalised now and then, this giving the works a well received touch of authenticity. With the coming out and the success of the cell phone portals offering free downloads, such as Maho no i-rando, high school girls feel encouraged to write their stories of teenage illusions, problems and temptations. “The individual stories evolve from a mixture of sex, prostitution, violence, jealousy, unwanted pregnancy, abortion, rape, auto-aggression, attempted suicide, drug abuse, illness and death. Love is romantically transfigured and illustrated as a positive force that renders meaning to life and acts as a remedial source”[19].

“The story, which sparked this trend[20], was Chaco’s Tenshi ga kureta mono (“Gifts from an Angel”), based on real experiences of love in high school. It continued to rank number one in popularity on the Maho no i-rando site for several months, and in October of 2005, it was sold in book form. For the next six months, it sold over 200,000 copies, becoming a bestseller, and in 2007 was made into a movie.

The big hit of the golden age was Mika’s Koizora (“Sky of Love”), published as paperback in 2006. It is a “two volume book, with a respectable number of 700 pages – corresponding to 100 characters per page on a cell phone screen and the incredible number of 2800 pages that were completely read on a cell phone screen by millions of young women”[21]. The nearly two million copies sold, the movie adaptation in 2007 and the television drama in 2008 have established its success[22].

Next in the top selling online and book format is Mei’s Akai ito (“Red Thread”), published in 2007 and having sold one million copies in one week. Of course, a movie and a television drama were released in 2008. Moshimo kimiga (“If you…”) places its author, Rin, on the fifth position in the bestsellers’ top in 2007, selling 400,000 hardcover copies.

This predominant female author fiction is not a novelty in Japan’s literary history. Back in the nineteenth century, educated court ladies began to write fiction, the most important figure and her crucial work being Murasaki Shikibu, respectively Genji no Monogatari (“The tale of Genji”). At that time, court ladies, the Empress’ companions, began to write intimate diaries, in Japanese, the spoken and unofficial language. Their class was a closed, powerless one, shut out from men’s world, “entirely integrated in aristocratic closed groups”[23]. Therefore, writing was their way to escape the harshness of their condition. In such small, hermetic groups, the women were creating literature, their literature, writing and reading it within the group. “Writers and readers (the audience) were members of the same small group […]. Certainly, the reader was a potential writer as well”[24]. The feminist perspective has thus a long, but quiet tradition. Today, we find the same intimacy among young girls, the only change lies on the writing devices: now, as well as then, authors and readers communicate in a closed group, only not face to face, but intermediated by a virtual world. Nineteenth-century court ladies’ diaries, as well twenty-first youngsters’ keitai shousetsu, though separated by a rich and serious literature history, both are pioneers. Time will tell if this novel-like fiction will develop into something worth the name “novel”, or it will vanish like a teenage fad.

From a feminist perspective, these writings raise a question mark: “As a method, it leads to the empowerment of girls”, according to Satoko Kan, a professor who specializes in contemporary women’s literature, who wrote for The New Yorker[25]. Would these literary attempts be an unconscious form of expressing themselves in a man-dominated world?

An important aspect of the author-fiction relationship relies on identity hiding and the borrowing of pen names. Giving up their real identity means for these young girls the best and the handiest way of escaping reality. However, the authenticity of these writings comes also from the author’s identification in name with the protagonist. What is a pen name for the author is a real name for the protagonist. In this way, the fictional world extends up to the borders of real life.

The two-level hiding, one behind a false name, the other behind the tiny cell phone screen, ironically shows a social and an identity dysfunction, common in these days’ society. One sixth grade author, pen named Bunny (after the Disney story “Bambi”), finds using her real name in fiction writing “embarrassing”[26]. Shy and ashamed of her fantasies, Bunny avoids real communication, preferring a cyber-identity, where she can talk freely. Her novel, Wolf Boy x Natural Girl, released in three volumes in 2009 has sold 110,000 paperback copies in just a few months, according to Starts Publishing Co.. Mone, author of Eternal Dream, is a 21-year old, married woman, who began writing on her Keitai out of depression, and what started as a confessional story, ended up as a fictional one, due to numerous enthusiastic feedbacks from online readers. Like the other girls, she doesn’t reveal her identity. “I would never let my image be seen,” she said to the New Yorker correspondent, Dana Goodyear. “I don’t want to bring unwanted attention on my family […]. And it’s not just me—there’s my husband’s family to think of, given the things I’m writing. I don’t want to inconvenience anyone. Revealing anything, whether it’s fiction or truth, is embarrassing, don’t you think?”[27]. Roland Kelts, a half-Japanese writer born in the United States and the author of Japanamerica. How the Japanese pop culture has invaded the U.S., sees the Internet as an escape valve for a society that can be oppressive in its expectation of normative, group-minded behaviour[28].

Because of its popularity and of the huge number of writers and novels on one side, and the widening of the thematic field (mystery, comedy, horror, science fiction, fantasy, history fiction) on the other side, keitai shousetsu’s development has outrun its success and has eased off on a matured market. At this point, the species has imposed itself as para literature, a phenomenon with a great impact on the media and a type of easy teen fiction that continues to exist and reshape itself as long as the entertainment industry will make money out of it. This is the third age, defined by Mizuho Kawaharazuka and Kayo Takeuchi, as “the solidification of the genre”[29].

Being a physical and virtual extended market, it explores new technological possibilities of e-commerce like electronic literature, which is another type of cyber facility. New digital reading devices such as Kindle (launched by Amazon), Reader (launched by Sony) or Nook (by bookstore chain Barnes & Noble)[30] offer the possibility of stocking a large amount of books, rewritten in electronic format. In this way, time, physical space and money are saved. In 2010 a group of writers, including novelist Hideaki Sena, launched “AiR,” an electronic magazine that bypasses publishers and bookstores and is distributed for a fee[31]. The today’ tendency in Japan seem to gape an abyss between the bookstores and the publishing houses that sense a menace coming from this rapid electronic development and digital giants that overcome the needs of an outrunning society.

The structure and epic of the Keitai shousetsu are tightly bound to the cell phone features. Thus, the sentences are short, simple and concise, the word display follows the European way of writing – that is to say from left to right, horizontal rows (different from the Japanese style: right to left, vertical rows)[32],[33]. Should this be seen as an implicit approval for world’s globalisation tendency?

Considering the writing techniques and content themes, grammar and vocabulary, we can draw a consistent pattern that all Keitai shousetsu are following:

• Abbreviated description of scenery
• Predominating dialogue and monologue
• Fast development of the story
• Short and simple sentences
• First person perspective renders authenticity and complicity with the reader, strengthening the writer-reader relationship
• Very little plotting or character evolution
• Young language, slang, which gives the atmosphere a touch of intimacy
• Use of non-textual elements (symbols, emoticons)
• Blank spaces, to show silence
• Wordsgetcrammedtogether, to show rapid actions, hot scenes.
• Romantic themes: pregnancy, miscarriage, abortion, rape, rivals and triangles, incurable disease, death, unhappiness, self-sacrifice
• Space setting in the provinces – the undifferentiated swaths of rice fields, chain stores, and fast-food restaurants

Explicit auctorial intention shows the writers’ consciousness about their writing process: Rin told the Japan Times correspondent, Yoko Hani, that “she intentionally uses short sentences, creates blank spaces and chooses less complicated expressions because as she writes she is always thinking about the keitai screen and the readers[34]. In other cases they do not intend to write novels, they have never had, but a diary-like story as a means of iyashi (healing) or sharing teenage illusions and sufferings. Receiving positive feedbacks from their posted chapters encourages them to keep on writing.

The serialization is a specific feature of these novels, which is not an invention of the digital age, but rather “a replication, with a new technology, of a practice that was used very successfully 175 years ago[35], by the 19th century British novelists as Charles Dickens, who first published his novels in epistolary form.

Regarding grammar and vocabulary, we have mentioned above their poor quality. Full of misspellings, slang and little word diversity, language is closer to the users’ age section, and also to the cell phone’s tiny screen, which doesn’t allow too much sentence enrichment. The Japanese language, as a SOV[36] language, has made it easier for this type of novel to take shape. Highly dependent on the context, “the Japanese language, full of successive periphrases and approximations, enables each interlocutor to seek refuge in a world of reservations, allusions”[37], that make the reader “an active participant in the making of the world of meanings”[38]. Considering these ideas, we can understand how it was possible for tiny screens to capture meaning, though a simplistic one. It is also true that the literary language has a high level of artisticity and meaningfulness that a yankii[39] cannot read, while the level of language in a keitai shousetsu is by far another language. The ideograms and Katakana (the Japanese syllables for borrowed words and proper names) are used in an elliptical style and with a slang vocabulary.

The time of creation is also of unusual type. They create during long commutes from home to school, in class breaks or just before going to bed. The time for inspiration and focus on the artistic level is short and fragmented. The fact that most of the people use their time between destinations communicating across long distances by phone or computer, instead of talking to the person next to them, represents a tare of the digital age. Direct communication has been overtaken by these hi-tech devices that, on one hand, bring virtually closer people from all around the world, but on the other hand, drive away the feeling of belonging to a real community.

The epic thread of such fictions is very much alike. Teenage love encounters difficulties as rape, pregnancy, miscarriage, jealousy, revenge, sentimental rupture. The good girl falls in love with a bad boy, a nonconformist and a delinquent, but the happy ending of their love story is replaced by either the deadly accident or the deadly disease of one of them. Mizuho Kawaharazuka and Kayo Takeuchi analyse the story of Mika, Koizora, which is the story of fresh year high school girl, Mika, and rowdy Hiro.

The acknowledgement of success is held by two kinds of prizes, one offered by Maho no i-rando and DoCoMo (“The Outstanding Achievement Award”) and one offered by “Mainichi Shimbun and Starts Publishing to find talented new young writers and promote high quality keitai novels”[40] (“Japan Keitai Novels Prize”).

Art and technology are now connected on the tiny screen of a multifunctional cell phone. Japan, famous for harmonious dualism of black and white (in general terms[41]), has been experimenting for the last decade the twining of fiction with electronic hardware. Writing a novel on a cell phone would have been unthinkable no more than a few decades ago. Japan’s long and impetuous literary tradition and its high standard technologies have created a hybrid – the cell phone novel – which gained very much attention from all society strata. Being loved and produced by teenagers, the Keitai shousetsu is also bitterly criticized by literary critics as Yumi Tonozaki, cited by the New Yorker[42]. Its flatness of plot, character and vocabulary, makes it hard for the literary men to call it a novel in the traditional sense. It is fiction, though not on a high level of artisticity. The fact that it is written on high-tech devices and its accessibility to the large public, give the species the grant to be talked about.

For us, people of the twenty-first century, art and technology must mingle together and the cell phone novel seems to initiate a new era for artistic communication. If it is not yet pure literature, maybe that in the future, encouraged both by critics and readers, this species become more professional. Or it may just die away as literature expert at Waseda University in Tokyo, Chiaki Ishihara, believes: “Keitai shosetsu is rapidly declining at this point”, Ishihara told CNN. “In a few years, it may not even be considered a subculture”[43]. Literature, the mirror of collective imagery, has been reflecting the human pains and victories. Literature, and we refer to the Japanese one, is facing now a new challenge. Beside cell phone novels, J-literature has experienced with great success another type of electronic literature: a novel written on the computer and posted online so that the author may catch the pulse of his narrative. Such a novel, a best-seller in 2001, well received by the literary world, is Konsento (“Concent”), written by Randy Taguchi.

At this moment electronic literature is a communication portal, because an increasingly alarming aspect of youngsters’ everyday life is the lack of direct, face-to-face communication. Our time is defined by cybernetics and long distance communication devices, as cell phones, computers, home cinemas, i-Pads, which have replaced oral and close communication. People use digital techniques in order to compress time and space distances, which is a positive development. Yet, we can notice a frustration feeling, repressed deeply in the subconscious, fed by this robot-like world. Virtual communication gives more freedom and less responsibility to both emitter and receiver. Still, something is slipping through our fingers: the feeling of closeness and human touch. On the other hand, digital devices can ease up the educational process. Being known the fact that students can’t imagine life without cell phone, computer or iPad, educational programs should include them in the study as digital tools.

Hence, is the high technology of the postmodern era a step forward to conquering new dimensions, or a step backwards to the prejudice of human nature? Is this novel evolution an artistic regress or a technological progress? How does the human being define itself in between these two coordinates? These questions, along with the ones raised above, set in motion our predictions’ depository and suppose which may be the answers. A fair position to these legitimate wonderings is an honest and subjective one. Man’s nature is evolutionary, pushing the edges of the unknown further and further. His humanity consists of his imperfect and dualistic nature, always being challenged by the both rational and irrational, mind and soul. The endeavour to create easier ways of living, through technology, is claimed by the rational side, while creativity, even on a cell phone screen, belongs to the irrational side.

We may conclude now that Japanese critics’ negative feedback is solid. Keitai shousetsu may not be literature, but is a form of self-expression for a generation of cell-phone addicts. The fact that they are writing and fictionalise their experiences, read them online and buy the book format of them, make this creative activity be taken into consideration.

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Notes

Laurenţiu Malomfălean

Babes-Bolyai University, Cluj-Napoca, Romania

laurentiu.trei@yahoo.com

Hypertext. Cybertext. Digitext

Abstract: In this paper I will try to define and compare three forms of textual embodiment, which are specific to different cultural periods and literary fields. In a diachronic view, those kinds of text are hypertexts only as the main paper-written text in hypermodernism, cybertexts as filling the space between paper and screen (by concerning cybermodernism) and, finally, digitexts (a relatively new concept) as the textual dominant of contemporary digitalism.

Keywords: Hypertext; Cybertext; Digitext; Hypermodernism; Cybermodernism; Digitalism.

Nowadays, terms like hypertext, cyber literature and, the more or less new, digital text are mixed and wrapped together without any logic. Hyper is not equivalent with cyber and cyber age is not the same with digital age. The differences are maybe minimal, but they are there. To begin with, the fictional world[1] became a virtual one, but the modalities of construction are similar for both[2]. In any case, the logic is the same: fictional or virtual, these more or less textual worlds have only one wish: to be more real than our beautiful real world.

 1. Hypertext and hypermodernism

 We usually relate hypertext with (hyper)links or what should be called a web hyperstructure. In this acceptation, the term was first coined in 1963 by Ted Nelson, a pioneer of our Holy Internet. But, grosso modo, hypertext was first used in poetics by Gérard Genette, in his preamble to Palimpsestes. In this book, the French author defines a transtextual relation which he calls hypertextualité, that is, in his own words, “toute relation unissant [!] un texte B (que j’appellerai hypertexte) à un texte antérieur A (que j’appellerai, bien sûr, hypotexte) sur lequel il se greffe d’une manière qui n’est pas celle du commentaire. (…) Pour le prendre autrement, posons une notion génèrale de texte au second degré ((…)) ou texte dérivé [!] d’une autre texte préexistant.”[3] It is very important to highlight those two verbs – unite and derive – in relation to what a so-called hyperlink does: only relating, but never uniting or deriving a (cyber)text with/from another. In a coincidental onomastic way, Genette illustrates a genetical approach, by showing that a hypertext is a text generated by a hypotext (as James Joyce’s Ulysses is conceived upon Homer’s Odissey). Thus, hypertext is a text born from another by means of rewriting, neocontextualisation, sequel or simply parody. Literature becomes a perpetual drafting process.

Of course, and the poetician focuses a lot on this topic, there are links between all written texts and this creates a hypertextual network of books. Not intertextual, but hypertextual. And Genette analyses various forms of textual transformations, like pastiche and parody. To be more poetically precise, like in the Borgesian Babel Library, there are connections and interconnections, describing the metaphor of the total infinite book – a Mallarméan dream finally accomplished once the Internet arised out from nowhere. Because The Garden of Forking Paths shouldn’t have become real. It should have remained only in the head of that hyperreader called Borges. Real, hyperreal, the shock is gone with the hyperreal wind. Like in a freecinema film such as Amélie, there is nothing left for us, nothing to be imagined. Everything is there, every single option is already made. We can no longer imagine, because we must choose a pre-textual path already there.

When it comes to how we read a hypertext, Gerard Genette appropriates what Philippe Lejeune called “lecture palimpsesteuse”[4], by defining it in very simple and also ambiguous terms: “lecture relationelle (lire deux ou plusieurs textes en fonction l’un de l’autre)”[5]. For me, I wouldn’t say “relational” because that term refers better to the cybermode of reading. I prefer a term like ”referential” reading, which means reading two texts simultaneously: the hypertext and its hypotext, not knowing which of them is the host of the other[6]. To correct a metaphor, as the most common textual practice, hypertextuality generates a Babelian hypertextual index rather than a virtual infinite book or library. That’s why we must reconsider what we understand by reading. Because an index can’t be read, but only consulted, like any dictionary. Literature as a hypertextual classified museum…

Even if hypertext is typically postmodern(ist) – defining a moment also called textualism in the literary field, after the well-known Derridean conundrum Il n’y a pas de hors-texte – hypertextuality has been the very basis and logic of literature since its origins. This textual practice has become dominant for what Gilles Lipovetsky calls hypermodernism – by defining hypermodernity as a superlative modernity and denying what was unhappily qualified as postmodernism and postmodernity. Because, etymologically, hyper means precisely the French de hors! And hypertext means at the same time beside the text and the text beside another text. Thus, we should say again, maybe more accurately: de hors-texte il y a  toujours un autre texte – l’hypertexte.

Anyway, that acceptation of hypertext as the underlying structure of Internet, conceived as a global hypermediatic and without ending network, is the result of a literalisation process, which put into practice what Derrida metaphorically stated in L’Écriture et la difference. Those virtual hyperlinks are the hyperreal forms of the references that are invisibly coining various paper-written texts. Of course, one could say it’s the same thing. Only that it’s hyperreal! The difference lies not simply in the textual format (typed and digitalized), but also in two aspects of textual reality, which transgresses the limits that make possible the very existence of a text.

In conclusion, at first sight, what Internet or digital medium does is only to put into practice a metaphor, to make a figure literal, by destroying its charm. The result is hypertext as we use it everyday. But emphasis should be placed on the synonymy of hyper with… paper. In describing a text translated on a digital support, a term like cybertext is more accurate, as I shall state in the second part of this, again, paper.

 2. Cybertext and cybermodernism

In 1997, Espen J. Aarseth defined cybertext as a type of ergodic literature[7], emphasizing the role of the cyber-medium in the reception of cybertextual realities. But not only there is the medium a character, if we want to follow Aarseth’s statements. First, a medium is always defined in contrast with another, and even paper is present more than in a tactile way when we read a book. Secondly, the choice of the reader who has become a user is only a graduation of the same possibility, pre-existent in the nonvirtual age. Finally, the long proclaimed openness of cybertext is just a little bit larger than the traditional one. I would just say that the openness of the text is real, not only a critical metaphor.

In short, cybertext is a transition between hypertext and digitext or, in more words, a paper text translated into digital form, but without any digital qualification. The pure transcription of a text from its analogue form into its digital format. Extrapolating, I think we should expand this definition in both sides – id est in every possible direction. Thus, cybertextuality as textual practice would be the proliferation of literature beyond the paper-written support and also the penetration of digital media into the realms of literature. A blog, for example, is mainly a collage of texts indirectly or even directly copied from a classic support on a digital one. But, on the other hand, we have that large amount of cyberpunk paper-written literature, which moves from the virtual into the classic (or rather modern?) reality. In any case, it’s just a translatation, a transliteration between two textual boundaries, provoked by the cyber-space boom.

Of course, terms like cybertextuality and cybertextualism become absolutely necessary in these conditions, and they must be defined in relation with hypertextuality and hypertextualism. Then, this new kind of text permits a participative and collaborative reading (when it moves from the paper support onto the electronic one), made possible by the hyperlinks. But, I repeat, at this level a (hyper)link only connects and never unites two texts in a scriptic succession rapport. I will give one example of producing cybertexts: in the Romanian virtual space (if such a localisation is not superfluous) the latest collaborative practice of writing is the Babel Story site[8], a free platform for intercyberauthors. But, like that Storyspace of the 80’s, this Babelian story project hardly uses of the digital specificity; it could be conceived as well in a traditional analogical medium as a creative writing session – collective, how else.

The new millennium marks the end of postmodernism (although hypermodernism is a more accurate term), and cybermodernism emerges as a transition towards a completely new cultural paradigm. If hypermodernity proposed the end of humanity as a collective subject, cybermodernity proposes the cyborg as an alternative to the death of man. A cyber-persona surrounding the inner void. A void eternally on-line. But everything has an end. Even ending. If this (or that, already?) cyberhumanity was the literalisation – id est realisation – of a cultural metaphor due to Foucault’s  post-humanity, we should be the messengers of the rebirth of man. But this paper is about literarisation, not about literalisation.

 3. Digitext and digitalism

When it comes to what I shall define as digitext, the pre-examples are already common: Raymond Queneau’s Hundred Thousand Billion Poems, Julio Cortázar’s Hopscotch or the novels of Milorad Pavić, in which reading is a combinatorial act, ordered by the reader and not by the author, who only proposes different trajectories. In addition to this, we could say that the reception theory of this kind of texts is beyond reading, overcoming it into a more complex interaction.

Of course, digitext is coined from the words digital and text. However, the emerging word is completely new. It’s neither a derivative word, like hypertext or cybertext, where we have two terms – a prefix and a root word – nor a compound word. It’s a new noun, which has nothing to do with digital, nor with the common text. Because in digitext the two component parts are unified in that internal „-t-”, which mixes them together. Like in a chemical reaction, the two reactants – in this case, digital and text – make a new substance. What does salt have to do with chlorine and sodium? Anyway, if hypertext remains on paper and cybertext remains the virtual form of a paper-written text (or the virtual reality put on paper), we now can define digitext as a writable, operable and performable text only in a digital medium, inconvertible to a paper support. Obviously, we could play a little and say that digital literature is written with all our ten fingers on a keyboard. In contrast, the other old literature is written with a pen(cil) held in one hand, being a manual literature. And, surprisingly, analogue means exactly manual!

Yet, this digital literature seems to be sentenced to immaturity. Besides interactive fiction, let’s take poetry for example. Of course, poems could be written at two hands, on yahoo messenger. But poetry, that true Poetry, will always remain a solipsist act. As for the rest, only fakes and hypocrisy. Literature at its best is the result of a lonely pact with the real – whatever that real is. That’s why digital poetry won’t surpass the fad freaky stage. Or, at least, with extreme difficulty. Maybe digital prose or digital dramaturgy will have more luck. Because poetry cannot be unlinked with our soul, without it ceasing to be poetry. Mais, hélas, c’est une autre histoire! For now, we must agree that as a culmination of the writing liberalisation (a main result of blogging, the cybertextual phenomenon par excellence) the  aesthetic value of the digitext collapses under a very common pleasure principle, being a forced form of literature, too little spontaneous. But who knows? Maybe the real digiwriter is not born yet. Afterwards, reading is a death concept in our digital age. But we could accept a performative reading, equal in importance with the writing process. Anyway, to finish with these obsolete categories, for digitext – and not only for it – critical literacy became a myth. Digitext contains its own critical approach. Digitext is beyond criticism and aesthetic value. That’s a fact.

Above, I defined cybermodernism as a buffer zone between hyper-and-not-post-modernism and a new episteme. How should we call it? If we regard digitext as the specific textual form of the new cultural paradigm, it is as logical as possible to define the moment digitalism. Why this movement from a textual embodiment towards a dominant -ism? Inaugurated by the relation between textualism and postmodernism, this direction of thought became almost a rule. So let it be digitalism. But still, at this point I have to mention and vigorously quote Alan Kirby, an Oxford-based cultural critic whose last-year book, Digimodernism. How New Technologies Dismantle the Postmodern and Reconfigure Our Culture, debates our subject. I will postpone the terminological polemic on the deficiency of a word like digimodernism and accept its content:

Since its first appearance in the second half of the 1990s under the impetus of new technologies, digimodernism has decisively displaced postmodernism to establish itself as the twenty-first century’s new cultural paradigm. It owes its emergence and pre-eminence to the computerization of text, which yields a new form of textuality characterized in its purest instances by onwardness, haphazardness, evanescence, and anonymous, social and multiple authorship. These in turn become the hallmarks of a group of texts in new and established modes which also manifest the digimodernist traits of infantilism, earnestness, endlessness and apparent reality. Digimodernist texts are found across contemporary culture, ranging from “reality TV” to Hollywood fantasy blockbusters, from Web 2.0 platforms to the most sophisticated videogames, and from certain kinds of radio show to crossover fiction. In its pure form the digimodernist text permits the reader or viewer to intervene textually, physically to make text, to add visible content or tangibly shape narrative development. Hence “digimodernism”, properly understood as a contraction of “digital modernism”, is a pun: it’s where digital technology meets textuality and text is (re)formulated by the fingers and thumbs (the digits) clicking and keying and pressing in the positive act of partial or obscurely-collective textual elaboration.[9]

 Obviously, this process of textual digitisation hasn’t come out of nowhere, and Alan Kirky further asserts that “in its early years a burgeoning digimodernism co-existed with a weakened, retreating postmodernism; it’s the era of the hybrid or borderline text (The Blair Witch Project, The Office, the Harry Potter novels)”, but also cyberpunk literature and other forms of cybertext. As I have shown above, cybermodernism was precisely that borderline between hypermodernism[10] and our digitalism.

And finally, the promised polemic. Why digitalism and not digimodernism? On the one hand, a contraction of ”digital modernism” is improper in this case, because the result gives us a term without any reference to the digital. We don’t have a prefix like digi, we must use digit. What functions in the word digitext as a fusion, here is a nonsense. On the other hand, we should at last get rid of this modernism, which has become a mere stereotype and, thereby, a self-sufficient headache! Because the digital revolution marches beyond modernism. In other words, why not simply digitalism? Why must we always, again and again, reuse this twentieth-century suffix named modernism? We must go on!

Of course, to quote the paper call for this article, digital technologies open the field of literature and literarity to new forms of literary practice, yet we cannot even suggest ”the demise of literature” in the age of digitalism. There is only a diminution of the literarity as what makes a text to actually be a text and, secondly, we are witnessing a proliferation of new textual practices, alternative styles of reading and spectacular ways of collaboration.

Bibliography:

 Aarseth, Espen J.: Cybertext. Perspectives on Ergodic Literature, The Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore, Maryland, 1997;

Genette, Gerard: Palimpsestes. La littérature au second degré, Éditions du Seuil (collection Poétique), Paris, 1982;

Kirby, Alan: Digimodernism. How New Technologies Dismantle the Postmodern and Reconfigure Our Culture, New York, Continuum, 2009.

Notes

Ruxandra Bularca

Babeş-Bolyai University, Cluj-Napoca, România

ruxandra.bularca@gmail.com

How the Internet taught me to read

Abstract: This study discusses the material component of a book as paramount to an aesthetic delimitation between the book in its classic, traditional meaning, or the book per se, and its electronic counterpart, generically dubbed e-text. Concurrently, it also attempts to establish itself as a rather symptomatic treaty on contemporary reading. It does not embark on a review of the new editorial means and methods; nor does it assume any subversive stance, in taking sides with regard to the two incarnations of the book. The Internet offers a paradigm which can no longer be ignored or marginalised by mainstream editorial studies, whereas digital native individuals are inevitably led to assume personal perspectives on the act of reading (as a performance, not as an achievement!), and such perspectives may sometimes appear at odds with tradition. Thus, the Digital Age lends the factual book a decadent aesthetic role to play on the new cultural scene, a role that leads to the emergence of book art or using books as mediums or canvases instead of abstract content.

Keywords: E-text; E-book; Book art; Digital native; Digital immigrant; Digital reading,; Internet; Pierre Bayard.

“Literary imagination is an aesthetic object offered by a writer to a lover of books.”

Gaston Bachelard

Argument

It is a unanimously accepted fact that the digital environment entails a process of rethinking the relationship between readers and their books. The emergence of a new paradigm, that of the e-book and e-reading, has caused a relapse of the book (as an object), stripping it down to the purely functional, that is, to the simple display of content in a more accessible, cost-effective environment, where individual copies can be replicated endlessly. The book’s materiality has thus become an independent variable, not an ancillary (and always intrinsic) trait, as entertained up until the advent of the ‘90s.

This study is attempting to discuss the material component of the book as a paramount to an aesthetic delimitation between the book in its classic, traditional meaning, or the book per se, and its electronic counterpart, generically dubbed e-text.

Concurrently, it also attempts to establish itself as a rather symptomatic treaty on contemporary reading. It does not embark on a review of the new editorial means and methods; nor does it assume any subversive stance, in taking sides with regard to the two incarnations of the book. Beyond simply drawing an impressionist profile, or being liable to appear as such, it is consequential to a rather more profound aspect. The Internet offers a paradigm which can no longer be ignored or marginalised by mainstream editorial studies, whereas digital native individuals are inevitably lead to assume personal perspectives on the act of reading (as a performance, not as an achievement!), and such perspectives may sometimes appear at odds with tradition.

What is a digital native?

Digital natives are individuals who have been born, intellectually speaking, into the Digital Age of the world, since the World Wide Web and its inherent informational flows have effectively become common place. They start to interact with the new technologies from an early age, and benefit from an upbringing within the Internet environment which is plausibly akin to that received in their own father’s house: indeed, they acquire a dynamic knowledge and familiarity with the meanders of the digital stage, as they would with the rooms of their real-life homes.

Mark Prensky, the scholar who authored one of the meanings of the term^[1], places it in direct opposition to that of the digital immigrant: the individual born (or should we say, brought up) before the ‘70s, that is, before the wide-scale implement of digital technologies, and who therefore has to adopt, at some rather late age in life, the mannerism and the mechanisms of the Digital Age.

These terms draw meaning from the analogy with the perspective on the native citizens of any given country, who acquire a natural grasp on native customs, language and religion, as compared to immigrants to the country, who are expected to adapt to the new realities. Prensky pushes forward to discuss matters of digital immigrants’ “accent “and “dialect” (such as a propensity for printing documents and taking notes on paper, rather than submitting on-screen comments, or printing emails in order to save and file them as hard-copies). Digital immigrants are distinguishable by their thick, heavy accent when they turn vocal in the network, as they adopt distinctly pre-digital manners – for instance, calling someone to their room so as to share with them the webpage displayed on the computer screen, rather than simply sending the URL; or, including the apparently redundant attribute “digital” when referring to their camera, rather than simply calling it a “camera” as a digital native would.

How am I reading, or The Internet, the Book and their constraints

We will state as a starting point that both the literary eye and the sound literary reasoning can be educated just as efficiently in both environments. The outcome is approximately the same. Most often, an excessive reading of traditional books can warrant a reading experience just as shallow as that which transpires from accessing a plethora of Internet articles via their URLs, and both represent the same function: purely informative.

In its linearity, reading presupposes certain calmness and an uninterrupted flux, which builds in intensity, in a gradual crescendo. This transgresses into the disruptive, and becomes a disconnecting and disconnected experience when it operates in environments where text is no more than a mere reference within the weave developed and supported by adjacent texts, all of which seem to circle it both playfully and incessantly.

Also, digital reading extends to the fact that the availability of all references, footnotes, and generally the satisfaction of all conceivable requirements for further insight or clarification impose a relativistic appearance to the main text and to its significance cloud, ranking it down to an indeterminate position within the larger network.

Digital reading implies, by its very non-linearity, its transgressions, its narrative beat swings and moodish shifts in style, that the text should no longer be conceived as unique and particular. It dismantles the text and it removes it from the center of the stage, it robs it of its place as the nexus of the reader’s interest, and in doing so it creates outrageous ripples in the flow: the text is delayed until it slips out of phase, and only gains momentum as the reader is focused onto what will eventually settle down as the next (pre)text, and even then only as (con)text.

Owing to its specific instances, hypertext, technotext, cybertext, link clouds and to their transmediation capabilities, the act of Internet reading causes a mutation. The elegant armchair reader seated comfortably with his book by the fireplace (as held by the respectable literary tradition) shifts into a deranged, schizoid and compulsive persona. Digital reading seduces with its call for distributed attention. The long-awaited informed reader of the New Criticism becomes a false, wireframe reality within the network. The readers entertain such plausibilities as the notion that by clicking an ever increasing number of links, they might actually map the entire context and eventually gain access to all possible interpretations of the text.

The Internet boasts a literally infinite ability to attend to intelligent informational gobeur-ism, as a feeding frenzy. A significant number of scholars object, asserting that one can not obtain intellectual satiety by living on informational fast-food, just like one would not have the same dish everyday, and thus pointing out that there must be a difference between an informed brain and a literary brain.

Should we choose a different perspective, however, it would become apparent that an isolated (disconnected) book imposes a certain rhythm, capable of guiding the reader through the folds in time it postulates itself. Due to the discontinuous nature of digital reading, the internaut can easily take whatever time she pleases and dwell at length on portions of the text cloud which touch on the main corpus, thereby achieving control on the dosage of the reading pleasure.

Traditional reading, on the other hand, relies on certain wisdom, acquired through the repeated act of reflection, instilled through careful consideration for each paragraph. The proper way to read a book equates to the tacit immersion into the history of the niche cultural debate epitomized by that particular book; of course, with the caveat that such a debate more closely resembles a conference where time is saved for a round of questions at the end, and the audience graciously abstains from interrupting the speaker with any impolite remarks throughout the duration of the discourse.

Yet, the Internet accommodates partaking in conversations quite similar to those in real life, where the interlocutor engages the author polemically, assisting him in the construction of the discourse and possibly extending its boundaries, molding it into an ever more open, ever swirling, ever expanding narrative. Burst after burst, the digital environment discharges micro-narratives, but it never conflates them into the frame of Grand Narrative with all-encompassing wings and a taste for judicious measure.

We can carry around with us any type of gadget designed for e-reading, such as an iPhone, but the instrument itself cannot create the time for reading. Authentic reading feeds on history / chronology, and it enables memory. Far from showing disparaging contempt to such concepts, Internet reading offers a framework for the readers to design their own personal historicities and an evaluative micro-canon, while also establishing itself as the repository of paths already followed.

The memory per se is not necessarily involved in these workings. What good is there, indeed, in attempting to retain any data ourselves, since we can so easily find it in real-time, within the network and its omniscient, omni-historic archives? The underlying logic of the network itself rejoices in bookmarking and marginalia, much more than in simply gulping information at all costs. Therefore, in the absence of any information mnemotechnical requirements, reflection emerges as the winner. Since we are only one click away from the information we desire, the ideational path can attain self-indulgence and thus achieves a qualitative boost.

Remembrance and memory are consequent to the very act of reading a book. It leads the reader into the narrative universe designed by an author, and into a story erected upon certain cultural constructs defined and nuanced through previous readings. The Internet, on the other hand, grants access to all existing interpretations of such constructs, and thus triumphs in the overlay of a nearly complete spectrum of nuances. It opens the door to new interpretations and, sometimes, gives hints of such possible formats as to which the author, bound to his day and age, would have not given any thought. Not equating such an approach to a downright intrusive attempt on the initial auctorial intentions, it can still be sustained that the digital environment purposes a panoramic perspective (and also a snapshot) on a given society of culture at a given time, and can explain and contextualize with surgical prowess the synchronized evolutionary paths of literary methods, concepts and tactics, or those of stylistic form.

Internet reading represents a form of establishing connections, illustrating a function which aforetimes had remained throughout centuries the privilege and the prerequisite of those great reflexive minds empowered to assemble comparative paradigms (Goethe, for instance) avant la lettre, or to sublimate subtle cultural shifts into concise encyclopedic essays in foreboding homage to a before its time genealogical approach (as with Flaubert or Valéry).

Extensive studies were published and great coverage was granted to the so called Death of the Book (with a capital D) in the Digital Age, however such statements should give proper consideration to the level of subsistence within the narrative of the mechanics of desire (as defined by Brooks or Hillis-Miller), which can become creatively attuned to both author and reader. As far as the narrative is concerned, change has only affected its medium, its dynamics and the rules regarding access, and the potential ability of story-users to equip themselves in order to immerse into the epic.

Tricksters in Academia – powered by the Book

For me, the reader, the text of the book represents the percentage of the book’s universe shared/updated by the author within its covers. Thus, the book becomes the entirety of the “world” which explodes into existence when contact is made between reader and text.

This world is as much powered by the reader through an imaginative process (centered on an accumulation of data pertaining to my real, present environment and adjoining on the subjective sum of all experiences derived from my previous readings), as much – of course – as it belongs to the author, just like the book, or (to) the text of the book itself.

Thus, we can witness a role reversal, in what Gadamer defines “the hermeneutic circle”. It entails a gradual surrender of redundant or ultimately incompatible interpretations (with regard to the continuous stream of fresh “data” consequent to permanent updates to the expectations horizon, in line with the advances in reading).

The digital environment causes the streams of meaning projected (from the hermeneutic circle) that end up labeled as “faulty” (and seen, in Gadamer’s key, as possible instances of the book) to avoid being discarded simply on virtue of the fact that they never materialized. They do belong, in fact, to the book – but to that compendium forsaken by the author yet embraced and updated by the reader, and atuned to the reader’s parameters.

A library becomes thus a “world” which subjectively draws psychological sense, generated by networks that materialize from the interconnection and superimposition of past potentialities. The reader thus weaves the fabric of existence for the context himself, manipulating the sum of the book’s virtual incarnations.

The practice of digital reading determines by necessity a reconfiguration of the book’s medium.

Along with the development of digital reading strategies, the French Academia has witnessed a similar effervescence even within the traditional, analogue medium. One of its most radical voices, that of Pierre Bayard[2] (echoed by Umberto Eco) postulates (bluntly) that books should not even be thoroughly read, as a matter of fact. In complete defiance of the – horrified – buttoned-up academic mainstream, the author goes on to conclude that it should suffice to know simply the coordinates of any book within the literary network (not to be confused with the Canon, which it simply encloses), to be able to issue a sound cultural judgment.

Far from being a guide to non-reading, and what at a glance might seem a manifesto of academic pharisaism, Bayard’s thesis places itself rather as an honest and profoundly human(ist) testimony, and as a soothing touch for those readers who feel rather overwhelmed by the sheer mass of available information and with humbleness try to hide their editorial gobeurism.

Despite the sacralization of reading by the society, Bayard implies that a vast majority of those who perform it are patented tricksters, even within the ranks of the literary elite. Postulating that no one can (claim to have) read Everything (nor is it feasible to do so), but rather that the driving force remains the intimate pleasure of reading, he investigates the deeper meaning of the Canon as a bibliographic patrimony.

Non-reading is, for the author, an act just as authentic as its counterpart. It implies an involvement in the literary flux and is quite distinct from what we might call the absence of reading. An authentic reader is thus more interested in his/her ability to indulge in reflection on the book, be it upon its actual reading, or without having consumed the experience. With only limited time at disposal but in charge of an apparently infinite bibliographic estate, the most respectable approach in Bayard’s opinion, would be to bookmark the grid coordinates of a reference (that is, a book) within the wider and evidently more contextualized network of Literature, so as to better grasp its relative clout and hue within the canvas of literary history.

Being aware of the grid coordinates becomes equivalent thus to being intimate with the book itself. It is instrumental to the act of reading books – and reasoning of that which is read – and does not interfere with the reader’s ability to delve deeper into some of them. The fabric of the network is in fact the body of knowledge and the collection of meanings that can be acquired without having actually read the book.

Bayard’s coordinates outline the “ideal reader” for a book. They can predict what sort of tag can stick to the book and implicitly how you would perform as a reader, because the ideal reader is powered by the book.

What can be(come) a book? – A digression

In the wake of the emergence of digital content, the book’s expression and its manners acquire a self-conscient material undertone.

Estheticizing the ontological is a form of decadence, and this seduction through aestheticism is the trait of those strong concepts or objects (in Vattimo’s terms) which lose strength by focusing on one function of theirs – in this case, that which bestows upon them an atemporal status, a passport to eternity and thus an obvious realignment of their semantic identity, prone to rejuvenate their objectual self.

Consider the monocle. The antiquarian Philip von Stosch used to wear one in Rome in the 1720s, for better results in his close examinations of engraved gems, but it did not become an ubiquitous fashion accessory until the 19th century, only to become – shortly after the advances in the field of modern optometry – a mark of dandyism. In the 18^thcentury this object acquires with a relatively fast pace its function as an eye care device, its role being to mitigate the natural inconveniences of poor eyesight. In the passing of time, the design and the production of this artefact which have been both an art and a revolution unto itself lost ground in practical and functional terms, due to the emergence of a new object – eyeglasses. Nullified in practicality, the monocle retained its aesthetic function.

It was eventually salvaged as an epitome, notably in the esthetic (but not the practical) version of steampunk[3], an esthetics which in its own right represents the resurgence of a past period – the Victorian era – at the noontide of post-modernism. As a common article in pre-Victorian times (steampunk hailing from Victorian Britain), the monocle remains today only evocative and referential to its poshdimensions.

It does not seem to be the case for the book as an artefact. Its plurality of functions remains undiminished, but when transplanted in the digital world, these functions are reduced to the status of “medium”.

The material book becomes a medium that not only facilitates the spread of knowledge, but it can stand actually stand for it, and may embody (as materiality) a self-referential meditation on its (newly acquired) ontological status.

Tradition holds the canon on how to observe a painting. From Leonardo’s “pittura e una cosa mentale” or the Louis Marin’s theories on proto-renaissance paintings, to the recommended distance from eye to canvas and to cubist tridimensionality, all trends and movements educate the eye on how to observe the “thought” on the canvas, not the canvas itself. Yes, the matter which is instrumental in breathing life to the painting remains important, of course, but in the overarching logic it is of diminished rank. Of more immediate effect is the reflection “thought” with the paintbrush and thus its outcome. In post-modernism, the painting embarks onto the act of self-consideration, whereas the majority of arts and their apparel are starting to develop their own meta-discourse.

History is repeating in approaching the book as an esthetic artifact. Owing to the long established art of bookbinding or to the elaborate minutiae of editorial elitism, or even to older ancestry, such as the art of medieval illuminators and unique hand-adorned breviaries, seeing the book as an esthetic artifact had usually the limited meaning of observing its content, or at most, the pictorial representations within the covers. Those copies which had a clear, precise function (usually religious) were bound in precious metals or subject to various methods of conservation treatment.

Tradition teaches us to perceive and rank books (only) on virtue of their content. But what may occur when the book’s “medium” is challenged by another environment and the issue lies in establishing the specificity of these two media?

Even as the process of digitization has been pushed to full throttle, the book – and the printed page – still remain cause for fascination.

As traditional texts undergo the mutation from informative to performative, they most often retain not their function, but rather their medium. To illustrate the multimedia dimensions of this alternative classification, I’m attaching examples of artists who transmutated traditional texts in authentic pieces of sculpture. The book is not reduced to its mere material medium, quite unlike Truffaut’s rendering in which all pages in all the books in all the libraries in the world are inexplicably stripped of their letters by a sign-eating-virus, thus leaving humanity denuded of its cultural meaning.

The sculptures below retain a firm grasp on the significance of the book. Their texts support the sculptural intent and complement it seamlessly, to bring into being a form of art which transgresses the reductionist, purely informative function imposed upon the book by the digital medium.

Robert The book collects books abandoned by former owners or gathered in storage bins and creates works that comment on their meaning as self-referential and their newly acquired cultural irrelevance. The explains the poetics of his art as heartfully vandalizing these discarded and betrayed books, so as to retaliate against a culture that has turned them into waste.

Robert The, The Art Crisis[4], 2003

Thomas Allen combines pulp-fiction cover-art and pop-up books to create scenes from that certain book by cutting and combining images represented on the covers and by using the remaining pages and tabs to create the stage or pedestal for the depicted event in the book.

Thomas Allen, Untitled, 2009

Cara Barer’s photographs are trying to reinvent the book as an aesthetic object and its substantiality as an abstract form with an infinite and variable range. Depicting a book this way can draw on almost as many interpretations as the content itself. The poetics^[5] of this artist is to capture, through skewing and rippling, the vulnerability and intimacy of the printed page.

CaraBarer, Untitled, 2010

The poetics of Nina Katchadourian seems to have a clear literary antecedent in the cut-up technique engineered by Brion Gysin and William S. Burroughs. The selection and organization of material is a curatorial kind of endeavor, in which the artist works within the limitations of a given collection to impose some semblance of logic and order. The physical configuration of the books, however, is sculptural, allowing the formal properties of the covers such as color, font, as well as the overall arrangement, to gird the sequencing of titles in formal subtext. And while these layers imply a knotty, multi-disciplinary practice, Katchadourian views this project as a form of portraiture, in which books freed from alphabetical order or the more basic goal of storage tell the stories of their owners through incidental verse.

A day at the beach

Primitive art The bathers

Just imagine Shark 1

Picasso Shark 2

Raised by wolves Shark 3

Sudden violence

Silence

What is Art Another way of telling

Close observation The history of Philosophy Illuminations

Negations

Brian Dettmer is using book-based scrap whose original function was cast into oblivion. His usual materials fall into the category of books, but not only. Maps, tapes and various other media “prosthetics” are geared to re-contextualize new meanings or meanings taken for granted and culturally omitted regarding the object itself. Using surgical tools, Dettmer engraves and sculpts each copy of the book into an exhibit piece that stuns the eye and persuades the mind of its inherent accuracy of detail and technique.

Brian Dettmer, Encyclopedia, 2010

In the absence of the standard white canvas, Mike Stilkey uses stacks of books in order to paint his paintings. Making use of the form and cover each book and each recycled book “spine”, his sculptures and his large installations are defined both by the picturesque imagery and by the particularity of his canvas.

Mike Stilkey, Untitled, 2009

Laramée Guy’s sculptures depict the reversed relation between the oversized accumulation of knowledge and the corrosion of the environment. Stacks of books are sculpted in such a way as to show landscape formations, edges of canyons, mountain-tops or famous landmarks reflecting the terrestrial both in physical and spiritual terms, trying to capture the living nature of inanimate objects^[6].

Guy Laramée, Untitled, 2009

Jeremy May chooses to craft unique jewelry out of old abandoned book sand. The artist dissects stack of hundreds of printed pages and laminates them to model into the desired shape through a painstaking process of production. The delicately artistic results may be worn as symbols of condensed written history and may be matched with any apparel as exclusive designed jewelry.

Jeremy May, Vanity Fair, 2010

Su Blackwell chooses to manufacture tangential scenes of ideational content from the books she uses, by gently folding and precisely cutting their pages. Artist converts the strips of text removed from the books in order to create a new narrative style in storytelling.

This hyper-detailed style varies between figures and silhouettes “tattooed “on text page, butterflies that fly towards the open book’s cover and specific narrative scenes that reflect events in the original content of the book.

Su Blackwell, Red Ridinghood și Sleeping Beauty, 2009.

Jacqueline Rush Lee’s sculptures resemble, in large degree, wilted plants or exotic marine vegetation than the remains of civilization. Deliberately destroying ancient books by exposing them to moisture, dismantling or remodeling, the artist illustrates the fragility of the object represented by the book reducing it to the status of a fossil skeleton.

Jacqueline Rush, Lorem Ipsum I, II, 2010.

Bibliography:

Bayard, Pierre, Cum să vorbim despre cărțile pe care nu le-am citit, ed. Polirom, Iași, Romania, 2008.

Webliography:

Prensky, Mark: www.marcprensky.com/writing/Prensky%20-20Digital%20Natives,%20Digital%20Immigrants

Webography:

Allen, Thomas: http://www.foleygallery.com/artists/artist_ins.php3?artist=8

Bară, Carer: http://www.carabarer.com/

Blackwell, Su: http://www.sublackwell.co.uk/

Dettmer, Brian : http://briandettmer.com/

Katchadourian, Nina: http://www.ninakatchadourian.com/index.php

Laramée, Guy: http://popstart.ca/en/members/guy-laram%C3%A9e

May, Jeremy: http://littlefly.co.uk/

Rush Lee, Jacqueline: http:// www.jacquelinerushlee.com/

Stilkey, Mike: http://www.mikestilkey.com/#

The, Robert: http://www.bookdust.com/main.htm

Notes

Cristina Vănoagă Pop

“1 Decembrie 1918” University, Alba Iulia, Romania

cristinamatilda@yahoo.com

The E-researcher

Abstract: Our paper introduces a new term – the e-researcher, which in our definition is a term defining the researcher who uses virtual tools as part of their activity. The pertinence and the extension of this type of research is also discussed, using a comparison between two types of analyses of the literary text. The first type of analysis is a classical one, based on the text, some bibliography and the inspiration of the researcher, the second uses a dedicated software called Tropes. Both analyses are performed on an essay written by Andrei Codrescu.

Keywords: E-researcher; Literary analysis; Software tools; Tropes; Andrei Codrescu.

The smell of new books… every person that loves to read knows it and most of the readers like it. But that is about to change in the digital age on account of e-books and many types of machines for reading electronic texts. Is literature perceived in the digital age the same as it used to be? Readers now have the advantage of cheaper books, because the costs for editing e-books are considerably smaller. To purchase an e-book is cheaper than purchasing the same book on paper. But how does the research community react to e-literature? There is no doubt that the digital era has opened a wider communication, letters between researchers becoming obsolete in favour of e-mails. Scientific debates are often continued in virtual space, on various forums or other discussion platforms. The myth of the researcher covered in clouds of dust in libraries and archives is about to disappear. Many libraries are scanning the content of the books and magazines, no matter how ancient, and are offering them to the reader in the form of e-text, which opens for researchers the possibility to use software tools to interpret the literary works they choose. Some of the digital era theories sustain that virtual space is a component of everyday life, each of us using virtuality as an extension for our personality and work. We intend to analyze the way virtual tools are or not a possible prolongation of the literature researcher, creating a new breed – the e-researcher.

We therefore present a research experiment that compares a literary text analysis in two different manners. The first manner is the old-fashioned manner of analysing literature, using the literary text from a book, a bibliography, the knowledge and the intellectual capacity of the human researcher. The analysed text is Against Photography, an essay written by Andrei Codrescu[1]. The second manner of analysis is using specialized software, called Tropes[2], whose exact presentation is better defined by its reference manual: “What is the content of a text? Or to be more precise: what are the core elements which must be identified in order to grasp the essential meaning of a text? Whether it is a press article, a book, a speech, or any other sequence of language, every text contains a few key sentences conveying the ideas that make up its framework: its skeletal structure. The problem, then, is to locate this central core of the text that holds the essentials of its meaning. This is the crucial first step, before any attempt at interpretation can be made” and “Content analysis, then, applies a set of techniques to a given text to determine: the identity of the main actors, the Relations in which they stand to each other, the hierarchy of these Relations and how they evolve.”[3]

The first manner of analysis depicts the way photography influenced Andrei Codrescu’s view upon life and creation. Some general outlines for this type of analysis, centred on the symbol of photography and related items, as we observed them, are presented as follows.

Andrei Codrescu spent his childhood watching his parents taking pictures, but also taking imaginary pictures through his own eyes. Both his parents were photographers. The professional environment receives an ontological value for the appearance of the human entity. “My mother and father spent most of the six months that they were married to each other in the darkroom of the photo shop. I was no doubt conceived in the darkroom. And afterwards, I baked there inside my mother under the steady red light for six full months, the time I believe that it takes most major organs and most of the brain to form. My outline must have been there in any case, as well as certain vital shadows.”[4] A correlation is created between the intrauterine environment and the photo shop environment, both being characterized by darkness and warmth. The obscure room becomes for Codrescu an equivalent of the cave or other mystical symbols of the intrauterine life, a symbol of the total protection the foetus is feeling and subconsciously misses throughout life after birth.

The adult Codrescu will later search for darkness that is full of life, explaining this way his preference for the cities that are very active at night, like New Orleans is. The red light may be considered an initiating light, a Self forming light, and many revelatory experiences signal the presence of light as part of the process. As in any other processes of this type, the separation from the revelatory experience is felt as a shock. “I was then violently wrenched into the light by my parents’ divorce”.[5] The departure of the mother from the photo shop and its red light represents the entrance into another type of light, with its own significance, the parents’ divorce and the daylight influencing the later relationship between the son and the father.

Some time after giving birth to Andrei, the mother opens her own photo shop, called Baby, after her moniker. A predestined name, Baby will influence Codrescu’s world as a child. The camera, the main instrument of a photographer, opens for him the gate to The Other and also the gate to Self. The writer speaks about the dichotomy that represents him: “I Am a Camera” vs. “I Am a Picture”, the last hypostasis being preponderant sometimes, especially as regards the relationship with his mother. While the mother was photographing the world through the lens of the camera, the child was photographing the world through his eyes. But periodically he used to get in front of the camera as a model for his mother. Several faces and body positions were changed until the mother chose one of them as worthy of being immortalised by the camera: the perfect figure of the son as an equivalent for the perfect son. Changing positions and expressions, the son is glad to receive the mother’s attention, entirely destined to him, when it was usually destined for the customers of the photo shop. The photography and the camera serve as means of expressing the love of the mother for her son.

Does photography become equal to identity? It depends on the purpose it is used for. Susan Sontag, one of the most cited authors for interpretations of photography, considers that: “A way of certifying experience, taking photographs is also a way of refusing it – by limiting experience to a search for the photogenic, by converting experience into an image, a souvenir.”[6] During the photo session, until the mother chooses the perfect pose, the child changes several expressions; all of them part of his Self. These expressions may compose a kaleidoscope defining the entire existence of the Self. As an adult, Andrei Codrescu will recognize that he finds it difficult to be in front of a camera, all photographers reminding him the photo sessions with his mother. He faces the dilemma of choosing the correct expression and posture for every picture, as all the other ones should be denied, chased away from his Self. This time equality is not present between photography and identity. Susan Sontag also brings in discussion photography as evidence. “Photographs furnish evidence. Something we hear about, but doubt, seems proven when we’ve shown photograph of it. […] A photograph passes for incontrovertible proof that a given thing happened.”[7] With humour, Andrei Codrescu recounts an event after his immigration to USA. He had not a driving licence, the usual identity proof of the Americans, so, when stopped by a police officer, he proved his identity using a photograph of himself from the cover of his first published book. This time, there is equality between photography and identity, being a strong connection between them for the authorities. As an immigrant on the American land, Codrescu ironically concludes “Photos para la autoridad!”[8]

These were mostly the main characteristics of the essay we observed during our literary analysis, using just the text from the author’s volume, a basic bibliography and the ability of the researcher. Our following analysis will transform the classic researcher into an e-researcher using, as announced, a dedicated software, Tropes.

To use Tropes, an electronic form of the essay is required in order to insert it into the software files during a simple operation. Once the text is introduced in the programme, all we need to do is to choose features of the software to respond to our interest on the text. We maintain the literary analysis centred on the symbol of photography and the terms related to it.

Even from the start, the software states the style of the essay as a rather narrative text, characterized by dynamism and action, also autobiographical, a characteristic that appears from several uses of the personal pronoun “I”. The exactitude of the facts becomes questionable due to the fact that “some notions of doubt have been detected”.[9] The software shows all the contexts in which the notions of doubt appear, the researcher being the one to determine their influence upon the veracity of the facts as autobiographical references.

Two reference fields are shown. Each of them includes an actant group and an acted group of references, which may be selected alone or together. The first reference field shows a general context. The second reference field shows a detailed context. Both fields sort the themes after their frequency. “Photography” is at the top of the list on the first reference field with 55 appearances, and the second as frequency in the detailed reference field, in this case “family” being the first as frequency. This may be a sign for the researcher that the term “photography” may need to be interpreted in a strict correlation with the notion of “family”. A list of various synonyms for photography and other semantically related terms is included into the reference fields. Next to the reference word, appears a list of all the contexts including it.

A graph helps the researcher to visualise the relationships between classes. In the centre of an orbit, the main reference is placed. On the left there are the predecessors of the reference word and on the right there are its successors. The distance between the reference classes depends on the number of connections between them. The graphic shows us that the closest predecessor to photography is family, followed closely by law, then by feeling and house organisations. At a greater distance, other classes follow: Europe, literary work, woman, time, child politics, security, world and electronics. The closest successor is social group, closely followed by feeling, business, and entertainment and far away by way, man, child, time, substance, world, woman, security. Nevertheless, the information is useful for the researcher when a contextual interpretation of photography as symbol in our text is required. Compared with the classical manner of analysis, new relationships are being outlined, even if they are not very frequent in the text, but may prove to be important for its semantic nuances.

Another feature of the software, called “scenario” presents, also in a graph form, the relationships between classes, with a strong line the frequent ones and with a dotted line the infrequent ones. In the category of “photo”, the actant “mother” is frequently related to “father” and “photograph” and infrequently to “shop” and “face”. The infrequent relations between “mother”, on one side and “shop” and “face”, on the other side contradict the emphasis we put on these relations in our old manner analysis. On the other hand, analysing another reference word, “father”, its infrequent relations with “face” and “look” confirm the sense we attributed during the first manner of analysis, which highlighted the absence of the father figure, the inconsistence of the relationship between father and son.

Picture as a way of perceiving the Other is also confirmed and highlighted by the Tropes feature called “relations”. “Picture” appears graphically to be linked most of the time to “world” and “people”.

A star graph displays also relationships between a reference word and other reference words or reference classes. “Photograph” is linked to: mother, apartment, room, world, government, search, baby, contract, son, police and girl, as predecessors. It is also linked to shop, gipsy, object, panic, melancholy, mug, Stalin, materiality, session, apartment, game equipment, end, cost, footwear, street and ground as successors. Once again, not even the most experimented eye of the researcher may comprise all the relationships existing between references. We underline the fact that in our case the analysed text is a short one, an essay, but the software may also analyse larger literary texts such as novels, even making comparisons and connections between several texts from a text corpus.

A distribution graph shows the relationships between the references after splitting the text in equal parts and following the frequency of the relationships after a histogram. Another graph of the reference relationships is constructed on the episodes of the text. The software automatically detects a number of episodes of the narrative line and may analyse different references for each episode or following its distribution in all the episodes. As an example, Tropes detected eleven episodes of the essay, the reference “picture” being presented in a histogram for every episode of the text. Closest to “photography”, different characteristics are found by the software: modality time, modality place, modality negation, the noun “child” and the personal pronoun “I”.

We chose to end here the exemplification for this computer assisted analysis, because our aim is not to present dedicated software, but to deduce some characteristics for this manner of analysing a literary text. First of all, dedicated software instantly produces all the analysis above and many others. All the researcher has to do is to introduce the text into the programme. This way, the researcher may save a lot of precious time. Once again, software is capable of observing hidden or hard-to-notice aspects of the text. But, all the graphs and statistic situations produced by the artificial intelligence need a further interpretation. We cannot put an equality sign between the result of the software and a literary analyse. The researcher is the one who will interpret data and he is the one who will choose which corridor of interpretation is more appropriate or which interpretation grid is suited for each literary text, having as conditions other aspects: the cultural context, the period of the writing, the social context, the programme of a literary movement and so on. We do not underestimate the power of artificial intelligence, but we cannot imagine a proper literary analysis without the intervention of the human mind.

Tropes is just one example of software that may be used for literary analysis and the only one that was at our disposition. Several other software programmes exist on the market, waiting to be used by the researchers. Our paper does not advocate the exclusive use of dedicated software for literary analyses. In our opinion, this type of software may prove very useful to researchers, facilitating their work through a quicker semantic analysis, for example. It can also bring to the researcher’s attention, smaller but significant symbols or fragments of text that may escape the attention of an experienced researcher. But, a software analysis does not replace the work and the finesse of the human mind and human sensibility, characteristics that open various corridors of interpreting literature, not just an exact and statistical interpretation.

That is why, we consider that a virtual analysis of the text may represent only a component of a larger and much complicated process. Talking about the future form of the human being, Andrei Codrescu stated: “… it’s really up to us to decide the future shape of our organism. I like to think of it as three-bodied creature, one electronic, one green, and one plain old flesh-human.”[10] Leaving aside the green component, we think that the researcher of the future may add an electronic component to the already existing old flesh-human one, in a gathering that may constitute an e-researcher. The dawn of this new breed of researcher has already appeared, the future will decide its pertinence.

References

Andrei Codrescu, The Muse Is Always Half-dressed in New Orleans and Other Essays, Picador, USA, New York, 1995.

Andrei Codrescu, Miracol şi catastrofă. Dialoguri cu Robert Lazu, Hartmann, Arad, 2005.

Mircea Eliade, Naşteri mistice, translated by Mihaela Grigore Paraschivescu, Humanitas, Bucureşti, 1995.

Susan Sontag, On Photography, Anchor Books, New York, 1990.

Tropes. Version 7.2. Reference manual, available at

http://www.semantic-knowledge.com/doc/V70/text-analysis/index.html .

Notes

Felix Nicolau

Hyperion University, Bucharest, Romania

felix_nicus@yahoo.com

The Jumpiness of Hyperliterature

Abstract: Hyperliterature is a creative modality already pushing out a second wave of writers and theorists. The non-linear narration and the multi-layered plot exclude the syntagmatic, completely sensuous reading. The new type of reading will be a jumpy one, devious and unpredictable as long as any reader is able to customize their narrative itinerary. The implicit risk is that the profane reader, deprived of the necessary training for approaching an arborescent reading, should choose the plain, non-heuristic trajectory – the one named by Jonathan Carr “the low bandwidth literature”. Assuming the risk or not, interactivity is the only way for the written message to survive in the epoch of the audio-visual.

Keywords: Postmodernism; Interactivity; Hyperliterature; Scripton; Texton; Canon.

Since the publication in 1981 of Theodore “Ted” Nelson’s book Literary Machines, we have got used with the terms hypertext and hypermedia. Of course, those literary machines were the computers and they were supposed “to make possible a new unified electronic literature” (Koskimaa, 2) with the help of a special programme named Xanadu. According to Ted Nelson, hypertext is a “non-sequential writing-text that branches and allows choices to the reader, best read at an interactive screen. As popularly conceived, this is a series of text chunks connected by links which offer the reader different pathways” (in Koskimaa, 3). The point was to create interactive and non-linear fictive texts, able to empower the readers to create their own way of approaching a literary work. Now we have to pay attention – it’s about fictive texts, a thing which restates the illogical, that is the free and open nature of literature.

The first hypertext fictions appeared in the early eighties, the series being inaugurated by Michael Joyce’s Afternoon. A Story (1987). This one firstly benefited from a commercial distribution. Hyperliterature was in a certain way a sequel to poststructuralist principles and was possible only with the emergence of computers. It is no more about chronology, space contiguity and a sequential plot built on chapters. Now the text is “a galaxy of signifiers, not a structure of signifieds; it has no beginning; it is reversible” (Koskimaa, 6). Like with the history of philosophy, we can start with the end and finish with the beginning. But what is the use of speaking in conventional bourgeois terms like: introduction, unique author, the constructed identity of characters, plot, climax, epilogue and so on? The question arises: does hyperliterature belong to postmodernism or is it a conclusion of the latter? Linda Hutcheon wrote it explicitly: “certainty becomes undecidability; control and identity make room to contradiction and to a move toward antitotalization” (41-2). Now if postmodernism is mainly about borrowing characters and creating a “transworld identity” (McHale, 58) which is supposed to be parodied afterwards, hyperliterature is about setting freer the act of reading. The reader can access the chapters-folders in the order they want. For instance, what was for Barthes a simple text, for Nelson became a docuverse, which is the sum of all documents existing in the global network. Of course, globalization is the first concept to be coined here. But wasn’t this the case with textualism? Didn’t it envisage the universe being compounded of texts able to self-generate? Wasn’t the later stage of textualism preoccupied with the communication that replaced the classical roles of author – reader? At a certain point, the death of the author had been declared, then the tables turned and the author rose from the dead. It was the reader’s turn to die. But this disappearance was immediately followed by the resurrection of the reader as an author. This was the later textualist communication about: nobody actually reads anymore, but everybody writes. Irrespective of the media used, all the people are absorbed into a process of generating texts. The question of aesthetic value is useless at this point.

The advantages of being limited

Hyperliterature bridged this gap: the reader is invited to become an author. Not necessarily through writing, but through taking an active part in combining the written material. The problem is that the academic definition of literature clings to form and format, rejecting senselessly other ways of laying out the content of a literary work. Then what is it to say about SMS poetry, a species which has already triggered plenty of enthusiasm? How could a classical critic approach a poem like this: “14:/a txt msg pom./his is r bunsn brnr b1%,/his hair lyk fe filings /w/ac/dc going thru./I sit by him in kemistry,/it splits my @ oms/wen he :-)s @ me” (http://rawsocket.org/rtfm/arquivos/2001_06_01_arquivo.html). Accessed the 29^th of November 2010)? Thus, the new types of media involve different types of hurdles to jump over. In this respect, Elisa Batista posted the article Don’t Go Gently into That SMS in Wired News: “The limitations are the best things about it. Having rules and barriers to overcome is very liberating for creativity. Creation becomes a game, a test of ingenuity. How can I fit this into 160 characters? That leads to much better poetry than the freedom to express deep thoughts on deep subjects at great length” (in Koskimaa, 8). As one can notice, the principle is exactly the same as with the one involved in elaborating the rules concerning the classical theatre.

As mobile phones have become live books, hyperliterature is baptized by Espen Aarseth “ergodic literature”. In the new type of literature “nontrivial effort is required to allow the reader to traverse the text” (in Koskimaa, 8). In his opinion, hypertext is a static structure. There is mutability in scriptons (from one reading to another), but the textons and their relations (the links) are immutable. In Brian McHale’s words, the text is consolidated into a “super-text” (57). One way or another, Mikhael Bakhtin’s theories on polyphony and heteroglossia are validated by hyperliterature too.

The most organized disorder

George P. Landow wrote about the rhetorics of hypertext and dwelled upon the close relationship between hypertext writing and deconstructionist ideas, mainly upon the way in which the reader becomes an author. This is clearly possible only through interpreting the form, with the specific meaning of reorganizing it. Working on form has an obvious impact on content. One could argue that the reader becomes an author by sheer imitation. But this counter-argument brings to my mind a quotation from Peter Ackroyd’s The Last Testament of Oscar Wilde: “Imitation changes, not the impersonator but the impersonated” (24). Isn’t this close to the Victorian situation, when Ch. Dickens was planning his serials depending on the readers’ preferences? Giving her/his readers the freedom to shuffle fragments, the author offers them a partnership. Maybe this is the only way out for literature, the only solution left for the artistic writing to survive in a world where everything is about advantages and entertainment. The slogan goes for it: Screening is way up!

Because I was speaking earlier about the variants and invariants in hyperliterature, I should mention the example of B. S. Johnson who, in The Unfortunates (1969) used loose pages that were to be shuffled and read in random order. That way each leaf became a texton and the orders in which they happened to be read were scriptons. Noticeable are the non-finite nature of the work and its inherent non-linearity. This apparent disorder and the chance for the reader to turn into a reader-as-author stir academic dissatisfaction, as regarding futile genres and species. There comes, then, the anti-technique argument. But, paradoxically, hypertext isn’t a format pertaining exclusively to digital media. Appeal is made to Ernest Hemingway’s six-word story (“For sale: baby shoes, never worn”), which some claim he considered his best work.

Another instance in case is Paul Ford’s Ftrain that contains thousands of links, references and content from other texts. Every item in this scaffold can be remixed, linked to, or copied in what could be called a derivative work.

 What about the canon?

Staying within the borders of the field, Nora Boyle enlarged upon the subject of digital literature, which is mainly about hypertext (HTML). She invoked Einstein’s theory of relativity, namely that time can move backwards and forwards. Consequently, her tone got inflamed or intelligently ticklish: “With the advent of the Digerati, or the ‘online’ cyber writers, everyone is publishing. The bluestockings ladies of yesteryear are today’s cybergirls, and a ‘man of letters’ transmutes into ‘webmaster’ or ‘online editor’. […] The mouse is mightier than the sword. The postmodern writer no longer writes, he transmits” (http://www.scribd.com/doc/15595903/Digital-Literature, accessed at 26^th of October, 2010). Then the question in this “speed-of-light information age” is: TO BE or Not to BE Digital?

What will happen to the canon? Undisputedly, it will have to digest the new literary formulae. It is not a problem of IF, but of WHEN. In 2005, the Dutch government established the Committee for the Development of the Dutch Canon, with the specific recommendation to conceive a canon for all Dutch’ people (see the website of the Dutch Canon: http://entoen.nu/informatie.aspx?id=5&lan=e). Isn’t this a hint that the intellectuals’ communities tend to establish the canon after their high-brow modernist criteria? Already Marshall McLuhan in Understanding media (1964) prophesized the emergence of a “global village”, functioning with the help of media innovations. After all, in this village literature is a Second Life-like system, more real than the “First Life”. As McLuhan put it: “the new media are not ways of relating us to the old ‘real’ world; they are the real world and they reshape what remains of the old world at will” (272). The good piece of news is that in this cybersociety the reader is more involved in creating the final text too. Naturally, the concern for the reader’s qualification regarding the status of a self-aware author pops up.

The literature at stake

It is possible that we should head for a “low bandwidth” literature, as Jonathan Carr, the editor of Magazine Minima, described it. With this occasion, we have to understand that the medium is no longer a container for the content, but that they got intertwined. Hyperliterature is not only about shuffling chapters or pages, but also about backing up the written content with sound and image. The definition of hyperfiction in Wikipedia goes like this: “Hypertext fiction is a genre of electronic literature, characterized by the use of hypertext links which provides a new context for non-linearity in literature and reader interaction. The reader typically chooses links to move from one node of text to the next, and in this fashion rearranges a story from a deeper pool of potential stories” (Accessed the 1^st of December 2010). And this is actually the condition of originality – reshaping older stuff in order to obtain new things. Peter Ackroyd formulated it precisely: “originality consists in forming new and happy combinations rather than searching after thoughts and ideas which have never occurred before” (Chatterton, 29). Aristotle’s theory also went in this direction: extracting the act from potentiality, the latter being the vast deposit of previously accomplished creation – in our case. But reference could be made as well to Baudrillard’s interpretation of postmodern culture as a simulacrum, that is a copy which doesn’t possess an original. In hyperliterature, the original is very fluid and can engender numerous copies, which actually are derivate originals.

Another connection with postmodernism is the adjacent intertextuality. The cybertext theory considers that all texts are machines fit to perform some functions. In this context, intertextuality becomes interactivity. An example of this kind is Markku Eskelinen’s Interface (1997), a three-phased work started as a novel and evolving afterwards on the internet, in an equation author’s input-reader’s feedback.

 Make it interactive

Interactivity can combine with kinetic techniques, like in Jim Rosenberg’s Intergrams (1997), where simultaneities (the layers of text are juxtaposed so that by moving the cursor, single layers can be read) protrude into a syntax externalised to graphic symbols which weld fragments of text. In Robert Kendall”s poem A Life Set for Two (1996), the reader has the possibility to select the atmosphere of the text from a menu. Michael Joyce’s Afternoon. A Story (1997), the first hypertext novel, is a hypertext story consisting of 539 lexias and 951 links connecting them, which makes possible several ways of reading (different set of lexias, in different orders). Such a system engenders quite different stories, or a frame-story embracing the readers’ stories. This process has already been coined as humanistic computing and is a testimony of the digital text dynamics. An acronym was created to give evidence for all these – MUD, meaning multi user domain.

Famous writers contributed some of their works to this challenge of crossing traditional literary boundaries. Vladimir Nabokov’s Pale Fire opens with a Foreword, and then the poem Pale Fire follows, the rest consisting of extensive commentary and Index. The reader can study and interpret these four sections in optional orders. Rayuela by Julio Cortázar has 155 chapters. The author proposes a certain order of reading them in the beginning, but the reader may skip this guideline and find other paths across the story.

These are a few elementary data about a type of literature which for sure will be the winner in the near future. And about which we know almost nothing. Because we are sluggish and, as a rule, we hate to be stirred, to be valued as anti-routine human beings.

Works cited:

 Ackroyd, Peter. Chatterton. 1987. London. Hamish Hamilton..

Ackroyd, Peter. The Last Testament of Oscar Wilde. 1983. London. Hamish Hamilton.

Bakhtin, M. Mikhail. The Dialogic Imagination. Four Essays. 1981, Editor Michel Holquist, Trans, Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist, 15^th edition, Austin: University of Texas Press, 2004.

Hutcheon, Linda. A Poetics of Postmodernism. 1988. New York and London. Routledge.

Koskimaa, Raine. DIGITAL LITERATURE. From Text to Hypertext and Beyond. http://users.jyu.fi/~koskimaa/thesis/thesis.shtml. Accessed June the 13^th 2010.

McHale, Brian. Postmodernist Fiction. 1987. London and New York: Methuen.

McLuhan, Marshall. Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. 1964. New York: McGraw Hill.

Vianu, Lidia, coordinator, The Critic’s Light. The Moment after Clarity Is Night. 2007. Ed. Universităţii din Bucureşti.

Alexandru Budac, PhD

West University in Timişoara, Romania

alexandru.budac@litere.uvt.ro

Soft-Selves and Soft-Readers

Abstract: This paper tries to outline some consequences of the cognitive perspectives that describe humans in technological terms. Andy Clark’s provocative explanation as to why we are “natural-born cyborgs” is discussed in detail. An artificially redesigned self definitely needs a special kind of education, but can a technologically-oriented culture provide the proper means to acquire valuable knowledge? Some possible answers to this question are suggested at the end.

Keywords: Ludwig Wittgenstein; Language; Philosophy; Cognitive sciences; The Copycat Project; Andy Clark; Cyborg; “Self redesigned”.

The issues raised by the accelerated progress of technology are rarely tackled in a moderate way. Especially when it comes to the fate of education and the future of books in the present information era, one can find discourses either at the somber extreme – culture and civilization as we know them will be swallowed by the black hole of technological apocalypse – or on the crest of a purely enthusiastic wave – we are heading to a better world, a Wonderland where we shall live forever, plugged into the information infinity, our personalities extended through the Paradise of Virtual Reality. Between the dystopian fears and the unreflected acceptance of technology’s promises, alternatives seem to be quite few. We will vegetate euphorically, surrounded by screens and deprived of books, like the characters in Fahrenheit 451 or, on the contrary, we will fulfill the evolutionary chain by completing our biologic equipment with ideal, metal and silicon organs and connecting with one another through more and more sophisticated communication networks. The books will die, the machines will do our entire work.

Too soon have we have forgotten Ludwig Wittgenstein’s lesson, namely that the majority of the dilemmas we try to solve by our more or less philosophical assertions are caused by the use of language itself, by our lack of expressivity, and by our habit of feeding the mind “with only one kind of example.”[1] Moreover, our ways of approaching and understanding new technologies depend enormously on how we relate to our own body and what was formerly called “soul”. A good part of the recent descriptions of human beings and their activities concentrates almost exclusively on what is really external, a byproduct of their life, not at all indispensable conditions for their existence: the artificial environment is more important than the mind which perceives and transforms it, social energies have priority over individuals, literary theories have become more important than the texts to which they apply, the generally valid abstraction takes the place of the specific situation, semantic interactions at a mental level do not depend on neural activities, memes are as responsible for our ancestral inheritance as genes, and so on. In short, we find ourselves before a plethora of more or less clear and justified categories. Though it should be a truism, the truth that any educational system involves the endorsement of some cognitive patterns to the detriment of others is quite often ignored.

It is surprising that, although the soul has become an obsolete term, used rather ironically or at best metaphorically nowadays, cognitive theories grounded in Artificial Intelligence research perpetuate, despite their high-tech terminology, the same old thought patterns and, particularly, dualisms similar to the one they ardently refute – the Cartesian dualism. Years ago, I was myself seduced by the descriptions of the mind in computational terms and by the uncanny consequences of the “Universe as Computer” theory. Today, much as I admire the efforts of philosopher Douglas Hofstadter and his team of eminent researchers (The Fluid Analogies Research Group), their attempts to build an artificial connectionist model meant to explain and perhaps even compete with the human one fuel my skepticism. I am referring to the famous Copycat Project – a computer program designed to reproduce the human mind’s aptitude to juggle with concepts’ extensionality and intensionality.

According to the authors’ description, the program has “an emergent architecture, in the sense that the program’s top-level behaviour emerges as a statistical consequence of myriad small computational actions, and the concepts that it uses in creating analogies can be considered to be a realization of ‘statistically emergent active symbols’.”[2] Extremely ambitious and admirable as it is – designed in the ’80s and the ’90s, The Copycat Project served as a base for the development of similar programs –, the software’s capacity to create simple analogies and simulate the infinitesimal processes (not yet fully understood) of human creativity are unsatisfactory if we compare them to the inner cosmos of each of us. Every single rule precisely defined by programmers to stimulate the emergent architecture’s fluidity is an obstacle to explaining the true conceptual fluidity at the same time – the human one. Besides, Douglas Hofstadter and the other researchers’ project grounds itself on ideal premises and does not take into account the fact that every mind is the result of an organic body. I believe that more interesting answers concerning brain mysteries should be sought in the field of neurology and the books of some remarkable scholars, among whom Antonio Damasio, Eric Kandel, Vilayanur S. Ramachandran, and Oliver Sacks.

I shall now turn to a challenging study published in 2003 by Andy Clark, Professor of Logic and Metaphysics at The University of Edinburgh, because I consider it symptomatic if one needs to understand a particular kind of attitude towards technological progress and our posthuman future. I am talking about Natural-Born Cyborgs: Minds, Technologies, and the Future of Human Intelligence. After assessing Andy Clark’s vision of our nature, I shall conclude with some personal considerations concerning the fate of books and teaching human sciences in the Twenty-First Century.

Andy Clark is one of the scholars who consider that the human mind is not special, as an entire Western philosophical tradition tries to persuade us[3]. It is only more adaptable to environment and, thanks to brain plasticity, more inclined towards improvement than other minds. To put it differently, its strength is, simultaneously, a weakness, but one that humans have always known how to use to their advantage. To Clark, „the mind is just less and less in the head”[4]. It transcends skull boundaries and projects itself onto weapons, tools, pens, texts, books, flying and sailing machines, PCs, remote-controls, artificial hearts, and many others. The scientist from the University of Edinburgh extends Manfred Clyne’s definition of the cyborg[5] and replaces, in an undoubtedly ambitious manner, the classical conception of homo faber with the upgraded description of man as “natural-born cyborg”.

The anthropological premises are correct, but when the author illustrates the imperative which upholds the entire book (We must improve our brain!) some distinctions become fuzzy. In Clark’s opinion, the development of our cognitive endowments necessarily involves more and more advanced technologies: eyes helped by video cameras, digital props for our tactile sense, cortical implants, devices turned on vocally or by retina recognition, auxiliary limbs, easy to pierce interfaces between mental states and Virtual Reality. We are “soft-selves”[6] – another euphemistic concept supposed to enforce our time’s pervasive belief that the self does not exist – scattered over an organic surface (our body) longing for inorganic prosthetic extensions. Indeed, our brain can only develop in constant interaction with the environment; yet, I wonder if a world perceived through such devices actually is a step forward.

The verifiable truth that our mind constructs an elusive image of the body and that this image is easy to change or distort encourages Clark to demonstrate how the self could be enlarged through “Augmented Reality”, that is a reality with its signifiers mathematically multiplied by the machines to which we would be plugged or, more correctly, the machines which would be plugged into our flesh. He distinguished between “opaque technologies”, whose manipulation needs special skills and sustained reflection during use, and “transparent technologies”, the latter being so present in everyday life that we are not even aware of our symbiosis. All technologies are opaque at the beginning, but most of them become transparent as they more or less change our lives. Though he accepts that we always have to pay a price for technological progress and that there are many kinds of risks – which he analyses in detail to refute by making them a little more benign –, Andy Clark still claims that, eventually, everything depends on our ability to discern the proper ways of handling the machines to accomplish our goals without becoming their slaves. His paradoxical belief, that only by extending our natural body into the inanimate world we become better beings, is unshakable:

“My claim […] is that various kinds of deep-human machine symbiosis really do expand and alter the shape of the psychological processes that make us who we are. The old technologies of pen and paper have deeply impacted the shape and form of biological reason in mature, literate brains. The presence of such technologies, and their modern and more responsive counterparts, does not merely act as a convenient wrap around for a fixed biological engine of reason. Nor does it merely free up neural resources. It provides instead an array of resources to which biological brains, as they learn and grow, will dovetail their own activities. The moral, for now, is simply that this process of fitting, tailoring, and factoring in leads to the creation of extended computational and mental organizations: reasoning and thinking systems distributed across brain, body, and world. And it is in the operation in these extended systems that much of our distinctive human intelligence inheres.”[7]

However, there are huge differences between the antique pen and paper and the brand new “non-penetrative modes of augmentation” of the self described in detail throughout Andy Clark’s book. Nothing assures us that the cognitive mutations will be benign and literate as they used to be. When he writes about the future education, the scientist particularly sees a semantic explosion due to the jocular interchangeability of the real and the virtual, and the artificial circumstances created to stimulate better brains from an early age. Yet, he does not too seriously question to what degree a reality which reaches the brain through a medium of digital processes can guarantee the ontological grounds for a coherent way of living. The possibility that the simpler solution could be the better one does not seem to interest Andy Clark. For example, he agrees that the printed book has major advantages over the digital format – his comparison between the amount of energy needed to light a virtual page and the comfort of reading offered by the paper page is more than enlightening[8] –, but the author still hopes that the old books will become museum pieces, accusing them of not being interactive. The idea that the MIT Media Lab technicians could replace the classical book format with papers covered in microencapsulated particles and powered by solar cells should amuse us, if only we did not know that it was deadly serious.

I myself do not believe that the human mind is a fixed entity, a Cartesian spectre (or a ghost) locked up in a machine[9], but I become very skeptical when Andy Clark tries to persuade us that our cultural future depends entirely on our ability to technologically redesign consciousness. The benefits of prostehetic devices described in the book for medical purposes are beyond doubt, though the morality of resorting to some of them should be discussed separately for each particular case. Nevertheless, to believe that, as the healthy human body becomes more robotized, we will find more and more priceless information about ourselves is beyond my comprehension.

What Andy Clark ignores in his otherwise brilliant study is that history of the self and reading cannot be separated. Nobody doubts that books truly improve our brain, but, at least for the moment, I like to believe that, if the human mind were to be “redesigned” in a better way, neither computers nor eugenic techniques would do it. In Natural-Born Cyborgs there is no clear distinction between being read and being informed, being imaginative and having the senses digitally excited. A world made richer by cyborglike perceptions, where people would be able to assimilate any kind of knowledge rapidly, – let’s say at a simple keybord touch, as Trinity learns to pilot a helicopter in The Matrix movie – , could hardly be called a cultural world. The recent overtechnologized wars have already shown us enough as to how the soldier’s moral sense is altered by simulator training. Combat field reality and the PC game interactivity become one and the same. The borders between life and death, natural and artificial, authentic experience and its simulation tend to be seen, alas, more and more like an interface aspect. In such circumstances, teaching literature or philosophy seems a real issue, because no matter how up to date you might be, no matter how sophisticated and efficient the means which help you to study, nothing can replace deep reading. Yet, reading is a solitary activity and, however out of fashion this might sound, it is only when you read that you are truly with yourself. The literary critic Harold Bloom put it superbly in the preface of his book How to Read and Why:

“There is no single way to read well, though there is a prime reason why we should read. Information is endlessly available to us; where shall wisdom be found ? If you are fortunate, you encounter a particular teacher who can help, yet finally you are alone, going on without further mediation. Reading well is one of the great pleasures that solitude can afford you, because it is, at least in my experience, the most healing of pleasures. It returns you to otherness, whether in yourself or in friends, or in those who may become friends. Imaginative literature is otherness, and as such alleviates loneliness. We read not only because we cannot know enough people, but because friendship is so vulnerable, so likely to diminish or disappear, overcome by space, time, imperfect simpathies, and all the sorrows of familial and pasional life .”[10]

Every sentence in this fragment is an urge for authentic life, a life lived among peers and enhanced by reading. Computer mediated experiences are life surrogates. To use science and its tools to understand and accurately describe the universe and to create better living conditions proves the greatness and audacity of human race once more, though lessons from the past teach us that any scientific progress has its dark side (see, for example, how the future cyborgs will be the best fighter pilots and warriors, perfectly plugged into their weapons[11]). To become one with the technology you are using, to sharpen your feelings until you change into a machine is to take the means as primary goals.

Our education systems will be highly digitized – a feature more than positive if we know how to rationally benefit from the unquestionable technical and economical advantages of the IT field. But it is not enough if we want them to be better than the systems of the past. A student whose memory and imagination were never spurred by deep reading in his/her early years, but whose dexterities at stitching pseudoscientific papers from the colorless ocean of information he or she takes for granted, will perpetuate the same learning pattern. More than ever, we must tell the real issues from the redundant ones – the wheels that can be turned though nothing else moves with them[12], as Wittgenstein used to say in the first half of the past century. The extreme attitudes described at the beginning of this essay – apocalyptic fears, and enthusiast technophilia – are mostly logical consequences of the translation from the scientific language into our everyday language. In a world homogenized by the Internet and mass-media – but not necessarily more open to actual communication, as nowadays mantra tries to convince us –, human sciences are the most vulnerable. For now, book selling is a sufficient argument to console those who worry. Despite the prophecies of Amazon Kindle and Google, the death of books is still far, but we will most certainly become soft-readers.

Bibliography

Bloom, Harold, How to Read and Why, A Touchstone Book, Published by Simon&Shuster, New York, 2000.

Clark, Andy, Natural-Born Cyborgs: Minds, Technologies, and the Future of Human Intelligence, Oxford University Press, Oxford, New York, 2003.

Hofstadter, Douglas, and Melanie Mitchell, The Copycat Project: A Model of Mental Fluidity and Analogy-making, in Douglas Hofstadter and The Fluid Analogies Research Group, Fluid Concepts and Creative Analogies. Computer Models of the Fundamental Mechanisms of Thought, Basic Books, New York, 1995.

Wittgenstein, Ludwig, Philosophical Investigations, Revised 4^th edition by P.M.S. Hacker and Joachim Schulte, English translation by G.E.M. Anscombe, Wiley-Blackwell, 2009.

Notes

Yannick Preumont

Università degli Studi della Calabria, Italia

y.preumont@unical.it

De Ţara Brînzei à Confession pour un ordinateur de Felicia Mihali

From Ţara Brînzei to Confession pour un ordinateur.

Felicia Mihali and the Narrative Discourse

Abstract: The family novel as a whole is best defined in terms of its four most distinguishing characteristics: first, it deals realistically with a family’s evolution through several generations; second, family rites play an important role and are faithfully recreated in both their familial and communal contexts; third, the primary theme of the novel always focuses on the decline of a family; and fourth, such a novel has a peculiar narrative form which is woven vertically along the chronological order through time and horizontally among the family relationships. Felicia Mihali plays with this definition given by Ru Yi-Ling and proposes with Confessions pour un ordinateur a new “personnel du roman”.

Keywords: Romanian Literature; Felicia Mihali; Family Novel; Computer; Narrative Discourse.

Au centre de la production romanesque de Felicia Mihali se trouve la problématique de la famille qui y est déclinée sous divers éclairages. Dans The Family Novel. Toward a Generic Definition, Ru Yi-Ling définit ainsi le roman de la famille :

The family novel as a whole is best defined in terms of its four most distinguishing characteristics : first, it deals realistically with a family’s evolution through several generations ; second, family rites play an important role and are faithfully recreated in both their familial and communal contexts ; third, the primary theme of the novel always focuses on the decline of a family ; and fourth, such a novel has a peculiar narrative form which is woven vertically along the chronological order through time and horizontally among the family relationships[1].

Nos propres études sur la traduction du discours sur la famille nous ont permis d’approfondir la question et l’œuvre de Felicia Mihali fait partie de notre corpus d’investigation. Sa « politique de ré-énonciation »[2] nous a particulièrement intéressés dans le cas de son autotraduction en français de Ţara Brînzei, mais c’est l’invention d’un nouveau « personnel du roman »[3] dans Confession pour un ordinateur qui fera ici l’objet d’une brève analyse.

Nous avons souvent proposé des exemples tels qu’un foyer qui reste « lisse » après la disparition du dernier habitant et qui peut être un cas intéressant de ré-énonciation: « Cet endroit restera lisse comme une paume de nouveau-né »[4]/ « Locul va rămîne neted ca-n palmă »[5]était écrit dans le texte roumain de départ. et nous ne devrions pas être étonnés par l’ajout de « abandonnée comme un squelette » lors du passage de « casa aceea, rămăse goală »[6]à « cette maison vide, abandonnée comme un squelette »[7]. D’une façon générale, parler de désagrégation des familles signifie, grâce au multilinguisme et au multiculturalisme qui caractérisent les auteurs et leurs traducteurs[8], donner des exemples concrets d’une grande créativité et d’intéressantes pratiques de reformulation. Mais à présent, après le passage de « Zgomotul motorului s-a auzit vreme îndelungată, ca o chemare » (p. 9) à « J’ai écouté longtemps le bruit du moteur qui me suppliait avec insistance, comme une lourde prière » (p. 13), le texte français rendant plus expressive la description de l’éclatement d’un noyau familial vécu dans la douleur, nous pouvons affirmer qu’avec le dernier roman de Mihali, il y a une évolution vers la disparition du chœur classique tragique, fait que nous désirons mettre en évidence dans une démarche scientifique d’observation et d’exploration du phénomène de la transtextualité.

Dans Confession pour un ordinateur nous pouvons facilement repérer les « formes de l’écriture oblique »[9], l’humour[10] et le discours tragique[11], fort nuancé, surtout : les « cavalcades » érotiques de l’héroïne font oublier quelque peu que, si elle est la Belle et la nymphe Galatée[12], que si elle peut se voir, grâce au peintre Serge, en Kyra[13], elle est aussi, après un divorce raconté de façon plus réaliste que les déboires évoqués dans Le pays du fromage, où le rêve et le délire prennent souvent le dessus, une belle Médée qui a connu le désespoir.

Le désespoir me donnait cette beauté unique de l’antique Médée, qui avait tout détruit, afin de maîtriser sa rage, mais qui finissait victorieuse[14].

Mais si le discours ironique et le discours tragique sont présents, un élément important du roman de la famille, le chœur tragique[15] est remplacé par l’ordinateur, seul témoin du déclin du début à la fin du récit. Nous trouverons encore le regard des amis de Serge, de la famille du premier mari et de celle du second, ou encore le regard des parents d’un des amants[16], rappelant quelque peu les scènes comiques avec le grand-père de Jacques dans L’avenir est dans les œufs d’Eugène Ionesco, mais nous ne trouvons plus la présence constante de quelque tante qui pourrait témoigner du désastre, comme le fit l’inoubliable Tante Dide des Rougon-Macquart, et moins encore la vision chorale dont il est encore question dans Dina, et qui rappelle celle d’Aci-Trezza des Malavoglia de Giovanni Verga. La technologie, qui a fait une brève apparition dans Dina[17] et dont la présence n’étonne guère chez un auteur qui a travaillé activement pour une revue électronique (Terra Nova), prend ici le relais pour assister à tout jusqu’à la fin, et même jusqu’après la fin :

Dossier: À la fin

Fichier: À la fin 1

Taille: 72 ko

Type de document: Microsoft Word

Modifié: 9/12/03 22:30[18].

Dossier: Après la fin

Fichier: Après la fin 1

Taille: 72 ko

Type de document: Microsoft Word

Modifié: 9/27/03 17:46[19].

Dossier: À la fin des fins

Fichier: À la fin des fins 1

Taille: 72 ko

Type de document: Microsoft Word

Modifié: 9/29/03 13:53[20].

Felicia Mihali multiplie les versions de Ţara Brînzei à Confession pour un ordinateur en faisant appel à de nombreux masques, comme ceux dont l’héroïne du dernier roman se pare pour se raconter à Serge sans oublier les fausses histoires[21] qu’elle raconte à ses autres amants. Nous savons que pour la symbolique profonde :

tout homme a un vrai visage, un visage originel qui est caché par son visage ordinaire, masque posé sur la vérité de son être. D’où toute l’ambiguïté fondamentale du masque qui révèle nos désirs les plus cachés (nos identifications fantasmatiques) […], qui montre donc notre visage « noir » le plus caché, mais cache notre « moi de lumière » dans notre figure quotidienne[22].

Ce sont les ajouts dus à l’autotraduction[23] des œuvres précédentes et les ajouts dus à une imagination d’artiste féconde qui aboutissent à un résultat aussi étonnant que celui des ajouts Microsoft :

Dossier: Ajouts

Fichier: Rouge 1

Taille: 72 ko

Type de document: Microsoft Word

Modifié: 9/15/03 21:30[24].

Dossier: Ajouts

Fichier: Bleu 1

Taille: 72 ko

Type de document: Microsoft Word

Modifié: 9/17/03 23:38[25].

Dossier: Ajouts

Fichier: Rouge 2

Taille: 72 ko

Type de document: Microsoft Word

Modifié: 9/28/03 13:35[26].

Dossier: Ajouts

Fichier: Rouge 3

Taille: 72 ko

Type de document: Microsoft Word

Modifié: 9/22/03 11:24[27].

Dossier: Ajouts

Fichier: Rouge 4

Taille: 72 ko

Type de document: Microsoft Word

Modifié: 9/22/03 20:57[28].

Dossier: Ajouts

Fichier: Bleu 2

Taille: 72 ko

Type de document: Microsoft Word

Modifié: 9/30/03 21:06[29].

Dossier: Ajouts

Fichier: Rouge 5

Taille: 72 ko

Type de document: Microsoft Word

Modifié: 9/29/03 17:38[30].

Dossier: Ajouts

Fichier: Bleu 3

Taille: 72 ko

Type de document: Microsoft Word

Modifié: 9/01/03 21:09[31].

Résultat surprenant et neuf où, si l’Histoire ne peut disparaître comme dans les plus grandes réussites du roman familial francophone[32], du moins certains détails peuvent être « gommés ». L’analyse de la construction textuelle du point de vue[33] devra tenir compte de cette évolution et de l’arrivée d’un nouveau type de personnages :

Je vous épargnerai les détails concernant le lieu précis où je suis née et où j’ai grandi ; il ne m’a jamais procuré de plaisir. Quant à mon nom, je pense qu’il est tout aussi inutile que vous le connaissiez, car que seront les noms, à l’avenir, sinon de simples assemblages de lettres, de points ou de chiffres ? Tentez donc de deviner l’histoire d’amour de Fid=9038&da et de In*//box&86664[34].

Bibliographie

A. Berman, La Traduction et la lettre ou l’Auberge du lointain, Paris, Éditions du Seuil, 1999.

M. Cazenave (dir.), Encyclopédie des symboles, Paris, Le Livre de poche, 1998.

J. Chevalier, A. Gheerbrant, Dictionnaire des symboles, Paris, Éd. Laffont, 1982.

G. Durand, Les structures anthropologiques de l’imaginaire, Paris, Dunod, 1992.

B. Folkart, Le conflit des énonciations. Traduction et discours rapporté, Candiac, Les Éditions Balzac, 1991.

G. Genette, Figures III, Paris, Éditions du Seuil, 1972.

G. Genette, Palimpsestes. La littérature au second degré, Paris, Éditions du Seuil, 1982.

P. Hamon, Le personnel du roman. Le système des personnages dans les Rougon-Macquart d’Émile Zola, Genève, Droz, 2004.

P. Hamon, L’ironie littéraire. Essais sur les formes de l’écriture oblique, Paris, Hachette, 1996.

F. Mihali, Confession pour un ordinateur, Montréal, XYZ éditeur, 2009.

F. Mihali, Dina, Montréal, XYZ éditeur, 2008.

F. Mihali, Le pays du fromage, Montréal, XYZ éditeur, 2002.

F. Mihali, Ţara Brînzei, Bucarest, Image, 1999.

Y. Preumont, Dire la famille. Discours tragique et discours ironique, Rome, Bagatto Libri, 2005.

Y. Preumont, « Le roman familial belge – Voyage entre absence et magie », in Poétique du voyage, Quaderni del Dipartimento di Linguistica, no. 22, Università degli Studi della Calabria, 2005, p. 153-176.

Y. Preumont, Lexique familial et énonciation, Arcavacata di Rende, Centro editoriale – Università degli Studi della Calabria, 2004.

Y. Preumont, « Métaphore, descendance et poétique de l’ironie », dans G. Vanhese (dir.), Deux migrants de l’écriture. Panaït Istrati et Felicia Mihali, Arcavacata di Rende, Centro editoriale – Università degli Studi della Calabria, 2008, p. 149-160.

Y. Preumont, Traduire le discours sur la famille, Roma, Aracne, 2009.

A. Rabatel, La construction textuelle du point de vue, Delachaux et Niestlé, Lausanne, 1998.

G. Vanhese (dir.), Deux migrants de l’écriture. Panaït Istrati et Felicia Mihali, Rende, Centro Editoriale e Librario, 2008.

R. Yi-Ling, The Family Novel. Toward a Generic Definition, New York, Peter Lang, 1992.

Notes

Mirela Roznoveanu

New York University School of Law, USA

roznovschi@juris.law.nyu.edu

The Virtual Mind

Abstract: There is evidence today that humans are experiencing a different biological reality related to the new virtual environment. Anthropologists affirm that Homo sapiens has developed alongside of technologies; philosophers are trying to understand the “screen culture” and the way we’ll cope with the “haptic culture,” the culture of touch; the theorists of aesthetic objects are trying to comprehend how contemporary screen cultures affect structures of aesthetic representation and perception. Will the book survive the dispersal caused by hypertext formats and the storage and mutability of the written word in the electronic age? Will culture – as we know it – survive the shift from digital images and text to that of acoustical culture, the visual experience in the digital age? The future will possibly employ a new language for a different kind of mind, the mind of virtual reality. Such minds will not make the ones that we now employ obsolete. A new form of alliance between the non-linear mind and the new media logic will be living in the fluid of the virtual mind reality.

Keywords: Postmodernism; ”Haptic culture”; E-literature; Virtual reality; Virtual mind.

An Anthropological Finding

A report commissioned more than a decade ago in the U.S. by the Kaiser Family Foundation on Generation M (the internet generation born in 90’ called M from ‘Media’)[1] revealed an unexpected fact: American children growing up in media-rich environments have brains wired differently than humans who did not come to maturity under such circumstances. Generation M2: Media in the Lives of 8- to 18-Year-Olds was the third in a series, and included data from all three waves of the study (1999, 2004, and 2009). Those reports have shown the effect that media can have in the lives of teens.

There is evidence today that humans are experiencing a different biological reality related to the new virtual environment. Anthropologists[2] affirm that Homo sapiens have developed alongside of technologies; that there is a connection between human biology and use tool. Discussing the human brain’s plasticity, its neural plasticity, Mark B.N. Hansen noted that humans are born with their nervous systems ready to be reconfigured in response to their environment. Synaptogenesis is a pruning process in the new born brain: the neural connections that are used strengthen and grow while those that are not decay and disappear. In his own words, “evolution is not solely physical … but psycho-physical; it is not genetic transmission alone that determines outcomes but rather the fitness of the entire individual, which includes the benefits bestowed by learning. In turn, learning and cerebral plasticity work synergistically together to accelerate evolution and give it a certain directionality by catalyzing environments in which learning and cerebral plasticity become even more advantageous.” In other words, “the new generations born in new media environments experience a dramatic, clear, cognitive shift from deep attention-willingness to spend more hours with a single artifact, intense concentration, a preference for a single data stream rather than multiple inputs – to hyper attention, brains developed to handle multiple incoming data streams.”[3]

For Katherine Hayles, the dynamics between the body and the machine, the transformative aspect of information technologies, the “temporalization of textual spatiality” and the human language interpenetrated by computer code[4] bring or will bring new narrative strategies; “the logic of coevolution implies, however, that just as networked and programmable media are transforming literature, so literary effects are revaluing computational practice…”[5]

Isn’t this new futuristic environment demanding (sometime soon) new kinds of writers? New kinds of teachers and teaching environments?

The Teaching Process

In my book, Toward a Cyberlegal Culture[6] written in the early stages of hypertext I noticed that the “enrichment of teaching with internet-based learning technology, and the ongoing process of introducing Internet-based technology into education are inevitably changing the ways learners think.” They were starting to experience a “non-linear mode of thinking,” a dynamism and a new logic connected to a metamorphic nature of change, deeply belonging to the World Wide Web. Michael Joyce[7] deciphered around the same time a “newly evolving consciousness and cognition,” — the emergence of a new mind.

How is my classroom of today? Surely, the teaching environment has changed dramatically. It adapted and it is every day adapting to the new media technology and to students’ advanced technological skills.

By default, the equipment simply projects from the podium or head-of-the-table computer audio and video into the room just as if I were in my office using my computer (with equipment on the podium or head-of-the table computer – and optional peripheral equipment – equivalent to a standard faculty office computer). Another feature is a one-button record option, under which installed cameras and microphones record and save (for later Blackboard posting) an audio-video recording of the class. The equipment blends into the room and is fixed into the mill work to create a natural operating position with few moving parts and no wires to tangle with during operation. All controls not directly related to audio-visual equipment, such as lighting and shades, are adjustable with separate physical switches rather than through the computer. Display screens (even in the seminar rooms) are behind the lecturer, rather than off to the side, so that the audience always face the lecturer rather than look away.

The Cybernetics Dimension

There is much discussion nowadays around the models for reading digital literature, the status of the text in the era of hypertext, and new narratives in a post narrative world. According to Carolyn Guertin, “what passes for narrative in the new born – digital storytelling forms is hyperactive, postmodern, post dramatic, self-reflexive and repetitive. Instead of emulating the act of reading, what we perform in these spaces is a visual task of browsing. As a result, the whole concept of story has been transformed by its migration into the spaces of digital media. The interactive or performative nature of the new media alters how and why we read.”[8] Digital Poetry or e-poetry is also trying to re-formulate poetic language;[9] and similarly, cybertextuality and philology seem to be highly interconnected to the new media. For Ian Lancashire[10] a “cybertext is any document viewed from the perspective of the theory or study of communication and control in living things or machines.” Espen Aarseth coined the term “cybertext”; cybertexts are ‘ergodic” (Norbert Wiener meant by it a “path of energy or work”): “cybertextuality … is a subset of cybernetics that studies messaging and feedback modules – author, text, channel/media, noise, and reader – of languages and literatures…The five modules of cybernetics studied by literary researchers in parallel (sender, channel, message, noise, and receiver) … in our case translate into “authors of texts …readers of texts … texts themselves …the language technologies and media … which together form a channel that governs their transmission through wear-and-tear that might be called literary noise studied in stemmatics ( a rigorous approach to the textual criticism), and media.”

Specifically, “the term ‘new media’ acknowledged the fact that, in an era of comprehensive digital capture, storage, and dissemination, nothing about former modes of cultural production and consumption could be taken for granted anymore, neither their aesthetic standards nor their social or political reach, perhaps not even their very right to exist in the future. Just as importantly, however, the concept of new media offered a corrective to how scholars, researchers, and image producers in the final stretch of the twentieth century had promoted advanced technologies as tools to dislodge our need for extended structures of temporality and reliable spatial orientations.”[11]

Philosophical Propositions

How has philosophy in the past century acknowledged cultural changes arising out of technology? Could we learn from it? We can recall Siegfried Kracauer’s 1927 essay on the mass ornament, Walter Benjamin’s 1930 theory of mechanical reproducibility,[12] and Adorno’s view of the role of modern technology in the arts. If Benjamin and Kracauer ”considered mechanical reproduction a liberating and potentially democratic engine of cultural dispersal and distracted forms of reception,” for Adorno it ‘threatened to obliterate the specificity and incommensurability of aesthetic experience.”[13]

In our age, the amalgamation of time-based representation and advanced computing power make our mediascapes different from those of the early to mid-twentieth century: the open-ended plurality and simultaneity, contents and structures of older media are mimicked, supplemented, or rewritten according to the technological parameters of the present.[14] According to William Uricchio and D.N. Rodowick, “…new media today, with its stress on real-time interactivity, its favoring of simultaneity over sequentiality, and its point-to-point modes of access and connectivity had its historical models in nineteen-century technologies of image scanning and transmission…” and hence the conclusion that… “what is new about new media is their powerful ability to absorb, incorporate, assimilate, pillage, rework or simply over-write the content and formal logic of other media’.[15] Reality proceeds from virtual reality, brilliantly recently wrote Andre Petitat.[16] The action falls within both practice and representation. During human evolution, this pair has differentiated into many different worlds and become more complex in building blocks of our universe symbolic worlds of waking and dream, truth and falsehood, reality and simulacra, of the factual story and fictional narrative, etc. The extension of real worlds requires / supposes also virtual worlds. The concept of aggregating a plurality of worlds and the plurality of interpretive work emphasizes the participation of the virtual reality — to reality.

Philosophers are also trying to understand also our “screen culture” and the way we’ll cope with the “haptic culture,” the culture of touch; while the theorist of aesthetic objects is trying to comprehend how contemporary screen cultures affect structures of aesthetic representation and perception. Many questions have to be answered at this point: will the book survive the dispersal caused by hypertext formats and the storage and mutability of the written word in the electronic age? Will – culture as we know it – “survive the shift from digital images and text to that of acoustical culture, the visual experience in the digital age, ‘one that considers the entire human sensorium, in particular the haptic dimension’?”[17] Catherine Hayles in her recent book is confident that “When literature leaps from one medium to another – from orality to writing, from manuscript codes to printed book, from mechanical generated print to electronic textuality – it does not leave behind the accumulated knowledge embedded in genres, poetic conventions, narrative structures, figurative tropes, and so forth. Rather this knowledge is carried forward into the new medium typically trying to replicate the earlier medium’s effects within the new medium’s specificities.”[18]

From the Vantagepoint of Literary Theory

Before the internet era, McLuhan wrote that “the electro-magnetic discoveries have recreated the simultaneous ‘field’ in all human affairs so that the human family now exists under conditions of a ‘global village’.”[19] And I cannot help remembering here his famous statement about the fact that “in a culture like ours … it is sometimes a bit of a shock to be reminded that, in operational and practical fact, the medium is the message.”[20] He had foreseen a departure from the linear world of words to a three-dimensional world of pictorial space. This new phenomenon connected with literary theory and literature itself trying to understand languages’ limitations and to accommodate them[21] has generated an immense amount of scholarship. Perhaps is, at this stage, more interesting than the literary objects created according to the new media aesthetics.

A vast corpus of articles survey the digital rhetoric, including novel strategies of self-expression and collaboration, the constraints of new digital media, and the formation of identities and communities in digital spaces, calling for an integrated theory of digital rhetoric. The concept of a digital rhetoric holds promise of opening new opportunities for rhetorical studies and it’s also “troublesome because it reveals the difficulties and the challenges of adapting a rhetorical tradition more than 2,000 years old to the conditions and constraints of the new digital media”.[22] Explorations of this concept show how traditional rhetorical strategies function in digital spaces and suggest how these strategies are being reconceived and reconfigured within these spaces.

The growing relevance of the transformative effect of information technologies on literature due to the temporalization of textual spatiality, the fusion of the human language with the computer code in the logic of coevolution seems to demand new narrative strategies. First of all we might conclude that traditional narrratology is challenged at its very base: the electronic text cannot be accessed without running the code; and running the code makes, for many, the source code part of the work![23] Human language is interpenetrated by computer code and literature as well; new definitions will try to grasp that: “…literature can be understood as a semiotic technology designed to create – or more precisely, activate – feedback loops that dynamically and recursively unite feelings with ratiocination, body and mind,” and Hayles goes further to define that: “Electronic literature extends the traditional functions of print literature in creating recursive feedback loops between explicit articulation, conscious thought, and embodied sensorimotor knowledge. … Electronic literature performs the additional function of entwining human ways of knowing with machine cognition.”[24] Is this true? How is this process taking place?

George P. Landow[25] enthusiastically wrote twenty years ago about the beginnings and endings in the borderless text, the dispersed and the fragmented text, the text in hypertext, visual elements in the print text, extratextual and intratextual, nonsequential (or multisequential) reading and thinking (see Chapter “Reconfiguring the Text”), the death of the author, the decentered self in the network paradigm (see Chapter “Reconfiguring the Author”), while the writing would have as a main attribute the readers’ disorientation (Chapter “Reconfiguring Writing”).

At that time, Jean Baudrillard had already discussed the shift from the tactile to the digital produced by information technology (Simulations, New York, 1983) that was seen as a primary fact about the contemporary world; Jacques Derrida had noticed in the hypertext the perfect medium of his theory of decentering the text and hypertextuality — the dismantling of the book as we know (Dissemination, University of Chicago Press, 1981); while Roland Barthes had glimpsed the new era of information technology as one in which operates the readerly versus the writerly text, the atomization and dispersal of the text (S/Z, New York, 1974) .

Initially published in 1992, Landow’s book’s merit was to gather together many literary theories and philosophical issues related, at the time, to the topic. As I live in that future described by the book, manipulating the reality it described, I can testify that, during the almost 20 years of hypertext, new media, and hypermedia, very little of note, if at all, occurred in the field of literary theory and literature itself.

What has truly changed in the past few years was the democratization of communication (blogs, home pages, listservs, etc) and the globalization of thought.

The created hypertextual narrative products – including hypermedia – were mostly a collage with interesting effects but nonetheless not unforgettable! As we were starving for originality in the arts.

The narrative products manufactured in our Western civilization in the past twenty years through hypermedia links and images had been a failure and were abandoned. We can look, to convince ourselves one more time, at the disappointing texts published in the Electronic Literature Collection: Volume One, October 2006 (College Park, Maryland: Electronic Literature Organization http://collection.eliterature.org/1/ \) or at a book titled Enter the Unknown, the Great American Hypertext Novel http://unknownhypertext.com/unknown.htm, and at a 2010 hypermedia novel published on the Iowa Review Web site http://research-intermedia.art.uiowa.edu/tirw/vol9n2/ , Concerto for Narrative Data http://research-intermedia.art.uiowa.edu/tirw/vol9n2/ and http://research-intermedia.art.uiowa.edu/tirw/vol9n2/artworks/concerto/interface.html, trying to mimic simultaneity.

In my opinion, these are experiments generated by “traditional minds” or by what is called “deep attention” minds, imagining the minds of the future, — those brains that will be experiencing another kind of cognition — “hyper attention”.

The real digital novel would be, from my point of view, very close to the homophonic novel conceived centuries ago in the Chinese civilization, in keeping with its forma mentis – the relationship between the hieroglyph and thought – as I described it in my book, The Civilization of the Novel[26]. This epic architecture – a name I give to what we call ‘the novel’ in our Western civilization – is a mixture of narrative and poetry, of paths and meanings specific to the Chinese cast of mind and thinking, operating simultaneously on several levels, completely foreign to the Indo-European conceptual and linear thinking modes. It is therefore not a simple coincidence that today the experimental digital or electronic poetry is the only productive literary genre in Western culture, as far as digital literature is concerned. Robert Coover[27] and Jean Clement noted in their later works that hypertext seems to lean more toward poetry than toward the narrative, that we witness “a shift from narration to poetry in fiction hypertexts”. Landow himself recognized that almost all the examples in his books “of both digital texts and hypermedia textuality and rhetoric (….) came from poetry rather than from fiction.”[28]

The Indo-European mind – linear by definition – is reflected in the grammar and syntax that generated the books we know and cherish. What is not linear in this mind is the range of the semantics, connotations, and ideas. Nevertheless, it is true that “the new narratives push us toward a new understanding of story that is rich in tentativeness, parallel possibilities, and boundlessness, and that digital narratives might encourage writers to imagine new “categories of stories and prompt new terms of analysis.”[29] Why not follow more easily what was produced in the European and Western civilizations over the past twenty-five centuries?

If print and electronic textuality deeply interpenetrate; if digital technologies are deeply connected with the narrative, then we will witness changes within the print tradition, and perhaps eventually in the novel. When “natural language is put into dynamic interplay with a wide variety of mechanical codes, and textual surfaces are littered with marks of digital machines. …digital technologies .. put into play dynamics that interrogate and reconfigure the relations between authors and readers, humans and intelligent machines, code and language… digitality has become the textual condition of twenty-first century literature.”[30] Landow[31] argued that the chaos of hypertext links replicates mental processes and/or that they can be used to discover our own “distinctive structures of thought” such as James Joyce’s ”stream of consciousness”[32].

Digital Poetry in the United States

Is the Editor dead? Can anybody publish whatever s/he wishes? There are many conversations on this topic on the American poets’ listservs. However, it is a little weird to see that poets are not accepting any input from anybody else, that the editor is reluctant to interfere, and consequently personal blogs, e-portals, and many other similar virtual products proliferate. The Logolalia Project / Altered Books http://www.logolalia.com/alteredbooks/ is one of them. I will add here UBUWEB http://www.ubu.com/contemp/silliman/index.html , Invisible Notes http://invisiblenotes.blogspot.com/, The Argotist Online devoted to poetry and poetics http://www.argotistonline.co.uk/ , The Mudlark An Electronic Journal of Poetry & Poetics http://www.unf.edu/mudlark/, Otholits http://the-otolith.blogspot.com/2010/04/poeteditorsi-contents.html, The Electronic Poetry Review http://www.epoetry.org/issues/issue8/poetry.htm.

Supervised by Dan Waber, a very active promoter and creator, The Logolalia Project helped raise many others, two as such being Vispoets http://www.vispoets.com/ and The Minimalist Concrete Poetry http://www.logolalia.com/minimalistconcretepoetry/ . Trying to understand what is happening here I subscribed to the American experimental – digital e-poetry listserv and I began to experience this new kind of poetry. Dan Waber published my digital poetry—as you can see here http://www.logolalia.com/minimalistconcretepoetry/archives/cat_roznoveanu_mirela.html — and recently asked me for a book, which I intend to produce. The software I worked with allowed me to play with colors and shapes and at least a few of these poems I consider viable and powerful, different, in its capacity to produce emotion.

Spidertangle http://www.spidertangle.net/home.html is another powerful project of e-poetry with outstanding poets communicating via spidertangle’s listserv and producing a great collection of books, anthologies, portals, a.s.o..

The Electronic Literature Organization http://www.eliterature.org is not as active as the Electronic Poetry Center http://www.h-net.org/~clc/etext/literature.html with its Poetic List from SUNY-Buffalo, a remarkable presence in American poetry, with Charles Bernstein on its Advisory Board.

Digital poetry already has its own public in place, recruited mostly from the community of digital poets. Poets read their works in the academic environment as many digital poets are professors in American universities teaching poetry and writing. Writing about digital literature I would like you to know at the same time that this article will be available online in the digital format. That is why I prepared two versions: one to be available online and one for a print version.

At the end of these pages I forecast that the future will possibly employ a new language for a different kind of mind, the mind of virtual reality. Such minds will not make the ones that we now employ obsolete. However a new form of alliance between the non-linear mind and the new media logic will be living in the amniotic fluid of virtual reality, the virtual mind. This process will take decades of gradual change. Humanity makes use of languages relying on words, images, musical scores, and mathematical abstractions. Therefore, why not welcome on the scene a new language capable of using all the above and more to express a new reality that is building around us, down multilinear paths? A new kind of mind will surely emerge ensuring the very survival, perhaps, of humanity itself.

Notes