“Now You See It, Now You Don’t: Performing Literature in Transition” (original) (raw)
Related papers
The Body and the Text. Performance in Cultural and Literary Studies
Revista Alicantina de Estudios Ingleses, 2014
The essay explores the incidence and fertility of ‘performance’ as a means to examine and critique culture also in the field of cultural and literary studies, on whose ground it has landed, together with performativity, as a ‘travelling concept’. By continuously traversing the porous borders of performance studies, both concepts are in fact aiding an understanding of identity and culture not only as discoursively and normatively ‘constructed’ but also as ‘performed’ through embodied practices whose ‘efficacy’ (transgression, resistance, agency) against those very terms of discoursive constructedness and normativity may be tested. Post-subcultural studies, for example, by focusing on contemporary youth subcultures’ creative life-style, body language and spectacular appropriation of the city spaces, analyse their tactics of resistance to the organizational ‘efficiency’ and technological ‘effectiveness’ that dominate today’s cultural scenario. The texts of literature are likewise increasingly approached as ‘events’ or performances, on whose contested terrain the embodied practices of writers and readers have become crucial while, especially in the so-called ‘performative writing’, the split speech/writing is being pushed to the background.
Visual Worlds: The Aesthetics and Politics of Affect. (eds.) Isabelle Boof-Vermesse, Kornelia Slavova, Elena Dineva. Sofia: Polis Press, 2018. 136-144. ISBN: 978-954-796-066-4.
Building on my previous studies of the origin and nature of electronic literature from the late 1990s onwards from the perspective of the philosophy of technology and the two strands of posthumanism: the technocentric and anthropocentric ones, as I have termed them,1 here I aim to examine the 'reverse' development in the field of fiction. How has digital technology affected the printed book? Clearly, digitality – of which visuality is only one aspect, often perceived as the dominant one – has emerged as the central feature not only of electronic literature, but lies at the core of contemporary printed literature as well. As N. Katherine Hayles claims in her paper, " What is Literature? " published in the New Literary History, " Literature in the twenty-first century is computational " (2007: 99). This is certainly true for electronic literature, which is " digital born, created on a computer and meant to be read on it " (Hayles 2007: 99). The digital medium has become intrinsic to print literature as well and has opened new opportunities for exploration and experimentation. This paper looks at recent visual experimentation in print, which draws on the digital, and leads to playing around with the materiality of the text. This development has led to a further foregrounding of the physical and fictional nature of printed texts in ways that are both original and reminiscent of the modernist experiments with language as a material object: both aurally and visually, in terms of layout and typography, as carried out, for example, by Gertrude Stein, Edward Cummings and many others. Though there is an established tradition of examining electronic literature as an offshoot of postmodern writing and as a validation of all the major tenets of literary postmodernism, it is not by chance that the avant-garde aesthetic practices of electronic literature and print literature in the 21 st century have been interpreted even in quite recent studies as conjoined to the modernist period, for instance in Digital Modernism by Jessica Pressman (2014). Today there is an abundance of literary texts, which merge textuality with technology in hybrids of the verbal and the visual mode by employing the creative potential of the digital medium.
Avant: trends in interdisciplinary studies - 2021, Vol. 12, no 3, 2021
This article offers an overview of typographical and experimental strategies employed in contemporary novel writing in the context of author-ing, authority, freedom and experience programming. Nicola Barker's novel H(a)ppy (2017) is discussed as an example of a rising trend in contemporary literary production characterised by an emphasis on multimodality and materiality of texts where the physicality of writing serves as a significant mode of communication, simultaneously aiming to transcend its medium. My claim is that although visually engaging and fascinating in itself, the typographical experimentation, apart from connoting a degree of liberation for both the writer and the reader, can also be looked at from the point of view of a particular "authoring," i.e. programming of reader's reception. This approach is contextualised against the backdrop of the theoretical discussion concerning the notion of author (Roland Barthes, Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida) as well as aspects of materiality of writing and of subverting authority in postmodern fiction and visions of the reader in multimodal texts. This is followed by a reading of the novel with reference to its themes of control and typographical experimentation. The article also recognises a performative aspect of such type of writing.
E-Lit Works as 'Forms of Culture': Envisioning Digital Literary Subjectivity
Culture Machine, 2011
Building on J. Hillis Miller’s 1995 article ‘The Ethics of Hypertext’, Gary Hall argues in Digitize This Book! that digitization, open-access and web self-archiving interrogate the limits of cultural studies ‘by positioning the normal and the usual – in this case, cultural studies and the more conventional modes of “doing cultural studies” – in a “strange and disorienting new context”, thus helping us to see cultural studies again “in a new way”’ (2008: 202). A related compelling question that the present paper asks is whether a similar (but reverse) operation might be practicable, i.e., if by positioning our concepts of the machinic and of the digital/computational literary within the frame of cultural studies it might be possible to see new media studies again in a new way. If we were to apply Gary Hall’s analogy in a rigorous way, however, we should first look at the conventional modes of doing new media studies before putting them in the disorienting context. As Noah Wardrip-Fru...
LITERATURE AND THE TOUCH OF THE REAL
LITERATURE AND THE TOUCH OF THE REAL SAUSSURE, DERRIDA, WITTGENSTEIN—WEIMANN, GREENBLATT AND SHAKESPEARE, 2002
Literature and the Touch of the Real argues that Saussurean linguistic theory that has become the dominant view of language cannot sustain any kind of non-structuralist analysis of literature. Criticism has moved increasingly towards history and politics, but it has neither forged nor adopted a philosophy of language suited to its new purposes. There is, therefore, pressing to bring to bear on literary and cultural studies a philosophy of language that will enable “literary criticism to make contact with the real,” in Stephen Greenblatt’s recent words, by showing how language grasps material reality through a process of practical consciousness and social activity. The book offers a detailed account of the constitutive contradictions of Saussure’s Course in General Linguistics that have been ignored by literary theorists. It argues that Derrida and Wittgenstein offer differently conceived, but related, ways of avoiding both the neo-Saussurean view that language either is disconnected from the world or constitutes reality, on the one hand, and the neo-Realist view that literature and fiction are secondary, etiolated forms of language use, one the other It demonstrates through a close reading of Derrida’s early texts that the notorious statement “there is nothing beyond the text” does not claim that there is nothing outside language. Rather, the broader context of this claim shows that that the reduction of the world from language is in fact one of Derrida’s earliest philosophical targets. The book uses the philosophy of Ludwig Wittgenstein to offer a renewed vision of the defamiliarizing power of literature. Literature, it argues, offers the kinds of “grammatical investigation” with which Wittgenstein himself was concerned. It is grammar (in the specialist sense in which he uses the term) that tells us “what kind of object anything is,” and the literary is the place where the coming together of language and the world is registered most fully. The book concludes with a discussion of Robert Weimann and Stephen Greenblatt’s work on William Shakespeare. Literature and the Touch of the Real argues that there is no gap between words and the world, and that because the world is always in language as part of its rules of representation, literature best reveals what kind of object anything is.
From Watching to Reading – Theorizing a Performative Manuscript
This article seeks to discuss the reciprocal relation between art practice and theorization process. I will examine the performance, “Current of Air”, which employs the structural strategy of a time-based “reading”, a performance book. The audience experiences scenes according to chapters. Each chapter aims to bring up a certain theoretical question between theatre performance and new media. These questions are expressed through an experimental art practice – performative installation. This practice intends to shift the audience from passively “watching” to a more pedagogic “reading”. In the final scene of this performance, audience members physically enter the performance-installation space. They continue their contemplations by immersing themselves in the media-driven installation set and enter into dialogues with artists from the production. Within the whole performance/ reading process, a deeper exchange between affective / intuitive feeling and intellectual thinking is observed. I assert that the role of spectator/audience as one of the crucial site for bridging art and scholarship. The discussion of spectatorship will follow Jacques Lacan’s notion on “Orders of Reality”, i.e., Real, Imaginary and Symbolic as well as Gilles Deleuze’s theory on “Purpose of Thinking”. “Current of Air” is an attempt to integrate the roles of spectator/ audience and book reader. This kind of artistic-intellectual work deepens the Theory and Art Practice connection and shows the importance of examining spectatorship in relation to Theory-Practice.