Appropriation: Towards a Sociotechnical History of Authorship (original) (raw)

Technocriticism and the Future of Literary Text

The Quest, 2014

In the 'techno-culture' of present age we have become cyborgs and the realization of this truth has given rise to a critical perspective known as Technocriticism. An application of Technocritical ideas to literary production and studies helps in interrogating the basic concepts of literature such as text, narrative and linearity which is an interesting discourse in contemporary critical theory. Technocritics challenge the Aristotelian concept of literary plot with its linearity and organizational unity in which the reader was passively engaged and privilege the non-linear and non-authoritative hypertext in which the reader becomes a part of virtual reality. Technology has attained an indispensable place in our life today. The use of computer and information technology in the form of software, internet, World Wide Web, email, blog, social sites, e-commerce, e-journals, e-texts and online services has acquired such an important place in our life that nothing remains out of the grip of technology. Computer and digital media based learning has given birth to a new type of electronic text known as Hypertext which is impacting the traditional literary texts to a great extent. Gone are the days when Literature and Technology were considered pole a part things. In the age of Information Technology Revolution, technology has given new direction to literary studies by opening up new avenues to the production and dissemination of literary knowledge. This influence of technology on literary theory is known as TECHNOCRITICISM which offers an altogether new way to read, write, comprehend and think about the textuality of literature. In the 'techno-culture' of present age we have become cyborgs and the realization of this truth has given rise to a critical perspective known as Technocriticism. It is an acceptable fact now that technology has deeply penetrated our culture of which literature is an important

Birth of a Paradigm: Digital Technology and Its Effect on Literary Studies

2002

Digital technology is changing the landscape of literary studies. In essence, the proliferation of computer technology and hypertext is forcing literary scholars to look at how the expanded role of the visual in our society is influencing the way we read and disseminate texts, especially hypertexts, while they also come to a better understanding of the role of the reader in a digital environment and the overall value of electronic literature. Literary studies is witnessing the birth of a new paradigm through digital technology in textual production and dissemination that will not only raise new questions, but further examine age-old literary issues. The following thesis will then explore several ideas concerning digital technology and literary studies including: ekphrasis, authenticity 'and value, and the nature of narrative. The introduction of digital technology onto the literary landscape has forced the re-evaluation of several aspects involved with literary studies, but more...

Publishing, books and reading: Spaces of authorship, visibility, and socialisation

Profesional de la Información, 2022

Over the course of history, the book and its environment have been in permanent transformation, undergoing changes that have affected its format, textual arrangement, form of reading, and production and distribution systems, as well as its social consideration as an instrument for the transmission of knowledge. One of the greatest changes has taken place in the 21st century with the emergence of digital formats throughout the publishing value chain. If in previous eras the transformations had affected one or other of the mentioned elements, the digital revolution has impacted on all of them simultaneously, as it has modified the ways in which works are created, produced, distributed, and consumed. Also, it has introduced for the first time an element of intermediation between the reader and reading: the device, which, in its different varieties, implies an element of additional complexity. At the present time, and after almost two decades, we can see the advances and setbacks that have occurred on this journey; the achievements and shortcomings from the publishing point of view, in which a strengthening of the big companies can be appreciated; and the emergence of a system of self-publishing that represents a rupture with traditional systems. From the point of view of authorship, the value of the brand, of charisma and prestige, has been emphasised, while a movement of creation is taking place on the fringes of the system that renounces posterity and recognition in favour of visibility. This approach to authorship is also subject to the influx and influence of social networks with their positive effects, in the form of projection, and negative ones, in the form of new ways of censure. Finally, in terms of reading, there is an ambivalent route that runs between the paths of a very strong tradition, linked to the printed book, and digital reading, established from the point of view of practices, but in its more conservative and imitative side with respect to analogue formats; in the digital sphere, new proposals and more innovative initiatives which are attracting the attention of growing but still minority sectors of society are emerging. The digital environment is progressing and consolidating, but it has not yet taken advantage of all the potential that technological advances could provide.

The Writer's Craft, The Culture's Technology

Journal of Pragmatics, 2007

The Writer's Craft, The Culture's Technology is a collection of articles derived from papers given at the Twenty-Second International Conference of the Poetics and Linguistics Association (PALA) at Birmingham in April 2002, which explored the connections between literary creativity and the new technologies available to text producers and text interpreters in contemporary societies. As the objects of analyses are not only literary productions but also other forms of cultural expression, such as hypertexts, web artworks, newspaper stories, television programs and online book reviews, the book is addressed to those who are interested in the interface between discourse analysis and new digital and multimedia technologies, and on how these new technologies impact the forms and functions of literary canons and other post-modern cultural products. Following a preface by Donald C. Freedman, the series editor, and an introduction by the two editors of this particular volume, the book is divided into four parts. Part I, The Writer's Web, includes four papers loosely connected by a focus on Internet genres. The first essay, ''Anti-Laokoön: mixed and merged modes of image text on the web'', by George Dillon, discusses how relations between text and image (and sound) are being created in contemporary web artworks, and argues for the centrality of the cross-modal link to the reader/viewer's processing of hypertexts. The relevant point argued by Dillon is that hypertext links allow users to create complex signifying structures by weaving together different textual fragments, an indication of the constant transformations in the interpretive rules and frames we use to make sense of the world. The second article, ''Personal web pages and the semiotic construction of academic identities'', by Carmen Rosa Caldas-Coulthard, follows the argument that, in late modernity, public discourses are being colonized by traces of discourses of the private world (Chouliaraki and Fairclough, 1999). In this particular case, the author investigates how web pages of individual staff members, linked to a broader institutional web page, are more and more influenced by discourses of the self, and how new forms of fictionalized identities are being created in the process. The third essay, ''Hypertext, prosthetics, and the netocracy: posthumanism in Jeanette Winterson's 'The Powerbook''', by Ulf Cronquist, also explores the issue of identity in discourse. The initial premise is that in the present technological age, essentialist and biological notions of sex and gender have been left behind, and that we have moved into a world where we are all cyborgs, our bodies representing the final frontier in terms of predetermined identity traits. To illustrate this premise Cronquist investigates an Internet novel, which offers the reader a chance to escape from her/his body, and through this e-novel examines issues of hypertextuality, prosthetics and the change from autocracy to netocracy in the postmodern world. The last essay

LiteraMorphosis. Digital Technologies and the Transformation of Literary Culture

Semicerchio, 2015

In presenting a special issue of “Between Journal” on Technology, Imagination, Narrative Forms (4.8, 2014), this article explores the varied interconnections between literature and technology in the contemporary age, and tries to define the contours of theoretical frameworks for a wider consideration of digital humanities. It does so by mapping some of their inflections in narrative at large, such as: the thematic or metaphoric representations of new or futuristic technologies in literature; the interaction between digital culture and more ‘traditional’ literary forms – from digital versions of classics to the use of IT technologies to facilitate experimental narrative techniques; the transformation of narrative under the influence of new mediascapes; the growth of intermedia or transmedia storytelling as a typical expression of the new convergent and participative culture.

"What Does It Matter Who Is Writing?: Literary Studies in the Age of Web 2.0"

In the opening of his essay, “What Is an Author?,” Michel Foucault “formulates the theme with which [he] would like to begin” by quoting from Samuel Beckett’s Texts for Nothing: “’What does it matter who is speaking,’ someone said, ‘what does it matter who is speaking.’” In this essay, Foucault wants “to deal solely with the relationship between text and author and the manner in which the text points to this ‘figure’ that, at least in appearance, is outside it and antecedes it.” For Foucault, Beckett’s “indifference” points to “one of the fundamental ethical principles of contemporary writing,” ethical in that it is a kind of “immanent rule” that dominates writing as a practice. This rule, Foucault argues, is best illustrated by tracing “two of its major themes”: first, “that today’s writing has freed itself from the dimension of expression” and, second, that of “writing’s relationship with death.” “In writing,” Foucault claims, "the point is not to manifest or exalt the act of writing, nor is it to pin a subject within language; it is rather a question of creating a space into which the writing subject constantly disappears." Equally, "the mark of the writer is reduced to nothing more than the singularity of his absence; he must assume the role of the dead man in the game of writing" (342-43). As many people have explained, for Foucault, the death of the author is the birth of Discourse, or what in this essay he calls “discourses that are endowed with the ‘author-function’” (346). Specifically, Foucault explains – in that very French way of his – that in this essay he aims to “locate the space left empty by the author’s disappearance, follow the distribution of gaps and breaches, and watch for the openings that this disappearance uncovers” (345). And for the most part, this essay is cited for its contributions in locating that space brought into being with the author’s death. But what interested me in returning to “What Is an Author” was the amount of space that Foucault dedicates in the essay to explaining both the term “author” and the term “work” and his focus, specifically, on literary discourses. And he does so in ways that I think are productive for exploring the issue of literary studies in the age of web 2.0. In our most utopian moments in thinking about technology, we echo Beckett’s “indifference” to the question “What does it matter who is writing?” in our celebration of the leveling, transformative effects of Web 2.0. Those effects may be best reflected in David Gauntlett’s explanation of Media Studies 2.0. Ultimately the issue I want to explore in my book – the issue of literary studies in the age of web 2.0 – is also an issue of literacy versus the literary, and this difference may be one of the reasons why “New Media Studies” may have found a more hospitable home in Rhetoric Departments than in English. As Foucault goes on to explain: "The coming into being of the notion of “author” constitutes the privileged moment of individualization in the history of ideas, knowledge, literature, philosophy, and the sciences. Even today, when we reconstruct the history of a concept, literary genre, or school of philosophy, such categories seem relatively weak, secondary, and superimposed scansions in comparison with the solid and fundamental unit of the author and the work" (What Is an Author 342). Literary Studies, I will argue, can’t exist without authors, even when – or maybe even especially when – those authors are discursive formations or cultural dominants that work with the text in constitutive ways. The cultural logic that operates in Toni Morrison’s Playing in the Dark still works as a kind of author-function to keep blackness from appearing in an American literary text. And so here we can begin to see why the question, “What does it matter who is writing?” – the question, I would argue, of Web 2.0 -- begins to become a scary one for literary critics. Taste, judgment, and external authority are certainly three of the ways in which discourse functions to normalize and discipline, and as such they become contestable terms. And to be sure the essentialized ways in which these terms function to mark the genius and authority of the Romantic Poet historically come to mean lots of bad things. But what I want to suggest in my book is that one of the effects of literary studies in the age of web 2.0 is to point out how much of what we do – and how much of our own critical authority – is a matter of taste and judgment. And how the “Whiggery” of the Internet can reduce that critical judgment to the indifferent voice of Beckett’s question, “What difference does it make who’s writing?” Mark Poster argues that Beckett's question “poses the challenge of a planetary system of networked information machines and human assemblages;” and that “until we develop a critical theory that is able to raise this question in our media context we cannot expect to contribute significantly to the formation of a discourse of postnational democratic forms of power.” In my talk, I will argue that one way that literary studies can contribute to that discourse is for it to recuperate and redefine the terms in which we think the literary. Specifically, I propose that we rethink the terms Taste, Judgment, and the Imagination.

Re-Writing Literary Past in the Digital Age

2009

The concept of knowledge society has by now become an inseparable part of modern human been said that the Internet has transformed knowledge into a global library and made it into a circulating hypertext. According to Umberto Eco it has created such an explosion of semiotic fireworks, where any point in space can be connected with any other similar point. 1 The new Library of Babylon does not acknowledge borders between states, nations and cultures. This process is global with respect to the consumption of culture, but local regarding the creation of digital content. Thus, Marshall McLuhan's phrase 'the medium is the message' should also be considered when memory documents created with the old analogue media are re-mediated and reconstructed in the environment of new digital media. 2 Below, we will examine the new practices of culture, and in the age of new media, its development can use seemingly limitless resources. It has representing the past from the viewpoint of memory institutions that hold and preserve large collections documents.