Printisflatcodeisdeep

literary analysis should awaken to the importance of media-specific analysis, a mode of critical attention which recognizes that all texts are instantiated and that the nature of the medium in which they are instantiated matters

notion of materiality. Materiality is reconceptualized as the interplay between a text's physical characteristics and its signifying strategies, a move that entwines instantiation and signification at the outset. This definition opens the possibility of considering texts as embodied entities while still maintaining a central focus on interpretation

"From Work to Text" (1986).

"The metaphor of the Text is that of the network," Barthes writes (1986: 61).

"the text must not be understood as a computable object"

Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin Remediation: media constantly engage in a recursive dynamic of imitating each other, incorporating aspects of competing media into themselves while simultaneously flaunting the advantages that their own forms of mediation offer (offering readers the opportunity to dog-ear electronic pages.many print texts are now imitating electronic hypertexts.etc)

Media-specific analysis (MSA) attends both to the specificity of the form—the fact that the Voyager paper clip is an image rather than a piece of bent metal—and to citations and imitations of one medium in another.MSA moves from the language of "text" to a more precise vocabulary of screen and page, digital program and analogue interface, code and ink

literary hypertext. =>>> hypertext ought to be reserved for electronic texts instantiated in digital media. In my view, this is a mistake, Hayles disagrees, When Vannevar Bush, widely credited with the invention of hypertext, imagined a hypertextual system, it was not electronic but mechanical. If we restrict the term hypertext to digital media, we lose the opportunity to understand how a literary genre mutates and transforms when it is instantiated in different media The power of MSA comes from holding one term constant across media—in this case, the genre of literary hypertext—and then varying the media to explore how medium-specific constraints and possibilities shape texts. Understanding literature as the interplay between form and medium, MSA insists that "texts" must always be embodied to exist in the world. The materiality of those embodiments [End Page 69] interacts dynamically with linguistic, rhetorical, and literary practices to create the effects we call literature

Mark Rose-Authors and Owners: The Invention of Copyright (1993),legal theorists such as William Blackstone defined a literary work as consisting solely of its "style and sentiment." "These alone constitute its identity," "The paper and print are merely accidents, which serve as vehicles to convey that style and sentiment to a distance" (quoted in Rose 1993: 89). but it was not practical to copyright "sentiment," for some ideas are so general they cannot be attributed to any single author: that men are mortal, for example. Rather, it was not ideas in themselves but the ways in which ideas were expressed that could be secured as literary property and hence copyrighted.

This judicial history had important consequences for literature that went beyond purely legal considerations: it helped to solidify the literary author as a man (male) of original genius who created literary property by mixing his intellectual labor with the materials afforded him by nature, (like Locke-men created private property by mixing their labor with the land)

In these discourses, material and economic considerations, although they had force in the real world, were elided or erased in favor of an emphasis on literary property as an intellectual construction that owed nothing to the medium in which it was embodied s. With significant exceptions, print literature was widely regarded as not having a body, only a speaking mind

a view that insists that [electronic] texts are immaterial makes it difficult to understand the significance of importing print texts into electronic environments

the computer can simulate so successfully only because it differs profoundly from print in its physical properties and dynamic processes

materiality should be understood as existing in complex dynamic interplay with content, coming into focus or fading into the background, depending on what performances the work enacts

Interpretation cannot be generated by the apparatus alone, independently of how it is used in specific works

The crucial move is to reconceptualize materiality as the interplay between a text's physical characteristics and its signifying strategies. This definition opens the possibility of considering texts as embodied entities while still maintaining a central focus on interpretation. In this view of materiality, it is not merely an inert collection of physical properties but a dynamic quality that emerges from the interplay between the text as a physical artifact, its conceptual content, and the interpretive activities of readers and writers. Materiality thus cannot be specified in advance; rather, it occupies a borderland—or better, performs as connective tissue—joining the physical and mental, the artifact and the use

Hypertext, understood as a genre that can be implemented in both print and digital media, offers an ideal opportunity to explore the dynamic interaction between the artifactual characteristics and the interpretation that materiality embodies. Like all literature, hypertext has a body (or rather many bodies), and the rich connections between its physical properties and the processes that constitute it as something to be read make up together that elusive object we call a "text"—and that I want now to call instead a codex book or stitched pamphlet or CD-ROM or Web site

Following Jane Yellowlees Douglas and others, I propose that hypertext has at a minimum the following characteristics: multiple reading paths; some kind of linking mechanism; and chunked text (that is, text that can be treated as discrete units and linked to one another in various arrangements

A print encyclopedia, for example, qualifies as a hypertext because it has multiple reading paths

Ursula Le Guin's Always Coming Home (1987), where the audio tapes afford multiple ways to access this multimedia text; Philip Zimmerman's artist's book High Tension (1993), where a multiplicity of reading paths is created,d Robert Coover's "The Babysitter" (2000 [1969]), a short story that pushes toward hypertext by juxtaposing contradictory and nonsequential events, suggesting many simultaneously existing time lines

the text's materiality provides resources that writers and readers can mobilize in specific ways

remediation, the simulation of medium-specific effects in another medium

Point One: Electronic Hypertexts Are Dynamic Images.

In the computer, the signifier exists not as a durably inscribed flat mark but as a screenic image produced by layers of code precisely correlated through correspondence rules words function as both verbal signifiers and visual images whose kinetic qualities also convey meaning (Hayles 1999b)

http://www.workxspace.de/valentine/val_va/val_f.html david knoebel-breathe

File:N

Point Two: Electronic Hypertexts Include Both Analogue Resemblance and Digital Coding. Point Three: Electronic Hypertexts Are Generated through Fragmentation and Recombination. Point Four: Electronic Hypertexts Have Depth and Operate in Three Dimensions. Point Five: Electronic Hypertexts Are Bilingual, Written in Code as well as Natural Language. Point Six: Electronic Hypertexts Are Mutable and Transformable. Point Seven: Electronic Hypertexts Are Spaces to Navigate. Point Eight: Electronic Hypertexts Are Written and Read in Distributed Cognitive Environments. Point Nine: Electronic Hypertexts Initiate and Demand Cyborg Reading Practices.