The Materialities of Close Reading: 1942, 1959, 2009David CiccoriccoUniversity of Otagodave.ciccoricco@otago.ac.nz
David Ciccoricco is a member of the English Department faculty at the
University of Otago, which is located in Dunedin, New Zealand. His research is
focused on contemporary narrative fiction, with a particular emphasis on
emergent forms of digital literature and network culture in general. He is the
author of
Reading Network Fiction (University of
Alabama Press, 2007), a book on the first and second waves of digital
fiction.
Alliance of Digital Humanities OrganizationsAssociation for Computers and the Humanities000113006126 June 2012article
This is the source
DHQ classification scheme; full list available at http://www.digitalhumanities.org/dhq/taxonomy.xmlKeywords supplied by author; no controlled vocabularyconverted to XMLChanged "dhq:caption" to "head."
This article identifies some of the popular and historical contradictions inherent to
the very notion of close reading digital literature, and puts forth an updated
conception of what the author argues continues to be a vital practice of literary
study. More specifically, it establishes continuities between a pre-digital
historical conception of close reading and the sort of materially-conscious
hermeneutics that digital textuality requires. The author applies the updated
conception of close reading digital literature to Steve Tomasula's
TOC, a self-described new media novel.
From I.A. Richards' machines to think with to literature
that would be unthinkable without the ubiquitous machines of the digital age.
The Materialities of Close Reading: 1942, 1959, 2009
Contrary to the practice of reading hypertext in a critical vacuum
as a revolutionary technology with untold implications for the production and reception
of texts, it is the close analysis of actual works of digital literature — literary
works written on and for the computer screen — that marks what has come to be known as a
second generation of digital-literary scholarship.Referring to Joan Campàs'
observations about digital literature being more often browsed
than read, N. Katherine Hayles writes, although, recently, in what we might call the second
generation of hypertext criticism as practiced by such critics as David
Ciccoricco, Terry Harpold, Matthew Kirschenbaum, and Jessica Pressman,
electronic literature is read, and read very closely A growing body of digital born literature is uniquely
positioned in its ability to use new and still relatively unfamiliar tools to mobilize
formal and material innovation in expressly literary fashion while using the same tools
to reflect on a cultural moment of great technological change. Scholars moreover are
uniquely positioned to extend contemporary literary and narrative theory given this new
mode of cultural production. Nevertheless, I would argue that if there is any trouble
with second generation digital-literary criticism it would be the celebration of both
the practice and the very possibility of close reading works digital literature, while
at the same time failing to adequately articulate what close
reading means, or must come to mean, in digital environments.
Some attempts to address this problem have deepened it: first, close readings of digital
literature have a tendency to collapse into a strictly visual semiotics — by which I
refer to analyses of both pictographic material and text treated iconographically
at the expense of its verbal or referential qualities.
Reading images and animations and celebrating text-as-image is
undeniably necessary when reading media-rich, visually dynamic works of digital
literature; the interplay between media elements is indeed a definitive characteristic
of the field. But in this view reading skills refers primarily to
an interpretation of image and animation and comes to unnecessarily dominate an emerging
conception of digital literacy. In this view, close reading elides conceptual
understanding that arises from the verbal and the textual. I grant the need to employ
the term and the practice of reading in such a way as to
accommodate not only visual texts but participatory ones as well. N. Katherine Hayles,
for instance, refers to textual installations in digital environments that create an enriched sense of embodied play that complicates and
extends the phenomenology of reading (emphasis added), . Reading in this view, she writes, becomes a complex performance in which agency is distributed
between the user, the interface, and the active cognitions of the networked and
programmable machine. But one cannot help but notice when such an extension becomes an
elision.There are sufficient examples of such elision, and any cursory survey
of notable digital literature collections, such as the Electronic Literature
Organization Collection Volume I, or the early Electronic
Literature Directory, or even special journal editions devoted to the
field, such as Dichtung Digital's New Perspectives on Digital Literature, will tend to reflect the same
situation: the number of primarily text-based or narrative-driven titles is small,
compared to the number of other (generative, algorithmic, primarily visual, or video
game) titles under consideration. Meanwhile, conferences and events devoted to
recovering the importance of text and reading in digital art and culture can
perpetuate the very elision they are trying to move beyond. For example, a 2009
conference on Reading Digital Literature emphasized that
digital literacy after all is still inevitably based on reading skills while the analyses it elicited often concerned installation art in which, for
example, one mostly does not engage in the reading process, but
rather plays with the rain of letters. The text has been transformed into visual
objects, or if you step back from the screens and take in the
installation as a whole, you're not really reading anymore; you're perceiving
this plethora of text as part of a trance-like experience. While the situation is not a problem in itself (and may indeed simply reflect
the ontology of what we call digital literature), it is highly relevant in guiding
our understanding and application of close reading in digital environments.
The practice of "reading" dynamic images does not need to signify the only or even the
primary kind of interpretive work that is done on digital fiction and poetry, and will
not, on its own, answer the question of what close reading means for digital literature.
Another reason why attempts to answer the question of what close reading means for
digital literature fall short is the tendency to apply an overbroad and uncritical
notion of close reading itself. We know that, on the surface, the
popular — or what we might call the institutionalized — conception of close
reading conflicts dramatically with the object in question here: a multi-medial
multi-modal digital artifact that simply refuses to stay still. And, of course, this is
what makes digital literature so valuable for shaking up literary studies. But the
closer we look, the more we find that close reading in the historical sense
serves up an even greater set of contradictions for digital literature.
The application of an overbroad and uncritical notion of close
reading is by no means restricted to those working in the field; the
institutionalized conception has become, for better and for worse, an atomized one. But
if we are going to redefine this figure in any productive way in light of digital media,
we need a ground from which to work. This need to revisit and re-animate close reading
is, furthermore, much more than a matter of terminology. If one agrees with Jane Gallop
who argues that the practice of close reading is not only what defines literary study as
a discipline and methodology, but also amounts to our single most effective anti-authoritarian pedagogyGallop frames close reading as inherently opposed to both older authoritarian
models of learning and contemporary models in other disciplines that rely on a banking model of depositing
knowledge directly into the student. Close reading, as inherited from New Criticism,
not only affords literary studies with a transparent methodology but also enables a
form of active learning . then literary
studies would be foolish to forfeit its power to wield such a practice beyond the
confines of print. In short, close reading demands our
devout and continued intellectual oversight.
In what follows, my intention is to work through some of the prevailing popular and
historical contradictions inherent to close reading digital literature, and put forth an
updated conception of what is ultimately a vital practice of literary study. In the
process, I'll establish some line of continuity — or perhaps more appropriately for a
hypertextually-minded project — insert a link between a pre-digital historical
conception of close reading and the sort of materially-conscious hermeneutics that
digital textuality requires. Finally I'll use Steve Tomasula's
TOC, a self-described new media
novel, as a model to apply such a conception of close reading to digital
literature.
The Matter of Historical Close Reading
On the surface, there are good reasons to presume that New Criticism, the critical
and pedagogical impulse most often associated with close reading, would be highly
compatible with the enterprise of digital-literary scholarship.Close reading
was not concomitant with the criticism that New Criticism professed; rather, as
Wellek describes, the method of close reading became the pedagogical weapon
of the New Criticism. For one, the New Critics were open about their desire to make
literary criticism, in the words of Ransom, more scientific, or precise and systematic. Many of them, Allen Tate especially, even saw poetry, above and beyond
science, as the only vehicle that could provide a unique and complete form of
knowledge . It is clear, moreover, that they
wanted to create a cohesive field, however crass Ransom's own admittedly
distasteful conception of Criticism Inc.
may have conveyed itself over the years. We know that the substance of close
reading is somewhat sullied. The alleged myopia of the New Critics and their
legacy has proved catastrophic, in this debasement narrative, for our
understanding of race, class, gender and, more broadly, our deeper historical
consciousness. In short defense of the debased conception of close reading, it can
be said that New Criticism was wittingly blind to what has been called extrinsic
textual factors so that the intrinsic factors of the text itself could have their
own day in the sun. There is also no shortage of secondary scholarship that
opposes the notion of the New Critics as resolutely or absolutely ahistorical.
Spurlin and Fischer's 1995 edited collection on The New
Criticism and Contemporary Literary Theory, for one, dismantles this
broad-stroke ahistoricism by either excavating evidence of historical
consciousness in the New Critical oeuvre or contextualizing the more radical calls
for history's exclusion as a direct response to the "Old Historicism" that left
literary criticism without a clear mandate and in need of a disciplinary home in
the first place. But one does not need to offer an extended apologia for the New
Critics in order to establish that close reading, and everything it stands for,
has survived. It has survived both the theory boon and the New Historicism that
followed it (meanwhile, we can thank Paul de Man for showing us that
deconstruction never really threatened the sanctified realm of close reading but
rather infused it with new zeal).
But, notwithstanding the inherent difficulty of speaking about any diverse group of
scholars as a collective, the New Critics were under no illusion that they were going
to create a positivistic discipline that could adopt the same brand of (scientific)
method albeit in the service of a different brand of truth. Rather, it can be said
that they were employing the very word scientific in a
literary way; for them, close reading in particular was far from a technical endeavor
. In Ransom's own often-quoted plea for a
scientific criticism, his own much less often quoted
qualification follows: It will never be a very exact science, or even a nearly exact
one… It does not matter whether we call them sciences or just systematic
studies; the total effort of each to be effective must be consolidated and kept
going. The New Critics were on the whole unlikely candidates for proto-technologists
or budding digital humanists. Indeed, New Criticism was marked by suspicion of an
increasingly industrialized and technologized society to the point of
insularity. This insularity was perhaps epitomized in the 1930
manifesto-laden collection I'll Take My Stand: the South and
the agrarian tradition, in which twelve Southerners penned essays celebrating rural life and traditional
values while flirting with Neo-Confederatism. Despite its reactionary rhetoric,
even for the day (it would not fare well under postcolonial eyes), the collection
was highly influential. Many of its contributors — among them John Crowe Ransom,
Robert Penn Warren, Allen Tate, and Donald Davidson — had by then already made a
name for themselves as part of the Fugitive poets, writing poetry for the magazine
of the same name in the early 1920s. In order to truly foster the arts, their
argument went, we would need to rehabilitate an agrarian society that valued
tradition, history, and self-sufficiency over the dehumanizing effects they felt
bearing down on them from the growing urban economies of the North. As the
literary historian M.A.R. Habib writes, the New Critics attempted to foster an elite which might safeguard culture
against the technological and populist vulgarities of an industrial
society. But theirs was not just a forward-looking suspicion of what industrialization
and modernization would mean for literary art and criticism: they were even
suspicious of what they saw as an overly technical approach to literary criticism
preceding them in the Russian formalists, whose mechanistic
quantitative methods were essentially at odds with any approach to a poetic or
fictional text that involved aesthetic judgment .
That the personal computer has for subsequent reactionary literary scholars and
schools come to represent perhaps the most vulgar of intrusions into the humanistic
realm would, in this historical light, further compound the contradiction of close
reading digital literature.
An elaborate example of New Criticism's problems with scientism plays out in Richard
Palmer's 1969
Hermeneutics, where he claims that despite all its humanistic pretensions and flamboyant defenses of
poetry in an age of technology, modern literary
criticism has itself become increasingly technological. More and more, it has
imitated the approach of the scientist. While Palmer grants that the New Critics were essentially right about the autonomy of the literary work of art and the
pitfalls of the intentional fallacy, On these points Palmer is actually much
more sympathetic to New Criticism than Wellek's reframing of Palmer's position as
an indifferent scientism would allow . they are here guilty by implication.
And though he later provides similar qualification that New Criticism constitutes in some ways an exception to this technological approach, he ultimately faults their emphasis on
structure and pattern in the production of cold analyses. He further charges that in treating the literary text as an autonomous
object, it becomes an entity to be mastered, and since complete mastery or control
does not equate to a complete understanding of the work, this is a false goal . Palmer concludes that New Critical readings
tended to fall into either an Aristotelian realism, organicism, or formalism. It would appear that only a nebulous philosophical foundation — its status as
moving target — has spared New Criticism from a more direct attack. A more
recent critique (albeit one no less reactionary on the topic of technology and the
humanities) argues that despite their attempt to construct a literary safe-house
within which to practice and preserve their craft, New Criticism in fact
internalized the technoculture it sought to escape: The New Critics of the 1940s and 1950s attempted to protect
the verbal artifact from the pressures of historical necessity and mere
utility; yet their method was a direct reflection of those pressures. New
Criticism was a kind of synecdochic condensation of the technological system
in its antihistoricism; its objective neutrality and treatment of the poem
as a clinical specimen; its quasi-scientific emphasis on specialization and
method together with a meager, mostly inconsequential theorizing; its myths
of synthesis and autolechy; its metaphors for organization. The New Critics
fostered a straightforward, roll-up-your-sleeves approach to criticism that
valued technocratic expertise, teamwork, bureaucratized efficiency, and
anonymity (though a few top stars always get the prizes).
Palmer's discussion of textual autonomy leads us to a related reason why we might
expect a high degree of compatibility between New Critical close reading and close
reading in the domain of digital humanities. The New Critical commitment to reading a
literary work on its own terms as a literary work (not biography, not history, not
cultural or political critique), along with their mantra of the text
itself, would appear to point toward a deeper interest in the text as
just that: a text, which is to say, a material artifact. Any focus on materiality
would make them kindred scholars with those who would later confront the materiality
of a new medium with the rise of digital culture. Their intense preoccupation with
form would likewise suggest a potential affinity with theorists of digital
textuality, who inevitably find themselves indulging in a new kind of Formalism when
reading texts on the screen whose own internal tensions are networked and
programmable.
But this sense of kindredness and affinity overlooks a crucial quality of the New
Critical attitude toward their object. The text, for these scholars, was both much
more and much less than the tangible product of the prevailing inscription
technologies of the day. In their search for paradox, irony, ambiguity, and — above
all — meaning, the site of interplay of these elements effectively became the textual
object, or rather supplanted it. The body of the text itself was
a function of what Jane Newman describes as the fundamental
Platonism of the New Critics' conception of close reading: The preferred 'object' of [New Criticism's] affection is in
fact an abstract creation. The embrace of the Idea of the Text. The body of the text for the New Critics was thus an abstract, dematerialized
body. It is true that any hermeneutical process will involve the creation or
recreation of some kind of abstract model, but the point is that for the New Critics
the medium was not the message nor even a part of it. We are left with an inherent
contradiction for close reading digital literature: one simply cannot close read
digital text in the New Critical sense, for reading a text as a text does not work
when you can no longer take the text to be an idealized abstract
site of formal interplay.
If history presents some contradictions for close reading digital literature, then
history can also surmount them. In fact, the figure who moves us out of and beyond
this impasse is also the same one often positioned at the headwaters of New Criticism
itself — I.A. Richards. Widely considered first among those influencing the New
Critical tradition, Richards (much like his student and fellow Englishman William
Empson after him) never fit comfortably in it. Richards attempted to negotiate a path
between affective interpretations by readers and the formal elements that inhere in
literary texts and structure a more or less appropriate or accurate interpretation. A
clear example of this negotiation is his 1929
Practical
Criticism, in which he conducts an experiment by asking students to
respond to a series of unidentified poems (in the mold of what would come to be
called Reader Response theory) then proceeds to categorize that data set using
principles that reflect the New Critical method. Outside of the fortified
disciplinary perimeter of literary criticism, Richards also rode the two-cultures
debate with more courage and panache than most if not all of his peers, even if his
attempt to instill scientific rigor in literary criticism while at the same time
insisting that poetic language was non-referential and able to access only
pseudo-truths was indeed having it both ways in the end.
As a literary critic, Richards certainly contains multitudes, and literary
historians are quick to point out when his theories were undermined by his practice
(see, for instance, ). He was, however,
remarkably unique in the way his work — both in theory and in practice — recognized
and embraced the materiality of literary texts and literary criticism. In terms of
his theory, he famously meditated on the ontology of his own book,
Principles of Literary Criticism, as a machine to think with, then did it over again in a revised preface for
the same work two years later. The two prefaces differ in their choice of machine. In
the first: A book is a machine to think with, but it need not attempt to
emulate a force-pump1924 Preface, . And in the second: A book is a machine to think with, but it need not,
therefore, usurp the functions either of the bellows or the locomotive. This
book might better be compared to a loom on which it is proposed to re-weave
some ravelled parts of our civilization1928 Preface, . In both iterations, we see a distinction drawn between the machinations of
literary criticism and those more crude though perhaps more precise operations of
industrial machinery (his literary machine need not emulate or usurp these other
functions); and, by extension, we can also see a re-inscription of Richards' division
of poetic and scientific modes of thought. In the second instance, moreover, he
introduces yet another machine that offers a better analogue for the type of
functions his text performs: the loom, which productively invokes the Latin etymology
of text, from texere, to weave.
But by pushing these metaphors even further, Richards' simple editorial exercise
also lends itself to an even fuller reading along cybernetic lines. First, even
though we understand Richards' famous analogy to imply that his book is a machine
that we, his readers, can think with, it is of course also something he himself is
thinking with as he creates, and re-creates it. It is this process of re-creation in
a slightly amended preface that enacts a kind of cybernetic feedback loop. In effect,
we have a reflexive description of a system that is itself also simultaneously, and
iteratively, at work: books are machines to think with, a process which in turn
produces more machines to think with, which in turn… and so on.
In addition, with his slight revision we no longer simply have
Principles of Literary Criticism, the work; rather, we have
Principles of Literary Criticism, the
network. Some would be inclined to call this bibliography or textual
criticism, which would be entirely justified. Though one crucial difference remains
in the fact that there is really not much point in arguing for a definitive version
of the preface; the network, by definition, remains decentralized. The significance
instead resides in the fact that the internal and inter-textual relations of the
prefaces — of the network — are open for reading and, indeed, close reading.
In the process of feeding the concept of close reading digital literature itself
through the work of New Criticism in general and Richards in particular, one
furthermore encounters a sort of density of activity — or, in more hypertextual
parlance, what we might describe as a significant hub in the network topology —
around the year 1942. That year marked the publication of Richards'
How to Read a Page: A Course in Effective Reading with an
Introduction to a Hundred Great Words, its very title indicating a
deliberate attention to textual anatomies. The introduction, moreover, yields yet
another revisitation of his preface, in which we are able to further contextualize
his choice of machines. Some books, he writes, endeavor to transport their readers or drag them passively hither
and thither (the locomotive); whereas others aim to
stuff them, with facts or other supposedly fattening matter (the force
pump and the bellows); and, finally, he adds a few more machines to the mix,
including pulverizers, consolidators, and the microscope, which can take the most familiar things and lay scraps and
details of them before us, so transmuted by the new conditions under which we
see them that we lose all power of recognizing or putting them together
again…. In perhaps a proto-hypertextual spirit privileging reader choice, however,
this time he makes it clear that readers of the present book will have to choose for themselves which sort of machine they will compare this
book to, adding that I do not believe a washing machine or a combination harvester
is the right one.
In addition, in that 1942 text, Richards began his peculiar typographical experiment
of using specialized quotation marks. These meta-semantic signifiers were an attempt
to redress what Richards called the inordinately heavy
task that quotations typically take on in critical writing . For example, a superscripted pair of w's indicated that a word is being talked about as a word
while a pair of n's indicates that the word is the name that is being used… though we may not think it is a good
name — similar to the phrase the so called ______. Insertions such as these, he had hoped, would abridge both the intellectual and optical labor of the
reader. While his readers may have found this typographical affectation curious, and
his publishers certainly found it intolerable, Richards, nonetheless, in the very act
of scripting meta-signification, might have been signaling a pre-historic,
externalized form of HTML as well.
After all, if Richards toyed with intervening in basic typographical conventions to
facilitate reading practices, hypertext technology demanded it. The standard HTML
design typography for Web browsers are, of course, not in the form of superscripts
but underlined and color-coded text. One would expect, for instance, underlined text
that appears in a web interface to be the site of a hyperlink, and its color will
communicate further basic information to the reader: blue suggests that you can go somewhere else from here, while purple suggests
that you've already been there. Richards' experiment,
clearly, involves a circumscribed and somewhat idiosyncratic system; that is, these
scripts were pointing not to some universal understanding of linguistic categories,
but back to his own inescapably stylized explanations of them (hence, the very need
for his own
Key). Nonetheless, it anticipates the
tension between universal typologies and a context-based pragmatics that would emerge
with the varied projects of categorizing hyperlinks (as evidenced in Susanna Pajares
Tosca's A Pragmatics of Links, or, in relation to
hypertext and narrative fiction, Jeff Parker's A Poetics of the
Link). Moreover, Richards' endeavor anticipates other experiments by those
scholars working in digital environments who similarly have found that the standard
HTML adornments have likewise taken on an inordinately heavy
task for critical readers and writers. In his hypertext essay Hypertext Syntagmas, Adrian Miles, for example, uses
different text link colors to refer to different strands of scholarly reference,
including blue for canonical, red for
commentary, and green for quotation.
Some readings of Richards' intervention have been unsympathetic; Paul Fry, for one,
describes them as the equivalent of nervous italics,
adding that these warning superscripts only codify Richards' pervasively
annoying habit of suppressing insoluble problems by exaggerating the difficulty
of soluble ones. But when seen through what we might call the long zoom of evolving critical
practices across media, Richards' experiment marks [up] a significant moment in the
development of a materially-conscious hermeneutics. Joseph Tabbi's own discussion of
Richards is exemplary in this regard. Discussing Richards' typography as enacting
recursive self-variations in the text — a kind of
feedback loop in itself — he goes on to suggest that hypertext may have already
animated this notion ad absurdum: In a culture of smileys, attachments, pasted text, and email
replies setting off what you wrote... the scare
quote is the default condition of the text....
Richards undertook another important experiment in 1942. About a decade prior, his
colleague C. K. Ogden proposed the idea of formalizing a pared-down, instrumentalized
version of English to serve as an international second language and aid in language
acquisition. He called it Basic English. Richards, during his involvement in the
project, saw a potential synergy between this simplified standardized language and
the affordances of contemporary mass media. He started conceiving of ways that their
simplified language set (which included 850 key words along with a number of
fundamental grammatical patterns) could be represented in visual form, and
subsequently reproduced — or, indeed, mass-produced — in varied media forms. In 1942
he went to Disney Studios, which would assist him with the design and production of a
series of stick figure drawings of people, places, and things that would eventually
appear in his multi-volume
Language Through Pictures, an
expansion of the Basic English project . As John Paul Russo
notes, the series eventually went into record, tape, television and
computer, easily adapting itself to the evolving media. Russo's own criticism of the project follows: While Basic offered an ideal of technological efficiency —
it was supposedly quick and easy to learn — it tended to reduce language
from a complex instrument of intellectual analysis into a collection of
purely functional or operational phrases. It helps to recall Richards' own dualistic understanding of
literary/poetic and non-literary language in light of such dismissals, and instead
consider the endeavor prescient for anticipating a problem that lies at the heart
of experiments in Artificial Intelligence and natural language processing, which
were then gaining tremendous momentum with advancements in modern computing.
Here we have a multi-modal, multi-medial experiment in language acquisition
and an attempt to technologize the word, no less one done in conjunction with that
bastion of pop-cultural production — Disney.
Thus, 1942 provides a logical place to anchor one link that will allow us to
reconcile some of the contradictions implicit in a historically minded application of
close reading to digital literature, and help establish a pre-digital critical
genealogy for digital literature (one that, moreover, stretches back further than a
beleaguered hypertext theory of the early 1990s). Nevertheless,
when it comes to close reading in dynamic digital environments, further modifications
to methodology are necessary. How do we productively redirect a conception of the
well-wrought urn toward, say, the well-wrought node, or, for that matter, the
well-wrought code?
Re-animating Close Reading
In 1976, lamenting the perceived threat of technology to literary art and study, E.D.
Hirsch wrote, The jargon of the technocrat whose terms of 'input' and
'output' turn us metaphorically into machines is now part of our modern
literature. With the advent of digital literature, today the language and logic of input
and output and the cybernetic vocabulary from which it springs is no longer jargon,
but part of the lingua franca of our field and,
indeed, a foundational difference between print and digital textuality. Moreover, we
are quite comfortable — albeit not passively uncritical — of the fact that Hirsch's
description of us as metaphorical machines has in some ways crossed into the literal
realm. That is, we do not have to adopt Marvin Minsky's popular reduction of the
human to a meat machine in order to realize that we now operate
in a rich site of posthuman — and arguably posthumanist — textual activity. We become
part of an integrated circuit that runs between body, text, and machine, and
completes the feedback loop in a way that print literature does not.See also
Rita Raley's The Digital Loop: Feedback and
Recurrence for an extended and articulate elaboration on this
point.
There is certainly no denying the complexity of the (intellectual, ethical, emotive)
transaction that occurs for the reader of print literature, and it is possible to
assert that Richards' own early musings on machinic textuality articulated the sort
of communicative circuits at work in any media. But, as Hayles explains, the new component possible with networked and programmable
media is the cycle's completion, so that the feedback loops run in both
directions — from the computer to the player and from the player to the
computer. In short, there are outcomes (or outputs) based on the perceptions and
actions of the reader (or player). Hayles adds that [t]o fully take this reflexivity into account requires
understanding the computer's cascading interpretive processes and procedures,
its possibilities, limitations, and functionalities as a subcognitive agent, as
well as its operations within networked and programmable media considered as
distributed cognitive systems. Whether our computers augment the texts we write (via word search, spell
check, or thesaurus) or, in the strong sense, we augment the texts that they write
(via programs that enable dynamic generation of poetic or narrative texts), we
conspicuously partake in such cybernetic reading and writing practices. See
on the poetry of text
generators. In addition, when our texts are works of digital literature, works written
for and read on a computer screen that would lose something of their aesthetic and
semiotic function if removed from their medium, The definition is an adapted
and abridged version of that put forth for digital
fiction by the members of the Digital Fiction International Network
(DFIN). That full definition includes a further description of works that pursue their verbal, discursive and/or conceptual complexity
through the digital medium with the intention of providing some
qualification of the literary. we need to partake in these interpretive processes in a manner
that accounts for textual mobility, autonomy, and materiality in new ways.
A first step in close reading digital literature is abandoning the classical notion
of organic wholeness and unity, for it is neither present as a criterion in the mode
of New Criticism nor absent in the sense that poststructuralist
criticism has always already told you so. It would seem
to be a fairly straightforward observation to say that the notion of the text as an
autonomous and autotelic object is untenable in digital environments because the
boundaries of the text itself are so often fluid, nebulous, or at least difficult to
discern. Furthermore, it is difficult to determine the status of navigational tools
such graphical maps (common in stand-alone hypertext applications such as Storyspace)
or splash page graphics, which often double as contents pages without privileging any
singular point of entry. Online texts raise even further questions given that they
can potentially link to any other text on the Web, a potential realized for
transgressive ends in many digital-literary works (Deena Larsen in
Disappearing Rain and Lance Olsen in 10:01 among them). Clearly, digitally-mediated textual links explode
Genette's concept of the paratext, those liminal devices of books that reside both
internally and externally to it . Genette
divides paratexts (which include anything from titles, forewords, epigraphs, and dust
jackets, to reviews, press releases, or correspondence written to or by the author)
in two categories based on the relative proximity of these devices to the text. Such
an exercise proves to be problematic in digitally networked texts where all nodes are
experientially equidistant. There are in fact several works of digital literature
online that relish the opportunity to enfold their paratexts within themselves
(including 253 by Geoff Ryman and, in perhaps the most
excessive example, The Unknown by William Gillespie et
al., which links to reviews written by the authors about their own work). See
for a close reading of The Unknown and the poetics of excess.
But despite these challenges to a traditional conception of textual form, digital
literature is by no means formless. In fact, in some ways close reading digital
literature requires a new mode of literary-critical Formalism. One expects
certain stock objections to any critical approach that is strikingly Formalist,
and digital-literary criticism is no exception. But the defense would go beyond a
stock response for digital literature: one must be Formalist to an extent when
talking about new forms. After all, a whole generation of theory misconstrued the
form — and the materiality — of digital textuality, whether we were talking about
flickering signifiers or a virtual text conceived in terms of purely light and
electricity. Part of the challenge for scholars in the field is that the further
they move away from their specialized circles, whether in articles or conference
papers, the more they must start with very formal or definitional
approaches because of the audience's lack of familiarity with not simply a given
text, but its form. Either way, a focus on form is always a means to an
(interpretive) end; and here we can follow art historian Yve-Alain Bois, who
writes that even one's most formal descriptions are always predicated
upon a judgment and ... the stake of this judgment is always, knowingly or
not, meaning ... [T]he reverse is also true: it is impossible to lay any
claim to meaning without specifically (and I would say initially) speaking
of form. For instance, while J. Hillis Miller has described the practice of
(cartographically) accounting for wholes as an inheritance from New Criticism and, with regard to its pursuit of panoptical
perspective, adds that it cannot be detached from its theological basis, scholars of digital textuality are determined to move away from the dominant
paradigm of a textual topography, and instead speak more accurately of
textual topology (see and ). Given that the connectivity of points defines
a digital network, not our ability to locate those points in space or map their
relative distance from each other, it is more accurate to discuss the structure of
networked forms of digital literature in terms of topology. Textual borders are thus
not erased in digital environments; rather, they are continually renegotiated and
redefined in a topological conceptualization.
Close reading digital literature also involves close analysis of the individual
components that comprise its topology: hypertextual nodes. In turn, we should
recognize the possibility of close reading new bibliographical units
that are peculiar to digital environments. In such environments you can close read an
entire novel or poem, or an entire node. You can also close read an idiosyncratic
path of nodes, one that will include a reading of the links that both separate and
connect them. In digital environments, you can furthermore close read images (either
static or dynamic) and sound (be it music or noise) in relation to the text. Of
course, you can do the same in print environments to an extent, but only
to an extent, for print texts do not perform, which is to say they do not execute
their code in a material sense. This passage is adapted from my contribution to
.
In turn, you can close read the kinetics of the digital text in relation
to the text; you can close read digital literature with and against its
interface / navigation; See for a
close reading of medial mobility and narrative discourse in Judd Morrissey's
The Jew's Daughter and for a close reading of the navigation
and interface of Michael Joyce's Twilight, A
Symphony. and you can close read digital literature in relation to
its application and — its ontological bedrock — programming code. The obvious
problem for reading code, of course, is that of accessibility; as Bootz puts it, reading does not allow one to access all of the aesthetic
layers of the programmed work of a digital medium. Some forms of digital literature — and poetry in particular — will invite
the practice of reading code by conspicuously introducing programming language
into the surface level of the text, making the code itself accessible or visible,
and in some cases even allowing readers to alter the code themselves (see Alan
Sondheim's discussion of the main forms of codework). In
fact, many programmers are quite willing to endorse aesthetic notions of code
itself that transcend the fundamental qualities of clarity and economy (see ). Other, more resistant texts might require
transgressive readings, such as exporting the individual
nodes of a multi-linear text and reading them in a fixed order (as Espen Aarseth
famously did with Michael Joyce's afternoon). See
for my own — admittedly somewhat
accidental — transgressive reading of the missing text in the
code of Judd Morrissey's The Jew's Daughter.
(Here again, the application of topology is apt in its concern for the
movement of points in a dynamic field). The presence of a mobile
material plane certainly has profound implications for how we read and interpret
literary texts. Moreover, it might seem that close reading — if we are to think of it
in terms of careful, deliberate, patient reading, is doomed when words and windows
tend toward perpetual movement. In Richards' own
How to Read a
Page, he states plainly that [a]nything that is worth studying should be read
as slowly as it will let you, and read again and again till you
have it by heart"; and he chides the reader who strives for speed in the
attempt to read more: "Whom are they fleeing from, these running
readers?. Speed reading of course connotes both business-oriented bureaucratic skill
and a bureaucratized pedagogy whereby students read for general comprehension or the
main idea. But despite its own penchant for kinetic text that
can truly test human ability to read at all (a good example would be the Flash poems
of Young-Hae Chang Heavy Industries), digital literature
does not necessarily require (or indeed allow) slow reading in the service of close
reading. It does, however, still require that the literary work — to use Richards'
own phrase — be read again and again — a statement that
is true perhaps now more than ever before. Michael Joyce (cited in ), for one, has advocated the practice of successive attendings in texts that privilege multiplicity
and poly-vocality, whereby we perceive coherence in terms other than that predicated
on a singular organic whole, a notion that would apply across a wide range of digital
fiction and poetry.
It follows then that close reading digital literature is inevitably close re-reading.
Granted, close reading of any literary text involves re-reading, but narrative and
poetic texts in digital environments take the practice of re-reading to a higher
power or second-order. Such texts, because of their changeability, recursivity, and
multi-linearity rely on reiteration for their iteration; that is, re-reading
can no longer be thought of as an epiphenomenon of reading in a network text
since the re-reading of textual elements, via the recycling of nodes, is
fundamental to (hyper)textual comprehension. Furthermore, although many works in print can claim to have no definitive
ending at the level of discourse, many works of digital literature make the promise
of return at the material level, which is to say they loop on the level of their
macro-structure, customarily ending at the beginning only to begin again. Thus, the
practice of re-reading is here hard-wired, so to speak.
Digitally networked narrative texts, in particular, can enact meaningful re-readings
in two distinct ways: (1) reading the same node in new surroundings — a new
semantic neighborhood — can endow it with new meaning; and
(2) a reader may return to a node much later on and find some of its elements
foregrounded by information accumulated since first reading it, a process that can be
said to augment the way memory works when reading a work of print. That is, our
engagement with the interface can unexpectedly bring information back into
consciousness and, unlike the first scenario, its context is recast in a strictly
cognitive sense. Both scenarios demonstrate the network's capacity to generate new
meaning through a recombination of elements already read.
The notion of re-reading has broader implications for the interpretive community of
digital literature and the literary establishment it is creating, effectively, from
the inside out. As Tabbi writes: In print, the credentialing process ends when the contract is
signed; in e-media, the work is vetted continuously (or could be) and lives or
dies depending on the readings it attracts, the re-writings it inspires, and
how these are presented. Therefore, Whatever transformations the Humanities undergo in new media,
a condition for the field's possibility has to be the ability to re-read, and
the freedom to cite, the work of peers and precursors….
For all these reasons, digital literature prompts a revisitation, re-articulation,
and re-animation of the very concept of close reading, one that attends to the
material context of its process and product. Despite the contradictions inherent in
an application of the prevailing historical and popular conception of close reading
to digital literature, Richards' own insights have already opened up that very
possibility. Techno-literary criticism, however, must recognize a work of digital
fiction as both a literal and a literary machine, one that is inevitably and iterably
reliant on code for its execution/performance. That means critics must consider the
formal, material, and discursive elements of each work as at once distinct and
inseparable, each integrated toward the production of meaning.
The Practical Matter of Close Reading
Steve Tomasula's digital narrative
TOC: A New Media
Novel offers a productive test case for what a close reading
of digital literature might look like. Written by Tomasula and designed by Stephen
Farrell (along with Matt Lavoy on animation, and Christian Jara on DVD authoring,
programming, sound engineering, additional animation, and some narration, and a host
of others contributing everything from voice work to paintings used for many of the
graphics throughout the text), TOC is published by
Fiction Collective 2 (FC2) under the auspices of University of Alabama Press, and is
available only on DVD, playable only on computer.
As the text's promotional material suggests,
TOC is,
above all, a meta-narrative about time: the invention of the
second, the beating of a heart, the story of humans connecting through time to
each other and to the world. The narrative is divided into two main
sections. The Chronos section tells the story of one
woman whose husband is horribly disfigured in a car accident, and who becomes
pregnant after having sex with her twin brother during her husband's convalescence.
The Logos section provides the prehistory of an exiled
people ruled by a Queen Ephemera on a mythical island
nation. Of course, if we were to consider this initial description as the basis for a
closer reading of the text, it would remain inadequate, as it is yet to acknowledge
the novel's textual condition — its digital ontology as an internally networked and
programmable artifact. What is missing so far is the recognition of an interplay
between the formal, material, and discursive elements of the text — in short,
something that would explain why the narrative needs a screen in the first place.
A different approach to reading of
TOC might follow the
trend of over-emphasizing the technical innovations of digital literature and the
materiality of the textual medium. Equally problematic but for the opposite reason,
such a reading might describe TOC as a dynamic visual
narrative published on DVD only and read / viewed on the computer screen. It would
mention that it uses QuickTime animation software for its introductory sequence, as
well as subsequent animations that are interspersed among the text, images, and
music. It would explain that the navigational structure stems from a central page
where users can click and drag a pebble icon on top of one of two boxes, labeled
Chronos or Logos; that
the Chronos section will play audio narration with accompanying graphics that the
user can zoom in on by clicking on them; and that the Logos section will open text
segments. Such a reading might even go into forensic detail about the programming
language(s) used to script the text's performance, which is important, but
insufficient on its own. The adjective forensic
invokes Matthew Kirschenbaum's Mechanisms: New Media and the
Forensic Imagination, which attends to the bibliographical
specificities of software and hardware — the materiality — of cultural production
in digital media. With regard to reading code in particular, it is worth noting
that the practice can yield insights into how the text's programming both enables
and circumscribes interpretation. That is, if the affordances of programmable
texts allow for certain functional or operational features which can in turn
inform the text's themes and meaning, the same programmability can also place
certain limitations on the production of meaning. For example, responding to
questions about TOC following his demonstration of
the text at the 2010 Electronic Literature Conference (ELO) at Brown University,
Tomasula explained that the somewhat arbitrary interactive cross-hairs function in
the Logos section of the interface, which allows users to select scenes by
targeting the colored slots in the moving image of a
player piano roll, resulted from a late compromise at the level of programming;
and he concedes that this compromise was not as apt to the text's wider themes as would be the
original conception of holes in a player-piano roll that would have stood in
for both the absence of sound, and that which creates soundemail correspondence with author, August 8, 2011. A tendency to focus on technological prowess or the newness of new
media is common in both the critical and popular writing on digital literature. But
it fails, much like the first case, to recognize the vital interplay between the
text's formal, material, discursive elements, and further leaves us with the simple
question: what's the story here? Or, is there even one to begin with?
With reference to a single one of
TOC's bibliographical
units, the node titled Under the Influence, 1959, we can
consider what a more complete close reading might entail.
The text is displayed inside what appears to be a glass sphere or bell jar, and
readers must scroll down to view the full scene, which reads as follows:
At a time when the world lived under the influence of the
machine, there was a woman, who was a woman, who was a woman, who was a woman, who
felt like a telescoping box of women, each birthday adding another woman that all
the rest fit within like Russian dolls. When she laid them all out, looking at
pictures that showed her first as a baby, then a girl, then an adolescent, then a
young woman, then a middle-aged woman, she didn't know which of them to ask, "Who
are you?" But then she became pregnant — and the pun became literal and it amazed
her to think of the smaller her that was in her, the smaller her adding a her that
could be nestled inside that her though none of them, not even herself, was really
her. She thought of her own mother, a larger version of her/not-her, and her
mother's mother, and her mother's mother's mother, and the larger versions of
her/not-her expanding out to the garden where slept the largest her of
all….
A more complete reading, then, would reflect on the text's materiality and form as it
engages its verbal and conceptual complexity. Starting again with some general
context, then moving to the scene in question, it might look like this:
Steve Tomasula's
TOC, a new media
novel published on DVD only and read / viewed on the computer screen, is a
story about time. The story moves from an epic sibling rivalry, a fight between the
twin sons of the Queen Ephemera, both potential heirs in their new island nation of
exiles. Their feud is as eternal as their names would suggest: chronology itself —
literally the science of time — has been split: there is Chronos, the figure for
time, and Logos, the figure for logic and its essential vehicle — language. Readers
must vote for one twin or the other in the main navigational
screen by casting a pebble (via a click and drag) into a box marked Chronos, which is
filled with sand, or Logos, which is filled with water. The Chronos section will play
an audio narration with accompanying graphics that tells the story of one woman whose
husband is horribly disfigured in a car accident, and who becomes pregnant after
having sex with her twin brother during her husband's convalescence. The Logos
section will open text segments such as the one above, which provide the prehistory
of Chronos, Logos, and Queen Ephemera and the people of the island nation. The text's
topology is encased by a broader hierarchical structure, thus merging multi-linear
reading at the local level with a linear progression that occurs globally:
specifically, after exhausting the nodes at the Chonos/Logos level of the interface,
readers eventually advance up to another level of the story,
which occurs on the island itself, long after the time of the mythical twins. On this
level, a menu of node titles is organized according to moons arranged around an image
of the island nation.
In
Under the Influence, 1959, a woman contemplates her
own identity and what might actually constitute its persistence over time. The
opening recursive refrain (there was a woman, who was a woman,
who was a woman) recalls the refrains that appear earlier in the text
during the voiceover narration in the opening sequence (sun sets
before sun rises before sun sets before sun rises), evoking the sense of
circular time. These micro-narratives also recall John Barth's Frame Tale in print (Once upon a time there was
a story that began once upon a time there was a story that began...);
although here Tomasula can employ both the screen's potential for kinetic, transient
text and a seemingly spherical substrate to animate this recursion: the top of a
glass globe image around which the text runs.
The same globe that appears here and in the animated prologue encases the text in all
the textual nodes of the Logos interface. It is ostensibly the top of a bell jar, a
standard piece of laboratory equipment. Typically used for the protection or
preservation of an artifact from the elements, or simply the ravages of time, the
fact that a weathered scroll is the protected artifact in this context offers a rich
commentary on the evolution of writing technologies. Historically, bell jars were
also commonly used as vacuum chambers for scientific experimentation; removing the
atmosphere, again, fundamentally alters the effects of time. One suggestion here then
is that the narrative is indeed timeless, or at least circular as in the case of the
pregnant woman. But the bell jar interface is a time machine in
yet another way. Later in the story (or earlier, depending in what order one reads)
we learn that Ephemera, the Queen of Exile, has glass fingernails that are in the
shape of an hourglass, as do all of her descendents. Inside those fingernails is a
tiny channel of sand that runs toward their fingertips when they go about their
business during the day. At night, for reasons best left to magical realism, they
sleep with their arms in slings so that the sand runs back toward their palms,
refilling the opposing end of their hourglass fingernails and, in turn, balancing out
their nights and days. For the reader, however, the glass fingertip we see on the
screen contains not sand, but rather the words on the papyrus-styled scroll. And it
is only by scrolling down to the end of each segment of this digital narrative that
we too are in some sense experiencing the measure of time through language.
Finally, we cannot close read this node, or any node for that matter, without close
reading its title:
Under the Influence, 1959. Even
though a reading of titles (of chapters or of entire novels) is common to traditional
hermeneutics, we know that nodes are not equivalent to
pages and one of the plainest distinctions between the two is the
fact that pages are numbered whereas nodes are titled. In fact, in any networked
fiction, it is possible and often necessary to read node titles in relation to the
titles that precede and follow them and in relation to the text of the node itself (a
practice foregrounded in Stuart Moulthrop's Victory
Garden, in which titles often complete the movement from one node to the
next both grammatically and semantically). See for examples from Moulthrop's text.
Keeping within the context of the bell jar, and given a scene
depicting a woman's troubled musings on her own sense of self, Sylvia Plath is
certainly present. Just a few years before publishing
The Bell
Jar, she herself would have been under the
influence not only of that enormous task in 1959, but also that of Robert
Lowell's poetry tutelage, not to mention the camera of Rollie McKenna, who took one
of the most famous (and haunting) photographs of the writer in Boston that year. The
weightiest influence for Plath, however, might have been the fact that she was then
pregnant with her first child, Frieda, thus establishing the clearest connection
between her and the woman with a smaller her that was in
her. Intra-textually, the meditations of the pregnant woman moreover
anticipate or, depending on the order of reading, echo the grotesque
plight of the pregnant woman in the Chronos sequence, illustrating the sort of
repetition and recombination typical in digitally networked fictions.
A more immediate reading of the title is of course the colloquial and somewhat
comical evocation that we are all intoxicated by something, perhaps our modern
technologies — under the influence of our machines. But
for the all the machines that feature so prominently in the text, either in its
discourse or its interface, from pre-history through Victorian-styled steam-punk to
the present day, the most dominant machine is not a real machine at all. That is, the
Influencing Machine evoked implicitly here in this title and
explicitly elsewhere throughout was a collective hallucination reported by a number
of schizophrenic patients attending the psychoanalyst Viktor Tausk during the early
1900s. (He published his findings in the
Psychoanalytic
Quarterly in 1933 with an article titled On the
Origin of the Influencing Machine in
Schizophrenia.)
These patients suffered from a paranoid delusion whereby they believed they were
being influenced — or controlled — from a distance by a machine that they could
describe to some extent but whose technical operation was always beyond the grasp of
their understanding, aside from the human heart at the center of the machine
described, incredibly, by the vast majority of subjects. Significantly, the
description of the individual parts of the machine changed over time according to the
changes in the popular technologies of the time. Not surprisingly, the descriptions
in the latter cases had increasingly evident parallels to television. One can only
wonder how Tausk's case studies would read if he published his article today, or for
that matter, in 1959, the year indicated in the title. After all, that year marks the
beginning of what is known as the second generation of modern
computing, when improvements in transistors and circuitry crossed a threshold that
made these machines much smaller, faster, and smarter. They were the first computers
that could accept commands that started to resemble what I.A. Richards might have
called basic English.
Thus, this well-wrought node has an apparent autonomy. It is, after all, a
semantically self-contained unit, open to a discrete close reading in itself. But
even the most devout New Critic must concede that the meaning of this text is
dependent not simply on the broader narrative network in which it resides but also
the material support that contextualizes our close reading project in peculiar ways.
From the bell jars and glass finger nails which tell us more of the represented
world, to the computer screen itself which permits the reflexive reading that
positions us under the influence of the ubiquitous machines of personal computing, we
cannot simply look through the interface to the language it conveys. At the same
time, the language cannot be reduced to merely one mode of signification among many
or, in the words of Brian Kim Stefans, a mere participant in a recombinant universe jointly occupied by
sounds, images, videos and the user's interactions; rather, language-driven work is crucial to the very notion of digital
literature. The point is to privilege neither language nor materiality outright — it
is simply to underscore the possibility of a productive communion between the
literary and the machinic in our media rich culture — in much the same spirit of
Theodor Nelson's own vision of computers as literary
machines.
In fact, if our critical consideration of machines brings us from the textual (after
Richards and Hayles) to the organic (after Minsky) and back again, then perhaps the
Influencing Machine of Tomasula's
TOC can be understood as a figure for close reading itself, one that
persists over time and across media. Close reading is, after all, a process by which
a reader is under the influence of a textual — and indeed technical — machine, a
machine that changes over time according to the changes in popular technologies of
the time. Furthermore, much like Tausk's patients, who could never wholly grasp the
operation of the strange machine they saw, we too continually struggle to grasp the
machines that enable digital textuality, both in the mundane sense, as users enduring
hardware or software upgrades that are — if only momentarily — just slightly beyond
our comprehension, and as theorists invested in understanding the varied ways in
which we are drawn into the circuitry. I am indebted to the insightful comments
of one of my anonymous reviewers in expanding this passage.
Techno-literary Criticism: So Close and So Far
Such an exercise in close reading and, for that matter, the entire present essay,
rests on a vital assumption: that digital media do not dispossess us of an
interpretive reading practice. Close reading in digital environments still involves
analyzing linguistic, structural, semiotic, intertextual, and semantic elements, but
it also involves digital literacy. Digital literacy is not necessarily in place of
and is in some ways in addition to interpretative practice in print, but is in all
ways attendant to the materiality of the digital medium. All in all, it should come
as no surprise that literary theory and criticism is becoming and must become more
formalist and materialist in orientation in the midst of our digital and networked
culture; and this is not just to accommodate digital texts and textuality into the
fold. Book history and textual criticism is enjoying its own revival with not only
this newfound focus on materiality but also new technological tools with which to
study its object. (It is also no surprise that the spike in academic interest in the
history of the book coincides with the ascendancy of the personal computer.
The Society for the History of Authorship, Reading and
Publishing [SHARP], in fact, held their first conference in 1991 the same
year Tim Berners Lee got his pet project off the ground). This re-definition of close
reading is indeed in line with developments in the realm of print. Witnessing the
fading gap between analytical methods that attend to the text
itself versus those materials outside of it, Newman writes, A new,
post-Modernist close reading ought to turn to the more
full-bodied objects that texts always are by recognizing that, as
historian-of-the-book, Roger Chartier, famously wrote, to
read is always to read something. Thus, digital literature has much to gain from recovering New Criticism's
sensitivity to language and technique along with Richards' own sensitivity to its
technical and material supports.
More broadly, the same line of inquiry has profound implications for the future of
literary studies and the very conception of the literary itself
in contemporary cultural production. I grant that the very word itself is vague,
contestable, and to a large extent determined — in the Wittgensteinean sense — on how
it is employed as a word. But one point that needs to be addressed — or redressed —
is the fact that any close reading of digital literature needs to attend to the
literary as composed of words,Scholar and
theorist of digital literature Astrid Ensslin echoes the same sentiment when she
writes that we can only use the term digital
literature if and when the reception process is guided if not
dominated by literary means, i.e. by written or orally
narrated language rather than sequences of images — no matter how short and
allusive text chunks, or lexias, may be. otherwise whatever is literary in the World Wide Web
and digital environments more generally will — like a Flash poem that is just a bit
too flashy — certainly pass us by.I'd like to formally acknowledge the
Leverhulme Trust for their generous support of the Digital Fiction International
Network (DFIN), of which this research was a part, and to the members of that
research group for their help in shaping the ideas contained herein. Special
thanks also go to Alice Bell, Astrid Ensslin, and Evelyn Tribble for their reading
of earlier drafts, and the anonymous reviewers for the Digital Humanities Quarterly for their superb insights in shaping the
final version.
Aarseth, E. Cybertext: Perspectives on Ergodic Literature. Johns Hopkins
University Press, Baltimore (1997). Balfour, I. History against Historicism, Formal Matters, and the Event of the
Text: De Man with Benjamin.Romantic Circles. Legacies of Paul de Man Praxis Series.
Web. Accessed 30 March 2011. Barth, J. Frame Tale.Lost in the Funhouse. Anchor Books, London
(1988).Bell, A., A. Ensslin,
D. Ciccoricco, J. Laccetti, J. Pressman and H. Rustad. A
[S]creed for Digital Fiction.Electronic Book Review, (7 March 2010). Web. Accessed 30
March 2011. Berressem, H.
Data Dance.Chaos/Control: Complexity, Philipp Hofmann (ed), 7-42.
Lit Verlag, Hamburg (2002): 7-42. Bois, Y.-A. Whose formalism?The Art Bulletin (March 1996). Web. Accessed 30 March
2011. Bootz, P. Digital Poetry: From Cybertext to Programmed Forms.New Media Poetry and Poetics Special Issue, Leonardo Electronic Almanac 14.5-6 (2006). Web. Accessed 5
August 2011. Brooks, C. The Well Wrought Urn: Studies in the Structure of Poetry.
Dennis Dobson, Ltd., London (1960). Ciccoricco,
D. Reading Network Fiction. University of Alabama Press,
Tuscaloosa (2007).Ensslin, A. From Revisi(tati)on to Retro-Intentionalization: Hermeneutics,
Multimodality and Corporeality in Hypertext, Hypermedia and Cybertext,Reading Moving Letters: Digital Literature in Research and
Teaching. Simanowski, R., P. Gendolla, T. Kniesche and J. Schaefer (eds),
Bielefeld: transcript (2010): 145-62.Fry, P. H. I.A. Richards,The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism: Modernism and the
New Criticism. Litz, A. W., L. Menand, L. S. Rainey (eds). Cambridge
University Press, Cambridge (2000): 181-99.Funkhouser,
C. The Scope for a Reader: the Poetry of Text
Generators,Dichtung Digital (2008). Web. Accessed 30 March 2011.
Gallop, J. The Historicization of Literary Studies and the Fate of Close
Reading,Profession 2007. The Modern Language Association of
America (2007).Genette, G. Paratexts: Thresholds of Interpretation. Lewin, J. (trans).
Cambridge University Press, Cambridge (1997).Gillespie, W. F. Marquardt, S. Rettberg, D. Stratton. The
Unknown. (1998-2001). Web. Accessed 30 March 2011. Habib, M.A.R. A History of Literary Criticism: From Plato to the Present.
Blackwell Publishing, Malden, MA (2005).Hayles, N. K. Writing Machines. MIT Press, Malden, MA (2002).Hayles, N. K. Hyper and Deep Attention: The Generational Divide in Cognitive
Modes,Profession 2007. The Modern Language Association of
America (2007).Hayles, N. K. Electronic Literature: New Horizons for the Literary.
University of Notre Dame Press, Notre Dame, Indiana (2008).Hirsch, E.D. The Aims of Interpretation. University of Chicago Press,
Chicago (1976).Joyce, M. Twilight, a Symphony. Eastgate Systems, Watertown, MA,
(1997).Kirschenbaum. M. Materiality and Matter and Stuff: What
Electronic Texts Are Made Of.Electronic Book Review (1 Oct. 2001). Web. Accessed 30
March 2011. Larsen, D. Disappearing Rain (2000) Web. Accessed 30 March 2011. Mateas, M.
and Montfort, N. A Box, Darkly: Obfuscation, Weird Languages,
and Code Aesthetics.Proceedings of the Digital Arts and Culture Conference,
IT University of Copenhagen (December 2005): 144-153.Miles, A. Hypertext Syntagmas: Cinematic Narration with Links.Journal of Digital Information, 1.7 (December 2000).
Web. Accessed 30 March 2011. Miller, J. H. Fiction and Repetition: Seven English Novels. Basil
Blackwell, Oxford (1982).Moulthrop, S.
Victory Garden. Eastgate Systems, Watertown, MA
(1991).Newman, J. Textual Intimacy.The German Quarterly. Forum 84.2 (2010) Web. Accessed 30
March 2011. Olsen, L. 10:01, a novel as film (2005) Web. Accessed 30 March 2011.
Palmer, R. Hermeneutics: Interpretation Theory in Schleiermacher, Dilthey,
Heidegger, and Gadamer. Northwestern University Press, Evanston
(1969).Parker, J. A Poetics of the Link.Electronic Book Review, (1 Sept. 2001). Web. Accessed 30
March 2011. Phelan, J. Experiencing Fiction: Judgments, Progressions, and the Rhetorical
Theory of Narrative. Ohio State University Press, Columbus (2007).Ransom, J. C. Criticism, Inc.Virginia Quarterly Review. (Autumn 1937): 586-602. web.
Accessed 30 March 2011. Raley, R. The Digital Loop: Feedback and Recurrence.Leonardo Electronic Almanac, 10:7 (July 2002). Richards, I. A.
Principles of Literary Criticism. Harcourt, Brace and
Company, Inc., New York (1926 [1924 preface]).Richards, I. A.
Principles of Literary Criticism. Routledge and Kegan
Paul Ltd, New York. (1952 [1928 preface]).Richards, I. A.
How to Read a Page. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul
Ltd., New York (1954).Russo, J. P. The Humanities in a Technological Society.Humanitas, XI.1 (1998). Web. Accessed 30 March 2011.
Ryman, G. 253: a novel for the Internet about London Underground in seven cars
and a crash (1995). Web. Accessed 30 March 2011. Simanowski,
R. What is and to What End Do We Read Digital Literature?
Opening Words,Dichtung Digital, 2009. Web. Accessed 30 March 2011.
Sloane, S. Digital Fictions: Storytelling in a Material World. Ablex,
Stamford, CT (2000).Stefans, B. K. Privileging Language: The Text in Electronic Writing,Electronic Book Review, (5 Nov. 2005). Web. Accessed 5
August 2011. . Sondheim, A. Codework.American Book Review 22.6, (September/October 2001):
1-2. Tabbi, J. Cognitive Fictions. University of Minnesota Press,
Minneapolis (2003).Tabbi, J. On Reading 300 Works of Electronic Literature: Preliminary
Reflections,On the Human: A Project of the National Humanities
Center. (22 July 2009). Web. Accessed 30 March 2011. Tomasula, S. et al.
TOC: A New Media Novel. FC2, University of Alabama
Press, Tuscaloosa (2009). Tosca, S. P. A Pragmatics of Links,Journal of Digital Information 1.6 (2000). Web. Accessed
30 March 2011. Warren, R. P. Pure and Impure Poetry,The New Criticism and Contemporary Literary Theory.
Spurlin, W. J. and M. Fischer (eds). Garland Publishing, Inc., New York (1995):
19-44.Wellek, R. The New Criticism: Pro and Contra.The New Criticism and Contemporary Literary Theory.
Spurlin, W. J. and M. Fischer (eds). Garland Publishing, Inc., New York (1995):
55-74.