ENGL 668k: Digital Studies (Spring 2004)

Walter,

I really appreciate your formulating the question thusly. You've raised two issues for me that I hope we can continue to discuss -- one, the degree to which we've naturalized the process of reading in the medium of print in a codex format and what it means that at this point in the development of electronic textuality, it is anything BUT natural to most of us. What does this fact tell us about our interaction with the codex? What does it suggest for different (perhaps better, perhaps worse, perhaps neither and probably some of each) interactions with electronic texts? I think it is critical to avoid positioning them oppositionally to one another because it seems too simplistic. Secondly, I think your having raised the issues of 'greatness' opens the door to thinking about the multiple WAYS to explore what we want/expect of electronic texts. We don't expect all codex texts to be "great". How do we distinguish which ones we demand that of and which ones we demand other things of? Maybe we can use this thought to complicate the discussion we started last week of all the material differences between electronic texts -- rather than just bouncing betweeen e-texts and codex texts as if all e-texts were one and the same thing and all c-texts were similarly alike in form, function, meaning.....

I think it's interesting, Kimberlee, that you use the term c-text (i'm assuming, by the context, that you mean it to be short for codex-text?)
lots of c...text words in that last sentence, huh?

anyway, what i'm trying to ramble my way into is this. though i'm not as brave as Kimberlee and willing to go anywhere near the "greatness"discussion, i agree with walter's assertion that one doesn't have to think so much about the medium of the codex text, but is almost forced into thinking about the medium of e-text.
i feel that my experience with a codex seems fuller because i am engaged with the content on a more conceptual/virtual/imaginative level than i can be with an e-text. and perhaps this is simply a result of my inexperience with e-text, but i hesitate to simplify it quite that neatly. especially since when i initially read kimberlee's post and saw the term "c-text" i thought she meant "cybertext".

maybe my frame of reference is changing and i need to check back after 32 years of dealing with e-texts to really deal with why (or whether?) my level of interaction seems more "meaningful" with codex texts???? perhaps by then, the point will be moot and the question will have answered itself.

One question, of course, is what you mean by "cybertext." If we're going by Aarseth's "ergodic literature" definition, there have already been cybertexts that are great in anyone's book (Pale Fire, e.g.).

But it looks like you're asking whether there can be "great" electronic literature. I have two answers to that. The first is direct but not very fulfilling: Whether or not electronic literature will be great, great literature will inevitably be electronic. Already, with Project Gutenberg, many of the greats are being digitalized. I think it is a given that, considering the rate and direction of technological advancement in our society, our primary methods for accessing ANY text will be electronic within a relatively short period of time. Of course, they may be electronic interfaces that mimic codex books (i.e. electronic paper).

The less direct but also potentially unfulfilling answer is that, in some ways, the question is irrelevant. Not that it's not an important question, and definitely one that needs to be asked, in so many words, in a class like this. But in the end, I think what we really want to ask is not whether works produced with new technologies will ever be great, because that's essentially a no-brainer... already most texts are produced with word processors, so we've already moved towards electronic production, and I can't see any reason why that move would slow or change course. Yes, there will eventually be great digital texts; they just may not look much different from great printed texts. But printed texts looked, in many ways, an awful lot like manuscript texts -- the difference was not in how they looked or what it felt like to read them or in their content at all. The difference was in the concretization of the text, the newfound possibility of widespread distribution, accurate reproduction, the very idea of a Text itself.

We've been talking about the potentials of texts that create immersive environments, offer choice, or integrate graphics and sound. These may never exist, but the real issue is what effect the *possibility* of them will have. What will the very fact of electronic media do to our IDEAS of text? Already the Internet is reversing the reification of the word that the printing press engendered. I think what we really want to explore here -- and Aarseth hints at this -- is not the electronic texts themselves; they are incunabula, or in the case of games, they're not aspiring to be literature. The issue is what effect they have on our ideas about literature, ideas, and the word, and how far this will go.

I wanted to respond in part to what Walter said, "I want the experience with them to be as important and satisfying as my experience has been with print texts."

I agree with what Jess says about the nature of e-texts and whether they are aspiring to be literature (though I'm wondering if we're holding the category of literature to mean something essential and not allowing game-texts or e-mail spam to be literature). (Incunabula? Sheesh, had to look that one up.) But what about e-texts that are trying to literature?

I wonder if some of the resistance to e-texts is a kind of technophobia (at its strongest) and simply a discomfort with the medium (e-texts by their very nature defamiliarize the text). Not to wax Trekker again, but I was always fascinated by Star Trek: TNG's nostalgia (and many sci-fi shows and films) with books. Captain Picard loved books (as did Kirk) and seemed to prefer reading them on paper over a terminal or datapad. Is the immersive quality tied to the materiality of the text? Yes, I think so.

You can't curl up with your 19" monitor, full-sized tower, keyboard, mouse, and paraphernalia in bed or on a cushioned bench in a bay window sipping a cup of hot chocolate or Earl Grey. Even a laptop can be unwieldy. There is something about the portability and tactile nature of books that we love. In the deepest sense, I think, is that with a codex you can TOUCH the words. Whereas on a screen, they're just bits of phosphorescence.

So, is this just a matter of becoming familiar with the medium?

ED

"I start rummaging through the other stuff I downloaded and settle on a collection of G.K. Chesterton essays called "A Miscellany of Men." One of the essays describes how, as a young man, Chesterton once explored a half-built house, writing messages on the wall to its future inhabitant, and then, in middle age, went back to the place and asked if the man he had envisioned was at home. It's a peculiarly confessional piece, and reading it provides me with my first sublime e-book experience. I read it in bed, with all the lights off, the pale rectangle of the screen floating in the darkness over my duvet while Chesterton describes approaching the house at evening, seeing the light shining from the windows and hearing a girl playing the piano and singing inside. The way the darkness isolates the e-book screen mimics the way lighted windows glow in the night, and Chesterton's wistful pursuit of a decades-old whim seems so obliquely revealing that the moment feels intimate in the way the best reading should. I wonder if the personal essay, with its first-person voice, might be the form best suited to the e-book."

--Laura Miller, Salon, March 2000

I think that we have only scratched the surface so far in this course in viewing/reading/experiencing electronic texts. We have some really wonderful things to read, and some things we won't read, that are truly great. The hypertext novel will be an eye-opener for some, I think.
I agree that there is something fundamentally appealing about reading a book in codex form. I expecially like old books that have been loved by others, passed around, made soft and inviting by multiple readings. But, I agree with Jess that text is already electronic in both production and archive. There are those who will argue, with merit, that projects like the Blake archive, somehow diminish the experience of the text by virtue of their digitization. I would say that that may be true, except that I will probably never have the experience of Blake in the original anyway, so what of it? I probably won't have the opportunity to read Emily Dickinson in the original fascicle or War and Peace in Russian.

OK - I'm all over the place. My point is that the two worlds we are talking about already collide and are not mutually exclusive. The tools for viewing e-texts will surely become something more aesthetically acceptable and yes more literature that would have been written on paper and then printed in books, will just be composed and simultaneously edited and produced in digital space.
I will continue to buy books, much to my family's chagrin. (we have a ridiculous number of books in my house - as I am sure you all do) BUT, I am looking forward to seeing where all of this goes. It's exciting.

Oh, and one more thing. . .
How much has our own experince been enhanced by the format we are using right now for discussion? How much more are we thinking about this course by using the Blog? How many more new ideas are we being exposed to? How much closer do we get to be to each other by having this space to "talk"? Would compiling these entries and publishing them in codex form enhance their status or usefulness in your eyes? Would we all be as free and creative in our composition if we knew that that was going to happen?

Just a thought.