Difference between revisions of "Textual Closure (Formal)"

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Formal closure is a property the printed text exhibited, at different pre-modern moments, by the text as a complete and unified whole, bound in the format of the printed book. The contemporary spread of the computer's digital text has opened texts to change and modification, which has profound consequences for the textual work as an aesthetic entity. Comparisons with the digital text are instructive, as the digital text brings to light the deeply naturalized qualities of the printed book.

The History of the Book

The book, or codex, succeeded the scroll as a writing format, and has been present since late antiquity. The form is serial, divided into successive separate printed pages; fixed, in that the text is fundamentally unalterable, except by addition; and unified as a textual whole. Historically, the closed text reached its peak of influence in the early modern period of the 18th and 19th century systems of literary printing in Europe (Hesse, 28). When printed and bound within the confines of the covers of the book, the poetic text was largely sealed from change, a quality which, during the Romantic period, elevated the author to a status of renown, and canonized the novel as timeless.

Friedrich Kittler describes this as the historical moment of 1800, a time when the printed book held a monopoly on textual storage in Europe. The literary novel emerged in the form of the bildungsroman, a form with a clear plot structure emphasizing a narrative progression from beginning to end. Many authors have noted how, with the glimpsing in the computer of the uncertainty always accompanying media paradigm shifts, this earlier moment on the cusp of modernity has been romanticized for its comforting aesthetic qualities which now seem threatened. Sven Birkerts has worried, for instance, that the pursuit of data through the computer will erode a longstanding cultural wisdom. (Sutherland, 1)

Yet other authors have described how codex genres prior to the 17th century were typically ununified, predating the historical moment of Romanticism.

The Printed Text and The Digital Text

Indeed, the widespread contemporary adoption of personal computers has recently only shown formal textual closure to be a contingent historical phenomenon, tied to the regime of print. For the computer user, digital text becomes a fluid, accessible form of data, easily copied or modified. For better or worse, the textual effect is to dramatically lower the barrier to inscription, opening up discourse and displacing the author's traditional authority.

Hayles recounts our Western concepts of the literary work as being an idealized, Platonic-like aesthetic essence, and our concept of the text as its necessary material instantiation. Yet she then follows McGann to argue that all texts are individual, and that the abstract notion of the work is an illusion.

References

Barthes, Roland, [1971]. “From Work to Text,” from Hale, Dorothy (ed) The Novel: An Anthology of Criticism and Theory, 1900-2000. Wiley-Blackwell. Print.

Chartier, Roger (1995). “Representations of the Written Word,” pp. 6-24. From Forms and Meanings: Texts, Performances, and Audiences from Codex to Computer. University of Pennsylvania Press: Philadelphia. Print.

Genette, Gerard. Paratexts: Thresholds of Interpretation. Cambridge University Press: Cambridge, UK. 1997. Print.

Hayles, N. Katherine (2005) “Translating Media,” pp. 89-116, from My Mother Was A Computer: Digital Subjects and Literary Texts. The University of Chicago Press: Chicago. Print.

Hesse, Carla (1996), "Books in Time," pp. 21-36. From Nunberg, Geoffrey (ed) The Future of the Book. University of California Press: Berkeley and Los Angeles. 1996. Print.

Kittler, Friedrich. (1990) Discourse Networks, 1800/1900. Stanford University Press: Stanford. Print.

Miah, Andy, (2003). “(e)Text: Error… 404 Not Found! Or The Disappearance of History,” Culture Machine, Vol. 5. Text available at: http://www.culturemachine.net.

Sutherland, Kathryn (1997). “Introduction,” pp. 1-18. From Sutherland, Kathryn (ed) Electronic Text: Investigations in Method and Theory. Oxford University Press: Oxford. Print.

Thompson, John B (1981). “Editor’s Introduction,” pp. 1-26. From Paul Ricoeur: Hermeneutics and the Human Sciences. Cambridge University Press: Cambridge. Print.

Vismann, Cornelia. Files: Law and Media Technology. Stanford University Press: Stanford. 2008. Print.