Textual Closure (Formal)
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.
Yet the widespread contemporary adoption of personal computers has recently 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.
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.
