Comparative Literature
in the Digital Age: Semiotic and Cultural Implications
Asun López-Varela
Abstract
Lev Manovich’s The Language of New Media (2001) inaugurated a decade of inquiries
into the effects of the digitalization of culture and its transcoding, that is,
its translation into other formats. Until then, literature had been identified
with book culture so strongly that, for centuries, it was institutionalized as
a practice of the book, even if printing is only a stage in the history of
textual transmission.
In
The Nature of the Book (1998), Adrian Johns reminds us that until the middle of the 18th-century
the book was an unstable object, with Shakespeare’s first folio including not
only more than six hundred typefaces, but also numerous discrepancies and
inconsistencies regarding its spelling, punctuation, divisions, arrangement,
proofing and page configurations. As a result, readers had to make critical
decisions regarding particular manuscripts, their origin, identity, consistency
and trustworthiness (31-32).
Comparison of the "To be,
or not to be" soliloquy in the first three editions of Hamlet, showing the
varying quality of the text in the Bad Quarto, the Good Quarto and the First
Folio . Wikipedia
Since
the 1990s, digitalization has encouraged the integration of the discourse on
literature with that of mediated communication. Thus, theoretical reflections
on the nature of media have stimulated growing critical concerns with
remediation (Bolter and Grusin), intermediation (Wolf, Rajewsky, Hayles), ‘media
convergence’ (Jenkins and Thorburn), and its impact
on culture since, according to Manovich, cultural categories and
concepts are being substituted on the level of meaning and/or language by new
ones which derive from the computer’s ontology, epistemology and pragmatics.
(12) In this perspective, which can be traced back to work by Marshall McLuhan,
new tools, the computer in this case, are at once the symbol, the means, and
the agent of cultural changes. This paper inquires further into the impact of digitalization
upon culture in general, and literature in particular, briefly revising the
evolution in the transposition of art across media, including writing, painting,
sculpture, the performing arts, music, and more recently film, and online
digitalitalization in relation to the literary.
My
aim here is to constellate a conception of media and literary studies that, by
virtue and necessity of taking up the global circulation of multimodal texts as
a central concern, might help trace the differences in the practices of reading/writing
in comparative literature and in media studies, and highlight some of the key
aspects that should be in the agenda of future comparative literature in
Europe.
Just
as a corollary from this is the reading time of this paper. English is spoken
at an average rate of about 160 words per minute; French at about 200 words a
minute and Spanish at about 220. I will try to read the 3000 words of my paper
in 20 min. Please forgive me, I wrote it in silent reading mode, and academics
silent-read quite fast. The medium matters.
* * *
Digitalization has encouraged the study of the evolution and transformations of
printed paper-based writing as a mode of inscription to the new screen formats.
Writing has been explored as verbo-visual dynamics by Jerome McGann. In his
works, he has unveiled the different materializations and configurations of
writing (print, colour, illustrations, fonts, etc.) within a historical
perspective. The materiality of those “embodiments,” to use Katherine Hayles’
term, which point to the nature of representation as individual and historical
memory, interacts dynamically with linguistic, rhetoric, and literary practices
to create what we call literature. In digital environments, the kinaesthetic
qualities of letters and words, their ability to move, appear, disappear,
dance, rotate, etc., are enhanced, making the digital the perfect place for
experiments in Concrete Poetry, for instance. More importantly, McGann shows
how, in Western discourse, where ekphrasis largely developed under the auspices
of Horace’s comparison ‘ut pictura
poesis’, these techniques mobilized the spatiotemporal frameworks of print
culture in multiple ways.
Simias Rhodius's Simias
Rhodius, "Eidullia Theokritou Triakonta". 325 a.c. aprox.
Hrabanus Marus
"De adoratione crucis ab opifice / De Laudibus Sanctae Crucis"
Augsburgo, ca. 845.
Harvard Library Bulletin “Material Poetry of the Renaissance/ The Renaissance
of Material Poetry”, Roland Greene (ed.) 1992, Vol. 3, Nº. 2.
Giovanni Battista Palatino Sonetto
"Figurato, Parte I, Compendio del Gran Volume de l'Arte del Ben
Scrivere" Roma, 1566. Harvard Library Bulletin “Material Poetry of the Renaissance/ The Renaissance
of Material Poetry”, Roland Greene (ed.) 1992, Vol. 3, Nº. 2
In Black Riders: The Visible
Language of Modernism (1993), Jerome McGann explored how the changes in the
form of mass production in the western world during the 18th and 19th
centuries caused the remediation of many aspects of the oral tradition, with an
interest in speech and vernacular voices. Paradoxically, the ideological,
symbolic and conceptual elements directed attention away from the material
aspects of writing because such recognition removed art from nature and
emphasized the artificiality of creation, bringing it close to the industrial
and mass-production mechanisms that the Romantic imagination rejected. In other
non-western cultures, where some of these aspects have remained largely
unexplored, iconicity played an important role. For example, while in the west
and until the 18th-century, the visual mode was carefully controlled
in written texts, keeping images tied around discourse, it has always been
fundamental in Chinese language and representation.
The
explosion of visuality in the 20th-century western art was related
to the impact of changing technologies for cheaper image reproduction
(fundamentally photography and moving pictures and cinematography). The
fascination with visual aspects was used to subvert discursive meaning in the
works by Marcel Duchamp, the art-game experiments of the Surrealists, the
compositions of Tristan Tzara and the Dadaists, Russian constructivism, the
anti-art mechanical sensibility of the Futurists, Ezra Pound’s Vorticism or James
Joyce’s language puns in Finnegans Wake.
Guillaume Apollinaire's Calligrammes:
"La colombe poignardée et le jet d'eau", 1918
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guillaume_Apollinaire
Avant-garde art enabled, for instance, the projection of simultaneous
occurrences within linear narrative forms by means of techniques borrowed from
montage in Futurist visual arts and sculpture. Other modernist experiments
included the suspension of the rapid
fluidity of time in an “epiphanic” instant, in James Joyce’s terms, or “a
moment of being,” as Virginia Woolf called it. Many of these early experiments
brought to the fore the material aspects of language by focusing on graphical
coding, the acoustic and visual aspects, and the articulation of meaning
through the aesthetic/writing space. They also opened the art work to their
audiences and removed partially or entirely the semantic content of discourse,
anticipating many contemporary experimental digital works.
Umberto Boccioni, Unique
Forms of Continuity in Space (1913)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Futurism
Comparisons between poetry and
painting were already present in Plato (Republic Book X, 605), who
banned all mimetic art from his Republic because, in his view, it makes
“phantoms that are very far removed from the truth” (Plato Republic
1968: 289). Rescuing mimetic art from Plato’s attack, Aristotle develops the
parallel between poetry and painting in his Poetics (9.16-21). He
emphasized that the object of both arts is the imitation of human nature in
action, but that their means are different: poetry uses language, rhythm and
harmony, and painting uses colour and form. For generations, the poem was the
epitome of the literary text. In fact, poetic expression
captures the original idea/emotion by echoing biophysical perceptual rhythms in
alliteration, homonymy, synonymy, and by means of contrastive variations such
as antonymy, negative parallelism and other defamiliazing techniques.
In Laokoon (1766), the German
writer Gotthold Ephraim Lessing emphasized the ability of poetry to excite
mental pictures in a temporal
sequence, thus creating the illusion of reality. The 20th-century
usage of the term ekphrasis was, in
fact, coined by comparatist Leo Spitzer in 1955 in his analysis of Keats’s poem
“Ode on a Grecian Urn”. Spitzer defined ekphrasis
as “the poetic description of a pictorial or sculptural work of art, which
description implies, in the words of Théophile Gautier, ‘une transposition
d’art’, the reproduction through the medium of words of sensuously perceptible objets
d’art (ut pictura poesis).” (Spitzer 1955: 207)
In
the west, the shape of the writing space became more prominent in the late 19th-century,
possibly under eastern influence brought by the expansion of European empires.
Pattern poems, for instance, were common in China, where pictograms, ideograms,
and phonograms were incorporated into poems as part of their writing system.
Shapes are also part of many Japanese haiku.
More research would be necessary to show the crossings between east and west
that encouraged the visual poems of the Greek Carmen figuratum, and later work by various poets such as George
Herbert (i.e.“The Altar”), Dylan Thomas
(i.e. “Vision and Prayer”), Lewis Carroll (i.e.“Long and Sad Tail of the Mouse”
in Alice in Wonderland), as well as
e. e. cummings’s “L(a”, Edwin Morgan’s “Siesta of a Hungarian Snake,” Francois
Rabelais’s “epilenie,” or Guillaume Apollinaire’s “Il pleut”.
George Herbert,
"Easter Wings / The Temple" Cambridge, 1633
A Mouse’s Tail Tale.
Alice in Wonderland.
In
some of these, as well as in many examples of ‘concrete poetry’, graphic design
and shape are visual complements to the sound patterns that accompany the
general perceptual effect of the pieces. The Futurists’ “words in freedom” were ‘works
in progress’ (a term also used by James Joyce for Finnegans Wake), open to new multi-sensory experiments,
particularly the impact of typographic innovation, including ink colours,
typefaces, paper texture, book-binding techniques, etc. All these innovations enabled a greater interplay
of perceptual modes, enhancing diverse forms of emotional and aesthetic charge,
alternating between ‘showing’ (mimesis)
and ‘telling’ (diegesis). As William J.
Thomas Mitchell writes in Picture Theory: Essays on Verbal and Visual Representation (1994), “The
real question… when confronted with these kinds of image-text relations is not
‘what is the difference (or similarity) between the words and images?’ but
‘what difference do the differences (and similarities) make?’ That is, why does
it matter how words and images are juxtaposed, blended, or separated?”
(Mitchell 1994: 91)
Among the first studies on ekphrasis we can cite Jean Seznec (1972) “Art and Literature: A Plea
for Humility” (1972) where he emphasizes the need for monographic studies on
the topic. Also Ulrich Weisstein in his Interrelations of
Literature (1982), primarily concerned with guidelines to make valid
inter-art comparisons, Wendy Steiner The Colors of Rhetoric, who defines
ekphrasis as an attempt to
imitate the visual arts by describing a still moment and thereby halting
time (Steiner 1982: 41), Ernest B.
Gilman who discusses the “Imperialism of
Language” as central to inter-art comparisons since antiquity, Grant F. Scott
who sees it as an attempt to “transform and master the image by inscribing it.”
(Scott 1991: 302) and as “a means of […] demonstrating dominance and power”
(303). In The Poetics of Ekphrasis from Homer to Ashbery (1993), James A.W. Heffernan from
Princeton University, explored “picturacy,” that is, how the verbal can become an instrumental medium
for investing pictures or other visually accessed representations with meaning.
http://grandtextauto.org/2006/11/
In Picture Theory: Essays on
Verbal and Visual Representation, Mitchell, one of the pioneers on
visuality, claimed that, although the visual and verbal media are different “at
the level of sign-types, forms, materials of representation, and institutional
traditions” (1994: 161), in terms of “expressing intentions and producing
effects in a viewer/listener, there is no essential difference between texts
and images” (1994: 160). Soon after, Claus Clüver argued that the concept
needed redefinition because “contemporary ekphrastic practices have subverted
the traditional relation of the representational visual text to its verbal
representation, even to the point of discontinuity.” (1997: 30) Since then, the
conceptualization of ekphrasis as a verbal representation of a visual
representation has been increasingly perceived as too narrow, and thus Margaret Persin has
expanded the range of ekphrastic studies by discussing “uncanonical art forms such as television, photography,
comics, and cinematography.” (Persin 1997: 19) The following year, in his paper “Quotation,
Enargeia, and the Function of Ekphrasis,” included in the volume edited by
Valerie Robillard and Els Jongeneel, Pictures into Words: Theoretical
and Descriptive Approaches to Ekphrasis, Claus Clüver explains that ekphrasis retains a certain degree of
Aristotelian enargeia and defines it as “the verbalization of real or
fictitious texts composed in a non-verbal sign system” (1998: 49). Since then,
the matter has become increasingly complicated with the inclusion of film
studies and, more recently, hypertextual models. As Bernhard F. Scholz recognized, the concept
is a “complex
multi-dimensional multi-faceted semiotic phenomenon,” (1998: 75) that
also has ties with intertextual relations (1998: 74).
Image from Siglind Bruhn’s personal page
http://www-personal.umich.edu/~siglind/ekphr.htm
A
radical redefinition was proposed by Siglind Bruhn’s Musical Ekphrasis, where she expanded Clüver’s to the
“representation in one medium of a real or fictitious text composed in another
medium” (2000: 8). She explores the synaesthesic intersections between music,
words, pictorial image and moving images, the iconotextuality of visual poetry,
the simulation of poetry in sculpture, the changes within literary adaptations,
or the influence of filmic techniques upon written works. In all these cases, a
given medium thematizes, evokes and sometimes imitates elements and structures
of another medium in order to stretch semiotic levels to their limits, modify
perception and conceptual imagery, and increase immersion and aesthetic response.
The same year, Elizabeth
Drumm in her discussion of “Ekphrasis in Valle-Inclan’s Comedias bárbaras”
showed how ekphrasis can be used in the stage directions of drama. Mitchell’s
recent collection of essays What Do Pictures Want? (2005) discusses the value of
discourse with regard to the visual arts, an analogy Mitchell constructs in
postcolonial terms, that is, the empowerment offered by discourse to the
voiceless subaltern which is visual representation. Here, critical elaborations
on intermediality use analogies between the power relations at work in
strategies of exploitation and othering, and the dynamics that can be perceived
in relations between verbal and non-verbal art forms. In 2008, Laura Mareike
Sager explored Ekphrasis in Literature and Film. Finally, in Intermediality
and Storytelling (2010) Marina Grishakova’s distinguishes between
"metaverbal" (an attribute of verbal texts that evoke images) and
“metavisual” an attribute of images that reflect on the incomplete nature of
visual representation).
http://www.sideshowtheatre.org/performances/productions/ekphrasis-cave-walls-soup-cans
Changes in scholarly discussion on ekphrasis
since the 1960s evidence a trend also visible in cultural studies, media
studies and education, from perspectives that sought to map structural concepts
from one field to another to a focus on dialogue between voices and power
positions. T. S. Eliot had
already spoken about the three voices of poetry:
The first voice is the voice of the poet talking to
himself—or to nobody. The second is the
voice of the poet addressing an audience, whether large or small. The third is the voice of the poet when he
attempts to create a dramatic character speaking in verse; when he is saying,
not what he would say in his own person, but only what he can say within the
limits of one imaginary character addressing another imaginary character. The distinction between the first and the
second voice, between the poet speaking to himself and the poet speaking to
other people, points to the problem of poetic communication; the distinction
between the poet addressing other people in either his own voice or an assumed
voice, and the poet inventing speech in which imaginary characters address each
other, points to the problem of the difference between dramatic,
quasi-dramatic, and non-dramatic verse. (On Poetry and Poets 1957: 96)
Literary voices correspond to diverse spatiotemporal contexts and
crossings among generic categories, for instance the fact that drama could be
considered both a narrative and a performance, and a sung version of a poem,
might be both literature and music. These voices are also related to
overlapping media configurations that might share metaphoric relations of
similarity (what Jakobson termed the axis of ‘selection), as in ‘ekphrasis’ or
intermedial reference, or metonymic relations of contiguity (what Jakobson
described as ‘combination’), as in intermedial transpositions or ‘adaptation’
from one medium to another. These types of relations are the basis for Jakobson’s distinction among
genres, with lyric poetry tending toward the metaphoric and realistic prose
toward the metonymic.
An interesting line of thought in
the philosophy of sound and its relation to ‘ekphrasis’ can be traced from the
pre-Socratic thinkers through to Nietzsche, Heidegger, Derrida and Deleuze and
Guattari, and more recently in contemporary theorists in film, cultural and
communication studies. In The Birth of Tragedy and Other Writings,
Nietzsche’s idea of the ‘spirit of music’ within the Dionysiac, confronts the
Apollonian visual ‘dreams’. Although Nietzsche favours sound over vision, the
relationship between the two is one of mutual need and symbiosis. Similarly,
for Heidegger, “We not only speak language, we speak out from it” (Heidegger 411), so that sound comes out of words as a
mode of action, a way of speaking, the poietic
element of sounding. The
importance of sound is very evident in Joyce’s writings, with his concept of
epiphany emphasizing a phenomenological convergence of all the physical senses,
but possibly stressing sound more than any other. There are many memorable
examples that bring to the fore the importance of sound in Ulysses, with some of the transitional passages in the novel marked
by sounds: from Bloom’s belly grumbling in "Lestrygonians," to the
tap-tap of the blind-man’s cane and Bloom’s flatulent coda at the end of
“Sirens”, an episode structured like a fugue. Derrida’s deconstructive work,
much inspired by Joyce, has sought to break the importance of visuality and the
illusion of presence in the Western world, and many of his works contain forms
of nostalgia for the loss of the sound of music. This emphasis on sound is also
commonplace in other postmodern critical approaches, for instance, Deleuze and
Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus, where
sound and deterritorialisation are related. What they term “line of flight” (Deleuze
and Guattari, 21) signals shifting adjustments marking new spatial alliances.
In postmodernism, sound becomes a metaphor for hybrid unstable process-formations
which, unlike fixed structures, are constantly changing under I-other
negotiations, conscious and unconscious affects, and power struggles marked by
desire and wishful thinking.
Nowadays, many approaches from a
range of interdisciplinary fields in the Social Sciences and Humanities
emphasize these dialogical, agentive, and mediating aspects of communication,
understood as body of acts/performances made known through verbal registers as
well as non verbal signs, whether face-to-face or by means of representations. From
Mikhael Bakhtin’s work on textual voices that negotiate hierarchies of
intertexts such as allusions, quotes, references, footnotes, endnotes, or annotations
on the margins, to Julia Kristeva’s expansions in her 1967 essay “Word,
Dialogue, and the Novel,” intermediality, as understood for instance by Irina Rajewsky, consists in
voices of overlapping media configurations that might share
metaphoric relations of similarity, as in ekphrasis or intermedial reference,
and metonymic relations of contiguity, as in intermedial transpositions or
‘adaptation’ from one medium to another. Werner Wolf has proposed a concept of
“transmediality” to forward the notion of narrative as an extension of the
verbal medium able to ‘read’ other media, thus establishing narratology as
transmedial tertium comparationis across
intermedial configurations. Wolf indicates that intermediality in the broad
sense is the medial equivalent of intertextuality, and n the narrow sense, it
refers to the participation of more than one medium. He uses the term “transmediality” for phenomena such as narrative,
whose manifestation is not bound to a particular medium. “Intermedial
transposition” are adaptations from one medium to another while “intermedial
reference” refers to texts that thematize other media (for example, a novel
devoted to the career of an artist –painter, musician, etc.). This term is also
used for processes of ekphrasis (for instance, a novel structured as a fugue.
But it is not just the process of
medial exchange that has become dialogical. Because effective communication
requires several modes of sense perception to locate things in space and time,
whether in situations where participants share the same spatiotemporal
coordinates or in recorded (past) events that use deictic pointers to the
original happening, the workings of a given medium — be it biophysical (the air that
conducts speech waves for instance) or technological (the printing press; a
computer) — are based on experiences where several perceptual/communication modes
(or sense modalities) speak across to each other. And there is also
neuroscientific evidence on this (see work by Jordan Zlatev).
"Symbolical Head,
Illustrating the Natural Language of the Faculties." (Image from Wells,
Samuel. How to Read Character. New York: Wells Publishing, 1870.
p.36.)
MIT Opencourseware Anthropology
See also: http://www.gutenberg.org/files/33223/33223-h/33223-h.htm
Within
the dialogic trend, the idea of the solitary reader engaged in ‘close reading’
of a literary piece, a notion integral to the teaching of literature, is also
beginning to shift. Close reading is based on a solitary engagement with the
text. However, performing, singing,
story-telling and reading aloud were common practices for adults in the 19th-century
household, and it was not until recently that these forms of leisure and entertainment
were displaced by radio, television, cinema, and the computer screen. Despite
the interactive turn and the frenzy for social networks such as Twitter or
Facebook, I believe humans have never been more separated than since the advent
of computer communication. The well-known slogan “connecting people” only works
based on individual choices; likes and dislikes. It shows a preference for asynchronic
forms of communication that allow the management of individual time.
Turning
back to the topic of the literary, I must emphasize that literature has no definite medial home base. In the previous lines I
have referred mostly to the dialogue between text, images and sound, moving within
ekphrasis,
that is, between words that speak in colours, sound and music, as Joyce put it
in The Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and ‘picturacy’,
the ability to read visual signs and speak for pictures. The movement, from the
unfolding of writing as inscription to other forms of adaptation, and the
mutation of print-based narrative into encoded interactive multimedia pieces of
electronic literature or computer games, as well as the reverse dynamics, from
screen to paper, as in novelization, for instance (on this see work by Jon Baetens)
constitutes the intermedial turn. This shift is also the artificer of the a
focus away from performativity, which became the paradigm from the 1990s until
quite recently, towards a focus on translation
and circulation, mediated by the interactions between specific types of medial
circulating forms and the interpretive communities built around them.
As mentioned above, the trends that
have dominated comparative literary studies for the past few decades are very
similar to those that gave rise to media studies. Critical readings of literary
texts provide a special understanding of history, politics, philosophy,
ideology and economics. Initially, the impetus to redraw the boundaries of
comparative literature came largely from progressive critical demands to
include "other" literatures, to undo the opposition between high and
low and incorporate popular culture, to foster a dialogue between centres and
peripheries, interrogating reception and mass audience while questioning the
culture industry, and more recently, exploring the role of translation. Emphasizing
the transmission and cosmopolitanism of culture as well as the exchange of
creativity and art among diverse cultures, Goethe’s understanding of Weltliteratur became the basis of the
discipline we know today as comparative literature. The incorporation of
approaches coming from the field of cultural studies into comparative
literature highlighted differences in literary transmission across the world,
whether in postcolonial contexts (see for instance Said 1978, 1993; Bhabha 1990, 1994), or including the
role translation (Bassnett 1993). These incorporation processes into the body
of comparative literature were the reason behind Charles Bernheimer’s
acknowledgement in his 1993 report that the term ‘literature’ may no longer
adequately describe its object of study (1993: 15). The current revival of world literature needs to be placed within these shifts in points of view, encompassing
complex processes of relations and appropriations, including political
and economic issues of space-location — both local (self, community,
nation) and global (transnational).
But it also needs to take into consideration the multi-material basis of the
literary.
The
evolution of the discipline of comparative literature, possibly unlike any
other field of research, stages the many forms and ways to capture processes of
simultaneous multidimensional change, across space—by exploring recurring
aspects in different cultures, and across time—by searching for historical
parallels and differences, inquiring into themes, topics, semiotic processes,
stylistics, and so on. From René Wellek
and Austin Warren’s structuralist conception of the literary work of art as “a highly complex organization of stratified character with
multiple meanings and relationships” (Theory of Literature 1984: 27) to
Damrosch’s definition of world literature as “a mode of circulation and of reading” (What is World Literature? 2003:
5) and as “writing that gains in translation’’
(281), with translation contemplated as “an expansive transformation of
the original, a concrete manifestation of cultural exchange and a new stage in
a work’s life as it moves from its first home out into the world’’ (How to Read World Literature 2009: 66),
the shift in vantage point is indeed spectacular as it opens “multiple windows
on the world” (Damrosch What is World
Literature? 2003: 15). Damrosch’s visual metaphor ‘windows on the world’ is
particularly apt to highlight the ways in which art-forms impact upon each
other, showing, for instance, how intermedial transposition (adaptation) from
one medium to another has extended representational possibilities, and how
processes of intermedial reference (or ekphrasis) help thematize other media,
as well as how the narratological basis of transmediality enables themes to be
presented in more than one medium, thus having a multiplied impact upon
literary reception. Roland Greene advocates a conception of comparative
literature that “concerns itself with the exchanges out of which literatures
are made: the economies of knowledge, social relations, power, and especially
art that make literatures possible; not literature but literatures; not works
but networks.”(214) Problematizing the concept of world literature by
re-introducing material concerns into the discussion, and addressing
comparative literature in terms of dynamic systems of relations, rather than
structures, requires minds open to the plural. It requires to look at
comparative literature, not just from a ‘distant reading’ perspective, but from
multiple languages and diverse cultures. But it also requires to perceive it
from different semiotic locations, not just textual. The typographical trace literature(s)
is almost mandatory.
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