Literature and the Dis-Appearance of Writing

Interlitteraria, 2009

Status Quaestionis, 2020

This article focuses on Jonathan Safran Foer's book-sculpture Tree of Codes (2010) as a postmemorial work formally intertextual and substantially metaliterary. In particular, it investigates the conundrum of the author's and the reader's generative agency within a postmemorial framework by dwelling on the highly experimental format of the book. Tree of Codes is the result of Foer's performative approach to Bruno Schulz's The Street of Crocodiles, from which the author carved out words, sentences and even whole pages in order to let a new text surface. The cut off pieces left material voids in the pages, empty rectangles displaying the intrinsic "extra-vacancy" of postmemorial narratives and producing a sense of bewilderment in the reader. As a consequence, readers seem to be invited to complement the author's generative act with their interpretive potential, in "a thousand of kaleidoscopic possibilities" to inhabit the empty spaces, the vacancies of the postmemorial endeavor.

Lists provide a peek into infinity. Even numbered lists imply the possibility of another entry. Between entries one can hear the silent “and” that makes each entry equal to another. Placing a hierarchical structure makes an outline or file directory with lists inside other lists. Given that a database is data structured to be accessed in various ways, the list offers the most simple and neutral ordering that can be rearranged (alphabetically, by date modified, by file size). The aesthetic of the database exemplified in the list both challenges narrative and has been a part of literary tradition, from the Bible to James Joyce’s Ulysses and beyond. The list marks an accumulation of things not narrative’s trajectory through time or space. In a way, narratives are guided tours through the database of the dictionary. However, there are several instances where narrative’s tour guide leaves the reader with a list from which that reader is tasked with deriving meaning. Action in a story stops or comes to a crawl when it collides with a list. Now the reader must practice the most significant action and that action isn’t an active verb (jump, run, scale, detonate) but a contemplative one (reflect, ruminate, consider). As innane as lists can be – grocery lists, to-do lists, meeting agendas, genealogies, dictionaries, BuzzFeed lists – they hint at the stories between the entries, behind the rationale for the chosen order, of the motives and state of mind of the list maker. In this presentation, I will read two literary lists – George Perec’s An Attempt to Exhaust a Place in Paris and Alexandra Nemenov’s “My Motorola” – as proxy landscape or portraits. Lists can be used to displace the human to swallow up our existence in the larger ecology beyond human society. But lists can also amass items, actions, or facts that come to reveal an intimacy with the list maker. Perec provides an example of the former and Nemenov of the latter. This dual ability of lists exemplifies key reasons why humans are afraid of their digital technologies: that those technologies will suppress the centrality of humanity or that technologies expose too much of ourselves.

Book historians can easily compare pages to monuments and typography to the urban plan of a city. For A. Petrucci, writing was a public venture etched on buildings before humanists privatized writing in the printed book. The space of the book is actually the projection of an urban plan and the prolongation of miniature buildings. While some authors have taken architecture as fundamental to the narrative structure of fiction such as George Perec’s Life: A User’s Manual or An Attempt at Exhausting a Place in Paris, Mark Danielewski House of Leaves, and Chris Ware’s Building Stories, I would like to examine Bruno Schultz’s 1934 Street of Crocodiles as a surreal, textual illustration of Lodz, Poland. Beyond illustrating a geographical city, I propose looking at the book, Street of Crocodiles as its own proper architectural space. Looking at Schultz’s book as a proper architectural space and not just an illustration of a geographic, urban, and domestic space becomes clearer when examining several texts derived from Street of Crocodiles. I will consider three works made from the original text turning first to Jonathan Safran Foer’s 2010 book, Tree of Codes, that carves a prose poem from the pages of Schultz’s short stories. Foer literally uses die-cut to remove portions of pages, creating a three dimensional book object that still explores public and domestic spaces in Lodz. When turning to the next two derivative texts, I argue that illustration is a rereading and rewriting of a space. Kamil Turowski, J. Hoberman, and Katarzyna Marciniak’s Streets of Crocodiles: Photography, Media, and Postsocialist Landscapes in Poland offers a collection of photographs and essays created in response to Schultz’s stories and archival research on inter-war Poland as a portrait of that place in time and time in place. The collection grafts images of 1920s Lodz with 2000s Lodz and considers Poland’s political place in both of those decades. Finally, The Brothers Quay’s 1986 stop animation, Street of Crocodiles, adopts Schultz’s representation of the schizophrenic father’s attic space and identity construction, animating the puppets Schultz cached. My presentation will thus make two major claims: (1) The book is similar to a building making typography and architecture close disciplines. In fact, type designer, Hermann Zapf, states “Typography is fundamentally two-dimensional architecture,” and (2) Illustration across media in remakes of a text equates to a transformative rereading. Raymond Federman states: “the whole traditional, conventional, fixed, and boring method of reading a book must be questioned, challenged, demolished.” Taking up a book as a geography ripe for recomposition shows readers could not only make a book their own through the process of reading, but reappropriate and build from the book as any book is the raw material of another.

2021

Like the photographs on the architect’s board, today most, if not all, of the charged images on the WBW will have been produced by digital means, including those of the artist’s own photographs.

This essay deals with the theme of urban Prototypes and Archetypes and investigates the repertoire of the different representations of Noah's Ark choosing identifi ed case studies. A virtual and analogical model is represented taking into consideration and analysing the different representations which the Ark has assumed over the centuries: a crate, a ship, a ship carrying a building, a boat/ship. The dimensions attributed to the Ark in the analogical model proposed here derive from the Book of Genesis (1.50 m. x 25 cm. x 30 cm.). The work of the prototype was developed using 3D modelling techniques. Which highlighted the similarities and differences between the selected case studies. The proposed essay intends to explore a new fi gurative model of the Ark starting from the historical-iconographic investigation within precise time limits. The analog and digital modeling therefore takes its cue from the case studies to defi ne a contemporary representation consistent with the typological and morphological invariants of the Ark described over the centuries. This with a careful refl ection on the technological innovation that the graphic investigation has achieved in recent decades representing itself an infi nite universe that offers the possibility of investigating forms and meanings that expand the knowledge of Architecture, its "forms" and Archetypes universal connected to it.

Lecture Notes in Networks and Systems, 2021

Purpose: The article is devoted to the means of visualization in the network novel of the modern French writer Ph. De Jonckheere ''La Cible''. The purpose of this article is to analyze the impact of digital technologies on French literary text and to identify the functions of visual and graphic means in the novel. Design/methodology/approach: The general scientific methodology of the research was composed of works on the theory of text and the theory of visuality, as well as studies of domestic and foreign linguists in the field of visual semiotics and polycodicity, punctuation and graphic organization of visual. Findings: The modern era is characterized by the fragmentation of established traditions in all spheres of socioeconomic activity and the search for new means of visualization. Thanks to the development of digital technologies at the beginning of the 21st century, electronic literature, including both text and multimedia components, came to the fore. At the same time, the network modified not only the visual space of the text, but also the reading process itself. Originality/value: It was found that the specifics of the visual and graphic design of the text of the network novel are manifested not only in the ways of presenting the text in the form of a blog, but also in the variety of planar and font variation, as well as due to the inclusion of various non-verbal elements in the text: crosswords, chess games, photographs, author's drawings. Digital technologies allowed the author of the novel ''La Cible'' to expand the set of text visualization tools. Hybrid texts by Ph. De Jonckheere, along with multicodicity, are characterized by hypertextuality. Multimedia and hypertext construction, creating a special visual appearance and idiosticism of the author, turn the text of a network novel into a literary game with the reader and an endless process of creating a text.

2016

Object in theWorld of Data A Play of Books Symbolicity of Information as Potential for Architectural Articulation Miro Roman1 1Chair for CAAD Institute for Technology in Architecture – Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) 1www.caad.arch.ethz.ch [email protected] We are beyond representation; our abstract objects are symbolic; figures, fugues, faces, masks, atoms, elements, characters, avatars, indexes. It is about infusing, narrating, doping, context, information and masterful articulations. Concepts become spectrums; they live like the memory or traces of things that have been; they are not documents they are animate. In this context interest of this paper is to see how can an image of book in the world of data be different than Kevin Lynch's systemic image of the city (Lynch 1960). Lynch has abstracted from the physical city. He is representing cities on the level of text, grammars and structures. What if one takes his exercise seriously and starts to play with text o...

2023

Copious foregrounded stylo-graphological resources typify Adimora-Ezeigbo's Children of the Eagle (Eagle). The aim of this study is to explore a stylo-graphological analysis of Adimora-Ezeigbo's Children of the Eagle in order to examine how the choice of graphological designs help to project the message of the literary text. The novel constitutes the data for the study. After a close reading of the text, the predominant graphological thumbprints were identified, grouped and analysed using Halliday's (1994) theoretical framework of Systemic Functional Grammar. The research employed the method of qualitative data analysis. Adimora-Ezeigbo, apart from the usual and simple prose writing form in straight paragraphing, traversed profound admixtures of narrative forms and styles, which include profile/resume and missive writing styles, versification, italicization and capitalization to elucidate the intended message, meaning and social relevance of the novel. The citation style was stylishly deployed to introduce the prominent female characters in the novel and to bequeath to them some form of social recognitions, the letter writing and versification styles were to engage an interesting and plausible form of interaction in the narrative, while both linguistic tools of italicization and capitalization were used to highlight discrete social functions in the narrative.

Open Journal for Information Technology

The paper discusses the place and role played by the pictures and text in the digital era. The digital art has become an essential component of contemporary art and new tools currently available to artists are revolutionizing the way they think and create, and so, artistic projects that could not have been accomplished with traditional methods, are now possible through computer interfaces. The computers have facilitated the traditional processes, and also offered a whole new vision on the sketches and the idea forming process, allowing the artists to create many virtual versions of an artwork-a concept. In order to analyze the history of digital art, it is necessary to study the history of several disciplines: computer history as visual medium, the history of graphic design and computer history integrated in the visual arts. Often these disciplines coincide during certain periods, making the study even more difficult to conduct. This chapter presents a brief history of computer generated art, of deconstructive typography and the importance of information visualization. Some of the earliest known examples of computer-generated algorithmic art were created by artists such as George Nees, Frieder Nake, Manfred Mohr and Vera Molnar in the early 60's. As a conclusion, we emphasize the idea that artists should use the computer as a tool adapted to their will, but understanding its potential to host systems that might allow the creation of artwork or graphics. In this regard, the computer must be considered a generative tool with a potential that must be understood in the context of the artist's work and intentions.

Experimentation in digital literature has followed different paths. The digital environment has often been explored by means of developing multiple technical possibilities to enhance hypertextuality. Meanwhile, researches have also been established to take advantage of all kind of sensorial and visual resources, developing visual and phonic aesthetics of high quality. Digital literature that has attached more importance to aesthetic resources contains most of the features traditionally awarded to lyric, and therefore is articulated around concepts such as internalization, subjectivity, suggestion, instantaneity, verticality, intensity or rhythm. Sometimes those features are developed through the spatial composition of the verses, such as in Poemas no meio do caminho by Rui Torres (2009), where visual context offers a particular intensity to the hypertextual linguistic configuration. We can also find a new way of relating with nature by using its images or sounds, as in WordToys by Belén Gache (1996-2012), where electronic birds confound and eventually may stifle any kind of communication. In most developed presentations, human body has a special preeminence. It may be used as a unique catalyst for words in performances such as Text Rain by Camille Utterback and Romy Achituv (1999) or Still standing by Bruno Nadeau (2005), where chance and visual shapes replace classical reference by a new sensorial sense.

Textual Cultures, 2020

this volume undertakes a critical cultural project: the presentation of a series of fundamental essays by key figures in the American tradition of textual scholarship in Italian translation. The editor, Michelangelo Zaccarello, a long-standing member of both the Society of Italian Philologists and the Society for Textual Scholarship, the American philological association devoted to the study of texts and textuality in English as well as work in other languages, is in a privileged position both to observe the discontinuity between the Italian and the Anglo-American philological environments and to put these different scholarly traditions in meaningful dialogue through a common focus on the promises and challenges of the digital. Indeed, the diverse essays in the volume are united by their interest in the deep modifications that the digital medium effects in the processes of text production, circulation, and reading, as well as its consequences for editorial practice and philological research. While the volume usefully touches on subject areas still underrepresented in Italian textual studies (e.g., the textual reliability of e-books or of texts digitalized with Optical Character Recognition), its central concern is with the philological questions posed by born-digital texts. Here, Zaccarello calls for new attention to digital materiality and proposes that many of the practices associated with traditional textual scholarship (e.g., paleography) remain relevant to philological research in the digital horizon. Far from being an oxymoron, the "material digital", he argues, is manifest both in the born-digital text itself and in the hardware and software used for the production and preservation of the text. Zaccarello also summons us to consider the impact of the digital on our thinking about such traditional subjects as authorial intention, the diffusion of errors, and the conservation of transitory variants. The essays in the volume encompass both complete translations and key excerpts of published works. The work of the textual scholar and theorist Jerome McGann opens the volume with an essay challenging and complicating the notion of authorial intention through an analysis of the many social and historical agents involved in the production of the literary text. McGann's paradigm-shifting work is followed by Susan Hockey's reflections on the ways in which digital textuality-markup language, image manipulation, etc.-revolutionizes knowledge access. In line with these topics, the third chapter foregrounds the work of Paul Eggert on the durability and