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Spring 2005 What are the implications -- for art, knowledge, communication and scholaraship
-- of the digitalization of books, images, and recordings now underway?
Perhaps this can best be understood in the the light of the history of
previous language reproduction technologies, inluding the alphabet, the
printing press,and the phonograph. "Textual Conditions" presents
an overview of some of the aesthetic and literary implications of technologies
for the reproduction and storage of verbal language, with special reference
to twentieth century poetry and poetics. Material on the Homeric age will
probably start with Havelock's How the Muse Learned to Write and,
possibly, Gregory Nagy's Poetry as Performance. On the history
of the alphabet more generally: Drucker and George Jean. Drucker would
return also, with her work on he significance of the visual representation
of language. The work of Jerome McGann would figure prominently, especially
his book The Textual Condition and his related work on textual
and bibliographic scholarship. Twentieth century "media" theory
would be represented by McLuhan and Innis, Benjamin and Cavell, possibly
Ong, but esp. Kittler's Gramophone, Film, Typewriter. I will address
recent work on emergence of digital reproduction and the Internet, including
digital poetry, specifically though a consideration of the essays in Elizabeth
Bergmann Loizeaux and Neil Fraistat edited collection, Imagining Textuality:
Textual Studies in the Late Age of Print. Our creation at Penn
of an audio archive of digital poetry readings, PennSound, might come
into this and also a book I edited: Close Listening: Poetry and the
Performed Word. I also plan to cover such developments as sound, visual
and digital poetry (and the related question of digital archives and editions
of poetry). I would expect this to relate to work of other in the department
on the history of the book; in that context, I am thinking of Chaydor's
From Script to Print and also Kittay and Godzich's The Emergence
of Prose. |