I hope that midterms are going well for everyone!
I have to say that I agree with the argument in the readings: that text is really graphical and we become unaware of written history's origins. The Byron example is brilliant because, for me, the realization that those two versions of the same poem read completely differently based solely on the visual aspect.
They also brought up something that I noticed almost immediately: the punctuation. We hear everything we read in our head in some way. If we are reading something we find boring, the text drones on in our head. For questions, we always hear the inflection go up at the end of the sentence. Based on the visuals of how something is presented plays a huge part in how we read it: literature is in fact art.
My example of this would have to be Shakespearean works. At this point there are so many different versions of all of Shakespeare's works that there are many examples of visual versions and formats are for sure different that how Shakespeare originally wrote the script. I imagine that the originals covey much more emotion than the mass produced versions now. In some of the modern versions, the sonnets are formatted in a different way than the pieces of the text that are not in a sonnet form. However, as a script for the stage, the text can be kept in this format, or be written in traditional script form. Scripts are a different type of visual literature entirely. The fact that each line begins with a name, such as "Romeo: " brings to mind a view of a person speaking, perhaps even a person acting on a stage or in a film.
Another example that we could talk about is the formatting of digital text. In this blog alone, I could choose to change the font, the type size, alignment; I can italicize, bold, underline. The way I break up my paragraphs is also an entirely new way to make my text artistic. Of course none of the examples would be good examples without the text itself. The way the author writes also leads to how the formatting should be in the end.
~Meg~
“The words of language, as they are written or spoken, do not seem to play any role in my mechanism of thought. The physical entities which seem to serve as elements in thought are certain signs and more or less clear images.” ~ Albert Einstein
I completely agree that remediation is one of the reasons that we don't really pay attention to the physicality of the text. Would there be any form of remediation that would enhance the physicality of the text?
ReplyDeleteOk, you've mentioned a few things that may or may not work -- here I was looking for showing some particular examples and working with an example closely to make your point clear.
ReplyDeleteYou're right about literature being graphical, and in a way being a form of art. When we read something, we often don't pay attention to the way the text looks, but rather the graphics that come to mind as we read them. So text enables us to create the art as we read, in a way.
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