Yesterday and the day before I went to two talks given by N.Katherine Hayles here in the area.
The first, on Monday, took place at RISD. There, NKH talked about her work-in-progress book, titled Coding the Signifier. She spoke from her perspective as a literary scholar, and much of her work is aimed at an audience of literary scholars who, she says, must look at new media objects, evolving experimental digital literature, in order to – well – keep up with their field. We must, she (rightly) insists, study and understand all aspects of digital literature, and this includes the code behind it. We cannot base our understanding of electronic literature (I use terms interchangeably here) exclusively on the natural-language words in it. (The next day, at Brown, Hayles even raised the question of whether e-lit has to have words in it in order to be considered e-lit.) We must know and understand [some variety of] code, even as we continue to work as literary scholars and not computer programmers.
To learn code, she suggests we look at literary electronic objects, for example, Lexia to Perplexia. If they are Web pages, we can view source and see (some of) the code behind them. If they aren’t, well, we can always ask an author for access to muck about inside a particular work’s files, without modifying them.
Allusions were made also to electronic scholarly resources – like, for example, the Rossetti Archive. Conspicuously missing from this first talk, however, was any discussion of the practice of building such resources as this combination of literary and new media scholarship that NKH is getting at. We have already seen, with Rossetti and Dante and Blake and so many others, that looking at print literature through and with our electronic tools yields fascinating ways to look at literary production (“as a system”!) that haven’t occurred to us before. It seems to me that electronic literary study must include a conscious awareness of both creative and scholarly electronic writing. Natural language is changed by code, NKH says, and vice versa. We can’t afford to ignore the ways in which the natural language of exclusively-print literature changes when code is applied to its interpretation.
I’m becoming fond of typologies – they are useful. I wonder how well the following classification works, when thinking of the essential components of literary study. (These aren’t to be confused with a necessity to be an expert in all of them; of course we specialize in one more than the rest. But awareness of each of these categories, an elementary familiarity with the problems they explore, is absolutely critical to our understanding of the interplay between literature and the electronic medium.)
Creative electronic writing. As said above, this includes both the literary-plot text and the code used to manipulate and present it. If this means looking at what’s possible in DHTML, Flash and GIS, then so be it. It doesn’t actually take all that much time to understand the principles behind these systems, at least to the point where one understands what all the pretty pictures mean.
Philosophical and other theoretical bases for creative electronic writing. This includes theories that were put forth long before the advent of the electronic age. NKH talked a lot about Saussure and semiotics, for example.
Paper-based or paper-presentable criticism of creative electronic writing. [Part of] Hayles’ own Writing Machines – or at least the paper-bound book (as distinguished from the Web supplement) – is an example of this.
Electronic theory and criticism of new media. Take some ebr articles, for example.
Electronic theory and criticism which takes as its object of study non-electronic writing. An additional example to the ones I gave above would be the Decameron Web.
I guess what I am driving at is: the natural language that is being changed by code is not only the literary, but also the critical. This applies not only to literary studies, but to the whole of the humanities. We theorize in code – for example, by semantically encoding literary texts. I do not presume to ask that all humanists perform semantic encoding, or use GIS to study history. But to understand in rudimentary ways how these systems work is an imperative.
Of course, NKH talked more about this more the next day, at Brown. (What follows is more of a disjointed sketch of what was said, by her and the audience, than a detailed analysis.) Here, she discussed her and Anne Burdick’s work on Writing Machines. In the book, NKH takes a close look at three objects belonging to three different genres: Memmott’s Lexia to Perplexia (new media work), Danielewski’s House of Leaves (experimental print novel) and Phillips’ A Humument (artist’s book). Analysis of a literary work should be medium-specific, she says as she discusses the materiality of these works. (She distinguishes this from physicality – which “doesn’t get you closer to the work’s meaning.” Materiality is those aspects of the physical object which are part of a work’s set of signifying strategies.) Wholly ignoring the physical aspects of a work of literature, attempting to study some sort of an ethereal Text which is unconnected to how it is presented in any given artifact, excludes a significant body of semantic information from the scope of inquiry.
Fascinating and rich, and I’m not doing it justice here. Her emphasis, even in electronically-anchored study of print literature, is on the contemporary and the experimental. Extremely useful, essential; but, in a literary-scholarship context, this needs to be considered alongside more… traditional… literature – I use this word with caution. After all, the Divine Comedy was pretty radical in both content and form, in its time.
