Schedule

Section 1          Section 2

“Print Culture” or “Medieval Remediations”        9/30                    9/29

“Gilded Monuments”                                                           9/30                   10/1

“Affordances of Reading/Writing Digitally”          9/30                    10/3

Readings

“Print Culture (Other Than Codex)”

Chapter 8 from Comparative Textual Media

Preview

Usually, when we talk about print, we’re really talking about books.  As a result, discussions around the “Print Revolution” are predominately discussions about the changes brought about by the ability to print books.  Gitelman reminds us that books are only one of a variety of printed mediums.  By setting the book up as the exemplar of print, we exclude other print mediums from our analysis of print and its cultural influence.  As a result, our understandings of print, the print revolution, and print culture are incomplete.

Gitelman uses job printing as an example of another print medium.   Job print documents are designed for specific business or private tasks, such as ledgers or rail tickets. The task determines the form and the form identifies the task. She points out important differences between job prints and books that call into question our notions about the nature of print. Gitelman’s article proposes the possibility that many of the characteristics that we assign to the form and historical import of print are really just characteristics of the book,

This article carries an implied warning to scholars of digital, as well as print media.  Like the print medium, the digital medium incorporates many distinct mediums within it. Some characteristics are universal across the incorporating medium, others are specific to certain mediums within. When we are discussing the properties of the digital, we should also be asking if these properties really characterize what it means to be digital, or are really just descriptions of certain instances of the digital that are being projected across the entire, encompassing medium.

Discussion Questions

1)   Why is it difficult to “nail down terms” when talking about print artifacts?

2)   Why does Gitelman suggest a narrow concept of print culture?

3)   Do you agree with her narrow definition?

4)   What does she mean by “return print culture to the printing house” and why does she think this is important?

5)   What does she say about print and preservation?

6)   Why widely can the meaning of “printedness” be shared?

7)   What does Gitelman mean when she writes that the codex is sluggish?

8)   What is different about reading job printing?

9)   What is different about printing job printing?

10)  What are the differences (if any) between a user and a reader?

11)  What does Gitelman mean by a “poverty of this well-worn analytic.”

 

“Medieval Remediations”

Chapter 8 from Comparative Textual Media

Preview

We have talked in this class about the media upheavals brought about by the advent of both literacy and print, and will soon begin discussions about the dramatic changes attributed to computing.  It is easy to imagine communication mediums and their practitioners as simply waiting patiently through the long stretch of centuries in between for the next revolution.  In this article, Brantley points out that media innovation never really ceased. Apparent borders between forms, languages, and genres were challenged and the nature of reading itself questioned.

Brantley illustrates her argument through the Vernon Pasternoster Diagram, a page from a 14^th century text illustrating the Lord’s Prayer.  The page is designed as a table, with different columns containing different languages (Latin and Middle-English) and medieval Christian categories such as the seven virtues, vices, and gifts; all built around the central theme of the prayer. The designer of the diagram uses color, spatial relations, (what we would call) font characteristics, and images to convey a complex but cohesive idea. Brantley describes 3 different types of remediation in the document: 1) orality and literacy, 2)emergence of the use of vernacular languages from Latin, and 3) the translation of texts to images and back.

Through this article we see the various ways that, even prior to the printing press, people were already concerned with the forms of the mediums themselves and exploring ways to remediate various media to build richer and deeper texts.

 

1) What does Brentley say is the value of middleness?

2) What is the Gregorian Dictum and what did it say about the relation between writing and images?

3) What does Brentley mean when she writes, “The isolation of the matter from the manner  is the beginning of talking about manner.”?

4) What is imagetext? What are some modern examples?

5) How does Brantley relate the Vernon Paternoster Diagram to new media?

6) What are some examples of when reading is a type of seeing rather than a type of hearing?

 

“Gilded Monuments: Shakespeare’s Sonnets, Donnes Letters, and the Mediated Text”

Chapter 10 from Comparative Textual Media,  Thomas Fulton

Preview

In the CMDC’s Electronic Literature lab, examples of hypertext literature are presented on the computer models on which each piece was actually written.  This allows the reader to experience the text within its original and intended medium. As Fulton points out in “Gilded Monuments”, the original and intended medium can inform the writing in such a way that a full understanding of the author’s original meaning is only discernable when read on that medium. As an example, he points to numerous references by Shakespeare and his contemporaries to gilding, as a metaphor for both monuments and permanence.  The full complexity of the meaning behind the metaphor can only be understood in relation to the practice of gilding manuscript edges. This complexity is lost when viewing these works as print objects instead of manuscript objects.

It is important for readers and writers of digital media to remain conscious of the relationship between a text and its original medium.  The hypertext novels of Michael Joyce and Shelley Jackson are products of the colors, resolution, screen sizes, and processor speeds of the machines on which they were written.  Fulton’s article reminds us to consider what will be or has been lost or altered when a text is digitized or transferred from one digital medium to another.

Discussion Questions

1) What does Fulton mean by “mediated text”?

2) Why does remediated text resist remediation?

3) Why do you suppose  that letters and sermons are called the most important genres of the Renaissance?

4) Can digital media be a “lasting monument”? Why or why not?

5) How does remediation make the medium visible?

6) How does the content of Donnes letter described on page 235 conform to and utilize the medium on which it was written?

7) Why do yo suppose Fulton focuses on on gilding?

“Affordances of Reading/Writing on Paper and Digitally”

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