Skip to main content

Diigo Home
Home/ fanfic forensics/ Group items tagged reading

Rss Feed Group items tagged

Filter: All | Bookmarks | Topics Simple Middle
Nele Noppe

The World According to Eco - 0 views

themodernword.com/...eco_wired97.html

umberto_eco internet reading open_work fanficforensics phd

shared by Nele Noppe on 10 Jan 10 - Cached
  • Then there's his idea that any text is created as much by the reader as by the author, a dogma that invaded the lit crit departments of American universities in the mid-'70s and that underlies thinking about text in cyberspace and who it belongs to. Eco, mind you, got his flag in first, with his 1962 manifesto Opera aperta (The Open Work).
  • Because before you start talking about a Minister of Culture you have to decide what you mean by "culture." If it refers to the aesthetic products of the past -- beautiful paintings, old buildings, medieval manuscripts -- then I'm all in favor of state protection; but that job is already taken care of by the Heritage Ministry. So that leaves "culture" in the sense of ongoing creative work -- and I'm afraid that I can't support a body that attempts to encourage and subsidize this. Creativity can only be anarchic, capitalist, Darwinian.

  • And how about your own sense of time? If you had the chance to travel in time, would you go backward or forward - and by how many years?

    And you, sir, if you had the chance to ask someone else that question, who would you ask? Joking aside, I already travel in the past: haven't you read my novels? And as for the future - haven't you read this interview?

Nele Noppe

The Future of the Book - 0 views

74.125.155.132/scholar

umberto_eco internet technology reading open_work fanficforensics phd

shared by Nele Noppe on 10 Jan 10 - No Cached
  • The present and
    the forthcoming young generation is and will be a computer-
    oriented generation. The main feature of a computer screen is that
    it hosts and displays more alphabetic letters than images.
  • Moreover, the new generation is trained to read at an incredible
    speed. An old-fashioned university professor is today incapable of
    reading a computer screen at the same speed as a teenager
  • I am a rare-book collector, and I feel
    delighted when I read the seventeenth-century titles that took one
    page and sometimes more. They look like the titles of Lina
    Wertmuller's movies. The introductions were several pages long.
    They started with elaborate courtesy formulas praising the ideal
    addressee, usually an emperor or a pope, and lasted for pages and
    pages explaining in a very baroque style the purposes and the
    virtues of the text to follow. If baroque writers read our
    contemporary scholarly books they would be horrified. Introductions
    are one-page long, briefly outline the subject matter of the book,
    thank some national or international endowment for a generous
    grant, shortly explain that the book has been made possible by the
    love and understanding of a wife or husband and of some children,
    and credit a secretary for having patiently typed the manuscript. We
    understand perfectly the whole of human and academic ordeals
    revealed by those few lines, the hundreds of nights spent
    underlining photocopies, the innumerable frozen hamburgers eaten
    in a hurry....
    But I imagine that in the near future we will have three lines
    saying "W/c, Smith, Rockefeller," which we will decode as "I thank
    my wife and my children; this book was patiently revised by
    Professor Smith, and was made possible by the Rockefeller
    Foundation." That would be as eloquent as a baroque introduction.
    It is a problem of rhetoric and of acquaintance with a given rhetoric.
  • ...6 more annotations...
  • The quest for a new and surviving
    literacy ought not to be the quest for a preinformatic quantity. The
    enemies of literacy are hiding elsewhere
  • the radical mistake of
    irresponsible deconstructionists or of critics like Stanley Fish was to
    believe that you can do everything you want with a text. This is
    blatantly false. Busa's hypertext on the Aquinas corpus is a
    marvelous instrument, but you cannot use it to find out a
    satisfactory definition of electricity.
  • Then there is the third possibility, the one outlined by Michael
    Joyce. We may conceive of hypertexts which are unlimited and
    infinite. Every user can add something, and you can implement a
    sort of jazzlike unending story. At this point the classical notion of
    authorship certainly disappears, and we have a new way to
    implement free creativity. As the author of The Open Work I can
    only hail such a possibility. However there is a difference between
    implementing the activity of producing texts and the existence of
    produced texts. We shall have a new culture in which there will be a
    difference between producing infinitely many texts and interpreting
    precisely a finite number of texts. That is what happens in our
    present culture, in which we evaluate differently a recorded
    performance of Beethoven's Fifth and a new instance of a New
    Orleans jam session
  • The
    problem is in saying that we have replaced an old thing with
    another one; we have both, thank God. TV zapping is an activity
    that has nothing to do with reading a movie
  • Debray has reminded us that the invention of the photograph
    has set painters free from the duty of imitation.
  • Certainly the advent of cinema or of comic strips has freed
    literature from certain narrative tasks it traditionally had to perform.
    But if there is something like postmodern literature, it exists
    because it has been largely influenced by comic strips or cinema.
    This means that in the history of culture it has never happened that
    something has simply killed something else. Something has
    profoundly changed something else
1 - 4 of 4
Showing 20▼ items per page
Move to top