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Nele Noppe

Literary Openness: A Bridge across the Divide between Chinese and Western Literary Thought - 0 views

74.125.155.132/scholar

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  • Nele Noppe on 17 Jan 10
     
    Associations between open work and chinese literary theory
Nele Noppe

McLuhan Studies Premiere Issue: Eco's Prophetic Vision of Mass Culture - 0 views

www.chass.utoronto.ca/...1_1art10.htm

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  • Even in his first essays in the sixties, the author's approach to reading, interpreting and commenting on culture could already be seen as that of a semiotician who had not yet adopted the technical jargon of the discipline. In fact, it would not be too far-fetched to consider the Eco of the sixties as essentially a young Adso (see the discussions on reading signs betwen William and Adso in The Name of the Rose) ready to learn about semiotics from the right mentor. We must also remember that as soon as Eco no longer feels satisfied by the early writings of French semioticians and structuralists like Barthes and Levi-Strauss, he turns to the studies of Jakobson and Peirce on the science of signs.
  • Also, few intellectuals can match Eco's great interdisciplinary skills.
  • In general, Eco's critics (most of them academic) have suggested that he is successful because he publishes trendy books.
Nele Noppe

Vegetal and mineral memory: The future of books - 0 views

weekly.ahram.org.eg/...bo3.htm

umberto_eco literature internet open_work phd phd_unfinished

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  • The WWW is the Great Mother of All Hypertexts, a world-wide library where you can, or you will in short time, pick up all the books you wish. The Web is the general system of all existing hypertexts.

    Such a difference between text and system is enormously important,

  • Today there are new hypertextual poetics according to which even a book-to-read, even a poem, can be transformed to hypertext. At this point we are shifting to question two, since the problem is no longer, or not only, a physical one, but rather one that concerns the very nature of creative activity, of the reading process, and in order to unravel this skein of questions we have first of all to decide what we mean by a hypertextual link.
  • Notice that if the question concerned the possibility of infinite, or indefinite, interpretations on the part of the reader, it would have very little to do with the problem under discussion.
  • ...28 more annotations...
  • No: what are presently under consideration are cases in which the infinity, or at least the indefinite abundance of interpretations, are due not only to the initiative of the reader, but also to the physical mobility of the text itself, which is produced just in order to be re-written. In order to understand how texts of this genre can work we should decide whether the textual universe we are discussing is limited and finite, limited but virtually infinite, infinite but limited, or unlimited and infinite.
  • First of all, we should make a distinction between systems and texts. A system, for instance a linguistic system, is the whole of the possibilities displayed by a given natural language.
  • If you are able to use an English dictionary well you could write Hamlet, and it is by mere chance that somebody did it before you. Give the same textual system to Shakespeare and to a schoolboy, and they have the same odds of producing Romeo and Juliet.
  • Grammars, dictionaries and encyclopaedias are systems: by using them you can produce all the texts you like. But a text itself is not a linguistic or an encyclopaedic system. A given text reduces the infinite or indefinite possibilities of a system to make up a closed universe.
  • A text castrates the infinite possibilities of a system.
  • Finnegans Wake is certainly open to many interpretations, but it is certain that it will never provide you with a demonstration of Fermat's last theorem, or with the complete bibliography of Woody Allen. This seems trivial, but the radical mistake of many deconstructionists was to believe that you can do anything you want with a text. This is blatantly false.
  • How can hypertextual strategies be used to "open" up a finite and limited text?

  • The first possibility is to make the text physically unlimited, in the sense that a story can be enriched by the successive contributions of different authors and in a double sense, let us say either two-dimensionally or three-dimensionally. By this I mean that given, for instance, Little Red Riding Hood, the first author proposes a starting situation (the girl enters the wood) and different contributors can then develop the story one after the other, for example, by having the girl meet not the wolf but Ali Baba, by having both enter an enchanted castle, having a confrontation with a magic crocodile, and so on, so that the story can continue for years. But the text can also be infinite in the sense that at every narrative disjunction, for instance, when the girl enters the wood, many authors can make many different choices. For one author, the girl may meet Pinocchio, for another she may be transformed into a swan, or enter the Pyramids and discover the treasury of the son of Tutankhamen.

    This is today possible, and you can find on the Net some interesting examples of such literary games.

  • AT THIS POINT one can raise a question about the survival of the very notion of authorship and of the work of art, as an organic whole. And I want simply to inform my audience that this has already happened in the past without disturbing either authorship or organic wholes.
  • Yet, there is a difference between implementing the activity of producing infinite and unlimited texts and the existence of already produced texts, which can perhaps be interpreted in infinite ways but are physically limited. In our same contemporary culture we accept and evaluate, according to different standards, both a new performance of Beethoven's Fifth and a new Jam Session on the Basin Street theme. In this sense, I do not see how the fascinating game of producing collective, infinite stories through the Net can deprive us of authorial literature and art in general. Rather, we are marching towards a more liberated society in which free creativity will coexist with the interpretation of already written texts. I like this. But we cannot say that we have substituted an old thing with a new one. We have both.
  • I have tried desperately to find an instance of unlimited and finite textual situations, but I have been unable to do so. In fact, if you have an infinite number of elements to play with why limit yourself to the production of a finite universe? It's a theological matter, a sort of cosmic sport, in which one, or The One, could implement every possible performance but prescribes itself a rule, that is, limits, and generates a very small and simple universe.
  • A hypertext can give the illusion of opening up even a closed text: a detective story can be structured in such a way that its readers can select their own solution, deciding at the end if the guilty one should be the butler, the bishop, the detective, the narrator, the author or the reader. They can thus build up their own personal story. Such an idea is not a new one.
  • All these physically moveable texts give an impression of absolute freedom on the part of the reader, but this is only an impression, an illusion of freedom.
  • n contrast, a stimulus-text that provides us not with letters, or words, but with pre-established sequences of words, or of pages, does not set us free to invent anything we want. We are only free to move pre-established textual chunks in a reasonably high number of ways.
  • At the last borderline of free textuality there can be a text that starts as a closed one, let us say, Little Red Riding Hood or The Arabian Nights, and that I, the reader, can modify according to my inclinations, thus elaborating a second text, which is no longer the same as the original one, whose author is myself, even though the affirmation of my authorship is a weapon against the concept of definite authorship. The Net is open to such experiments, and most of them can be beautiful and rewarding. Nothing forbids one writing a story where Little Red Riding Hood devours the wolf. Nothing forbids us from putting together different stories in a sort of narrative patchwork. But this has nothing to do with the real function and with the profound charms of books.
  • A BOOK OFFERS US A TEXT which, while being open to multiple interpretations, tells us something that cannot be modified.
  • Alas, with an already written book, whose fate is determined by repressive, authorial decision, we cannot do this. We are obliged to accept fate and to realise that we are unable to change destiny. A hypertextual and interactive novel allows us to practice freedom and creativity, and I hope that such inventive activity will be implemented in the schools of the future. But the already and definitely written novel War and Peace does not confront us with the unlimited possibilities of our imagination, but with the severe laws governing life and death.
  • That is what every great book tells us, that God passed there, and He passed for the believer as well as for the sceptic. There are books that we cannot re-write because their function is to teach us about necessity, and only if they are respected such as they are can they provide us with such wisdom. Their repressive lesson is indispensable for reaching a higher state of intellectual and moral freedom.
  • Its model is not so much a straight line as a real galaxy where everybody can draw unexpected connections between different stars to form new celestial images at any new navigation point.
  • Even after the invention of printing, books were never the only instrument for acquiring information. There were also paintings, popular printed images, oral teaching, and so on. Simply, books have proved to be the most suitable instrument for transmitting information.
  • Hypertexts will certainly render encyclopaedias and handbooks obsolete.
  • Then they are books to be consulted, like handbooks and encyclopaedias.
  • There are two sorts of book: those to be read and those to be consulted.
  • Yet, can a hypertextual disk or the WWW replace books to be read? Once again we have to decide whether the question concerns books as physical or as virtual objects. Once again let us consider the physical problem first.
  • Books belong to those kinds of instruments that, once invented, have not been further improved because they are already alright, such as the hammer, the knife, spoon or scissors.
  • TWO NEW INVENTIONS, however, are on the verge of being industrially exploited. One is printing on demand: after scanning the catalogues of many libraries or publishing houses a reader can select the book he needs, and the operator will push a button, and the machine will print and bind a single copy using the font the reader likes. This will certainly change the whole publishing market.
  • Simply put: every book will be tailored according to the desires of the buyer, as happened with old manuscripts.
  • Alas, if by chance one hoped that computers, and especially word processors, would contribute to saving trees, then that was wishful thinking. Instead, computers encourage the production of printed material. The computer creates new modes of production and diffusion of printed documents.
Nele Noppe

Interview with Umberto Eco (Coppock) - 0 views

carbon.ucdenver.edu/...eco.html

internet literature umberto_eco games fanficforensics phd

shared by Nele Noppe on 15 Jan 10 - Cached

  • "Do you think this might lead to new forms of literature?"

    I have been using a fantastic hypertext for the last 30 years. It is called Scrabble. Isn't it true that with Scrabble you can compose every possible cross link, every combination of sentences. It's a nice game, it can have educational purposes. Sometimes my wife who is German learned part of her English lexicon by playing Scrabble. Sometimes we play Scrabble in English, or in French. OK, but if you are a poet you have your mental Scrabble. You don't need the board to do it. It is the same I think for all those kinds of games. They can be very nice to play. So, I repeat: they can be used for training people in inventing and composing, but they have nothing to do, according to me, with the future of literature.

  • At the present state of the art, if I had to bet all the money I have in my pocket, I would bet more on hyper-systems more than on hypertext.

  • Then, when you read a serious book on Cremonini, first you discover that Cremonini was a great mind of this time, even though he was not an innovator like Gallileo, and that it isn't true that he refused to look into the binocular. He just said: "At the present state of technology, those lenses are very rudimentary, so I don't think that they can really help me to see something more."

    It was an objection to the present primitive state of the art. So what I am making now is probably a statement that we are still at a primitive state of the art. I have not been interested up to now to try virtual reality. Because until it is possible to make love to Marilyn Monroe; until the moment that her clothes start floating away - well, then at that moment I will try! But as long as it is just a sketch of Marilyn Monroe, and I can have the real sensation elsewhere, then the state of the art is so primitive that I prefer to wait, that's all! If you offer me this possibility soon, or better still, if you offer me this possibility when I am 80, I will be enthusiastic about the innovation, and I will become a fanatic supporter!

  • ...1 more annotation...
  • But that's why I say that at this point I have the impression that it is most interesting for educational and training purposes, rather than for providing real new aesthetic experiences.
Nele Noppe

Interview with Umberto Eco: 'We Like Lists Because We Don't Want to Die' - 0 views

www.spiegel.de/...0,1518,druck-659577,00.html

umberto_eco art fanficforensics phd

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  • SPIEGEL: In your exhibition at the Louvre, you will also be showing works drawn from the visual arts, such as still lifes. But these paintings have frames, or limits, and they can't depict more than they happen to depict.

    Eco: On the contrary, the reason we love them so much is that we believe that we are able to see more in them. A person contemplating a painting feels a need to open the frame and see what things look like to the left and to the right of the painting. This sort of painting is truly like a list, a cutout of infinity.

  • SPIEGEL: But you also said that lists can establish order. So, do both order and anarchy apply? That would make the Internet, and the lists that the search engine Google creates, prefect for you.

    Eco: Yes, in the case of Google, both things do converge. Google makes a list, but the minute I look at my Google-generated list, it has already changed. These lists can be dangerous -- not for old people like me, who have acquired their knowledge in another way, but for young people, for whom Google is a tragedy. Schools ought to teach the high art of how to be discriminating.

  • Culture isn't knowing when Napoleon died. Culture means knowing how I can find out in two minutes. Of course, nowadays I can find this kind of information on the Internet in no time. But, as I said, you never know with the Internet.
Nele Noppe

Hyperreality - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia - 0 views

en.wikipedia.org/...Hyperreality

hyperreality umberto_eco fanficforensics phd

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  • In semiotics and postmodern philosophy, the term hyperreality characterizes the inability of consciousness to distinguish reality from fantasy, especially in technologically advanced postmodern cultures. Hyperreality is a means to characterise the way consciousness defines what is actually "real" in a world where a multitude of media can radically shape and filter the original event or experience being depicted.
Nele Noppe

Umberto Eco and His Travels in Hyperreality - 0 views

www.transparencynow.com/eco.htm

umberto_eco hyperreality fan_fiction fanficforensics phd

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  • Eco saw that we create these realistic fabrications in an effort to come up with something that is better than real -- a description that is true of virtually all fiction and culture, which gives us things that are more exciting, more beautiful, more inspiring, more terrifying, and generally more interesting than what we encounter in everyday life.
  • As Eco explains it, his trip is a pilgrimage in search of "hyperreality," or the world of "the Absolute Fake," in which imitations don't merely reproduce reality, but try improve on it.
  • When he travels the artificial river in Disneyland, for example, he sees animatronic imitations of animals. But, on a trip down the real Mississippi, the river fails to reveal its alligators. "...You risk feeling homesick for Disneyland," he concludes, "where the wild animals don't have to be coaxed. Disneyland tells us that technology can give us more reality than nature can."
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • But, perhaps his most interesting perception occurs when he discovers, behind all the spectacle in Disneyland, the same old tricks of capitalism, with a new twist: "The Main Street facades are presented to us as toy houses and invite us to enter them, but their interior is always a disguised supermarket, where you buy obsessively, believing that you are still playing,"
Nele Noppe

New Essays on Umberto Eco - 0 views

www.amazon.com/...ref=sr_1_3

umberto_eco semiotics fanficforensics phd

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    by Peter Bondanella
Nele Noppe

The Poetics of the Open Work By Umberto Eco - 0 views

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umberto_eco open_work fanficforensics phd

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  • the instrumentalist's freedom is a function of the "narrative" structure of
    the piece
  • the instrumentalist's freedom is a function of the "narrative" structure of
    the piece
  • the instrumentalist's freedom is a function of the "narrative" structure of
    the piece
  • ...39 more annotations...
  • the instrumentalist's freedom is a function of the "narrative" structure of
    the piece
  • the instrumentalist's freedom is a function of the "narrative" structure of
    the piece
  • the instrumentalist's freedom is a function of the "narrative" structure of
    the piece,
  • the instrumentalist's freedom is a function of the "narrative" structure of
    the piece
  • the instrumentalist's freedom is a function of the "narrative" structure of
    the piece,
  • the instrumentalist's freedom is a function of the "narrative" structure of
    the piece, w
  • the new musical works referred to
    above reject the definitive, concluded message and multiply the formal possibilities of
    the distribution of their elements.
  • initiative of the individual performer
  • As he reacts to the play of stimuli and his own response to
    their patterning, the individual addressee is bound to supply his own existential
    credentials, the sense conditioning which is peculiarly his own, a defined culture, a set of
    tastes, personal inclinations, and prejudices. Thus, his comprehension of the original
    artifact is always modified by his particular and individual perspective. In fact, the form of
    the work of art gains its aesthetic validity precisely in proportion to the number of
    different perspectives from which it can be viewed and understood.
  • A work of art, therefore, is a complete
    and closed form in its uniqueness as a balanced organic whole, while at the same time
    constituting an open product on account of its susceptibility to countless different
    interpretations which do not impinge on its unadulterable specificity.
  • it is obvious that works like those of Berio and Stockhausen are "open" in a
    far more tangible sense.
  • the poetics of the "open" work tends to encourage “acts of
    conscious freedom” on the part of the performer and place him at the focal point of a
    network of limitless interrelations,
  • Instead nowadays it is
    primarily the artist who is aware of its implications.
  • However, in this type of operation, "openness" is far removed from
    meaning "indefiniteness" of communication, "infinite" possibilities of form, and complete
    freedom of reception. What in fact is made available is a range of rigidly
    preestablished and ordained interpretative solutions,
  • and these never allow the reader to
    move outside the strict control of the author.
  • It is not that the four solutions of the allegorical passage are quantitatively more limited
    than the many possible solutions of a contemporary "open" work. As I shall try to show, it
    is a different vision of the world which lies under these different aesthetic experiences
  • Now if Baroque spirituality is to be seen as the first
    clear manifestation of modern culture and sensitivity, it is because here, for the first time,
    man opts out of the canon of authorized responses and finds that he is faced (both in art
    and in science) by a world in a fluid state which requires corresponding creativity on his
    part.
  • the new man's inventive role. He is no longer to see the work of art as an object which
    draws on given links with experience and which demands to be enjoyed; now he sees it
    as a potential mystery to be solved, a role to fulfill, a stimulus to quicken his imagination.
  • W.
    Y. Tindall, in his book on the literary symbol, offers an analysis of some of the greatest
    modern literary works in order to test Valéry's declaration that "il n'y a pas de vrai sens
    d'un texte" ("there is no true meaning of a text"). Tindall eventually concludes that a
    work of art is a construct which anyone at all, including its author, can put to any use
    whatsoever, as he chooses. This type of criticism views the literary work as a
    continuous potentiality of "openness"-in other words, an indefinite reserve of meanings.
    This is the scope of the wave of American studies on the structure of metaphor, or of
    modern work on "types of ambiguity" offered by poetic discourse.
  • Clearly, the work of James Joyce is a major example of an "open" mode, since it
    deliberately seeks to offer an image of the ontological and existential situation of the
    contemporary world.
  • Here the work is "open" in the same sense that a debate is
    "open." A solution is seen as desirable and is actually anticipated, but it must come from
    the collective enterprise of the audience. In this case the "openness" is converted into an
    instrument of revolutionary pedagogics.
  • the examples
    considered in the preceding section propose an "openness" based on the theoretical,
    mental collaboration of the consumer, who must freely interpret an artistic datum, a
    product which has already been organized in its structural entirety (even if this structure
    allows for an indefinite plurality of interpretations). On the other hand, a composition like
    Scambi, by Pousseur, represents a fresh advance.
  • it is clear
    that a composition such as Scambi poses a completely new problem. It invites us
    to identify inside the category of "open" works a further, more restricted classification of
    works which can be defined as "works in movement," because they characteristically
    consist of unplanned or physically incomplete structural units
  • If we turn to literary production to try to isolate an example of a work in movement," we
    are immediately obliged to take into consideration Mallarmé's Livre, a colossal and far-
    reaching work, the quintessence of the poet's production. He conceived it as the
    work which would constitute not only the goal of his activities but also the end goal of the
    world:
  • However, Mallarmé's immense enterprise was utopian:
  • In every century, the way that artistic forms are structured reflects the way in which
    science or contemporary culture views reality.
  • Hence, it is not overambitious to detect in the poetics of the "open" work – and even less
    so in the "work in movement” – more or less specific overtones of trends in
    contemporary scientific thought.
  • The notion of "possibility" is a philosophical canon which reflects a widespread
    tendency in contemporary science; the discarding of a static, syllogistic view of order,
    and a corresponding devolution of intellectual authority to personal decision, choice,
    and social context.
  • The two-value truth logic
    which follows the classical aut-aut, the disjunctive dilemma between true and false, a
    fact and its contradictory, is no longer the only instrument of philosophical experiment.
    Multi-value logics are now gaining currency, and these are quite capable of incorporating
    indeterminacy as a valid stepping-stone in the cognitive process. In this general
    intellectual atmosphere, the poetics of the open work is peculiarly relevant: it posits the
    work of art stripped of necessary and foreseeable conclusions, works in which the
    performer's freedom functions as part of the discontinuity which contemporary physics
    recognizes, not as an element of disorientation, but as an essential stage in all scientific
    verification procedures and also as the verifiable pattern of events in the subatomic
    world.
  • Here are no privileged points of view, and all available perspectives are
    equally valid and rich in potential.
  • This is not the place to pass judgment on the scientific validity of the metaphysical
    construct implied by Einstein's system. But there is a striking analogy between his
    universe and the universe of the work in movement
  • Therefore, to sum up, we can say that the "work in movement" is the
    possibility of numerous different personal interventions, but it is not an amorphous
    invitation to indiscriminate participation. The invitation offers the performer the
    opportunity for an oriented insertion into something which always remains the world
    intended by the author.
  • All these examples of "open" works and "works in movement" have this latent
    characteristic, which guarantees that they will al- ways be seen as "works" and not just
    as a conglomeration of random components ready to emerge from the chaos in which
    they previously stood and permitted to assume any form whatsoever.
  • Now, a dictionary clearly presents us with thousands upon thou- sands of words which
    we could freely use to compose poetry, essays on physics, anonymous letters, or
    grocery lists. In this sense the dictionary is clearly open to the reconstitution of its raw
    material in any way that the manipulator wishes. But this does not make it a "work." The
    "openness" and dynamism of an artistic work consist in factors which make it susceptible
    to a whole range of integrations. They provide it with organic complements which they
    graft into the structural vitality which the work already possesses, even if it is incomplete.
    This structural vitality is still seen as a positive property of the work, even though it
    admits of all kinds of different conclusions and solutions for it
  • We have, therefore, seen that (1) "open" works, insofar as they are in movement, are
    characterized by the invitation to make the work together with the author and that (2) on
    a wider level (as a subgenus in the species "work in movement") there exist works
    which, though organically completed, are "open" to a continuous generation of internal
    relations which the addressee must uncover and select in his act of perceiving the
    totality of incoming stimuli. (3) Every work of art, even though it is produced by following
    an explicit or implicit poetics of necessity, is effectively open to a virtually unlimited range
  • of possible readings, each of which causes the work to acquire new vitality in terms of
    one particular taste, or perspective, or personal performance
  • The poetic theory or practice of the "work in movement" senses this possibility as a
    specific vocation. It allies itself openly and selfconsciously to current trends in scientific
    method and puts into action and tangible form the very trend which aesthetics has
  • already acknowledged as the general background to performance. These poetic
    systems recognize "openness" as the fundamental possibility of the contemporary artist
    or consumer.
  • The poetics of the "work in movement" (and partly that of the "open" work)
    sets in motion a new cycle of relations between the artist and his audience, a new
    mechanics of aesthetic perception, a different status for the artistic product in
    contemporary society. It opens a new page in sociology and in pedagogy, as well as a
    new chapter in the history of art. It poses new practical problems by organizing new
    communicative situations. In short, it installs a new relationship between the
    contemplation and the utilization of a work of art.
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

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  • 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
Nele Noppe

Participation, Reciprocity and Generosity in Art: On Open Work by Umberto Eco - 1 views

distributedcreativity.typepad.com/...post.html

open_work umberto_eco fanficforensics phd

shared by Nele Noppe on 10 Oct 08 - Cached
  • Eco distinguishes between the concept within aesthetic theory that every text is more or less open, because every text can be read in an infinite number of ways depending on what the reader brings to the text, and his more specific concept of the open work.
  • As examples
  • He also cites texts which on the surface are more traditional.
  • ...7 more annotations...
  • “In Opera Aperta, Eco argued that literary texts are fields of meaning, rather than strings of meaning, that they are understood as open, internally dynamic and psychologically engaged fields. Those works of literature that limit potential understanding to a single, unequivocal line are the least rewarding, while those that are most open, most active between mind and society and line, are the most lively (and, although valorizing terminology is not his business, best)
  • What the preceding entry leaves out is the historical context in which Eco puts openness. He feels that this type of work, open work, is the work of his age.
  • A sub-category of open work is work in movement which he describes as works which “characteristically consist of unplanned or physically incomplete structural units.”
  • Eco sees open work as essentially political; work that is open expresses a pluralistic worldview.
  • Work which is calling into question its own forms and assumptions has a valuable function – it teaches us how to operate with agency within a highly mediated world.
  • 1) Eco sees science as driving the worldview of an age, to which art responds
  • Forty or more years after the essays in The Open Work were written do we live in a world where the openness of our habits of interpretation makes the openness of the text less crucial?
Nele Noppe

Umberto Eco - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia - 0 views

en.wikipedia.org/Umberto_Eco

fanwork theory umberto_eco open_work fanficforensics phd

shared by Nele Noppe on 19 Aug 08 - Cached
    • Nele Noppe
      Nele Noppe on 19 Aug 08
       
      -> werk dat sterk voor interpretatie vatbaar is genereert veel fanfic
  • In Opera aperta, Eco argued that literary texts are fields of meaning, rather than strings of meaning, that they are understood as open, internally dynamic and psychologically engaged fields. Those works of literature that limit potential understanding to a single, unequivocal line are the least rewarding, while those that are most open, most active between mind and society and line, are the most lively and best
  • In Opera aperta, Eco argued that literary texts are fields of meaning, rather than strings of meaning, that they are understood as open, internally dynamic and psychologically engaged fields.
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • texts that are the most active between mind and society and life (open texts) are the most lively and best
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