From a Reading...

I have once again managed to run off on a tangent while reading for my final, critical project. This time, I've been reading "Radiant Textuality" by Jerome McGann. In it, he addresses some traditional perspectives on printed text. He talks about Mallarme's book, written about 100 years ago, about "the culture of the book." McGann says that in it, Mallarme rejects the idea of a book as a simple container for information. Instead Mallarme (there's an accent on the last "e")uses the book to mimic the structure of a musical score and the rhythmn of a poem. I liked the following sentence from McGann: "The Mallarmean book comes forth as a set of figurations behaving like sentient and purposive creatures, constituting and calling forth their world(s), which include all of the book's readers, living and dead, actual, possible, imaginary" (210).

I guess I just really appreciated McGann's giving the book a little more life, and poetically at that, particularly in comparison to the hypertext. He sees the novel as foreshadowing hypertexts in interesting ways. When he talks about the novel bringing forth a world, he says its contents are "memory simulations" and, as Plato said, "encodings of encodings." I know this may not be particularly new material but McGann puts it cleverly and, perhaps, with a new spin. If you're interested it's from a section of the book called "Beginning Again and Again:'The Ivanhoe Game.'"