Volume 6, Issue 2

This article explores media-related aspects of literariness and examines them on the basis of spoken and written language in new media art, in order to rethink the role of philology. The working hypothesis is that new media art does, in fact, possess the potential for literary analysis; the article is therefore intended as a case for the expansion of literary studies, its paradigms and methodologies. Literature, poetic structures and elements play a significant role in many new media artworks – a fact that has been overlooked so far by both media studies and literary scholarship. The article investigates this new, complex interdisciplinary field in an exemplary analysis. To expand the application of literary studies to new developments in the arts, including new media art working with language, one has to acknowledge that orally performed texts are as complex in their aesthetic presentation and poetic signification as written and printed literary works, and are therefore to be viewed as just as relevant subjects of research. In the introduction (part one), the research question will be contextualized within contemporary trends in research, in particular within discourse concerning the ›pictorial turn‹. It will be argued that the impulse to analyze audiovisual art from the standpoint of art history ( Bildwissenschaft ) or media studies generally overlooks or underestimates linguistic and literary components. However, in these artworks it is often the complex interplay between orality and scriptuality that creates poetic effects. The second part of the article will introduce the concept and genres of new media art and distinguish four central aesthetic strategies that are relevant for ›philological‹ analysis: (1) the integration of written texts or printed words with a poetic intention into new media art; (2) the use of verbalized language in an explicitly poetic manner; (3) the handling of pre-existing works of literature and their transformation into audiovisual art; and (4) the exploration and adaptation of literary genres by new media artists. The concept of literariness in literary theory will be discussed in the third part of the article, as it has been developed, amongst others, by Russian formalists, the Prague school and various literary scholars in the English and German speaking realm. The general aim will be the application of these notions of literariness to the poetic use of language in new media art. The main focus will be on the notion of poetic ›deviation‹ ( Abweichung ) and the increased self-referentiality of poetic language that is created by way of a »foregrounding of the utterance« (Mukařovský 2007, 19). Overall, poetic language can be perceived as such if it is ostentatious or if it intentionally creates alienation, a heightened awareness of its materiality, or an ›aesthetic surplus‹ that exceeds the mere communicative act. In the parts four to six the article will then analyze three recent video art works: Keren Cytter’s single-channel video Dreamtalk (2005), Freya Hattenberger’s video performance installation Pretty Girl (2008), and Magdalena von Rudy’s single-channel video Regnava nel silenzio (2008). These works have been chosen as divergent and aesthetically innovative pieces by young and upcoming female new media artists working in the German cultural context, and as representative examples for a recent trend in video art to generate complex narrative and aesthetic structures that strongly rely upon language. The three works will be examined in close readings focusing on the use of language and literary structures, both in scriptural and in oral language. It will be shown that these video artworks integrate elements from all three literary genres – drama (e. g. choral speech, teichoscopy), poetry (repetitions, parallelisms, rhyme, semantic ambiguieties, etc.), and epic prose (narrative voices, literary ekphrasis). Furthermore, it is argued that these new media art works create and make use of an ›aesthetic surplus‹ by way of a highly conscious and ostentatious use of language that is viewed and presented as an artistic material and a poetic ›tool‹. They also raise the question of agency inasmuch as all three video works play with inauthentic or figurative discourse, which is either articulated by someone else and only performed second-hand, or presented as ›re-presentation‹ as such. Moreover, in two of the three works discussed the speakers are not conceptualized as characters articulating ›themselves‹ at all, but as mere vocal instances mediating external content. Such experimental work with language definitively exceeds existing parameters of figural speech and character analysis both in film analysis and narratology. The language used by the speakers refers to its act of articulation as such, or works with iterations and other forms of language ›deviation‹ in actio . With regard to the concept of literariness, such linguistic strategies must be considered poetic.

This article extends work on notions of space developed by media and poetry theorists. It particularly analyzes how contemporary technologies re-define the writing space of digital poetry making by investigating the configuration of this space in the writing of the digital poem. First, I acknowledge the permanent engagement of poetry with its writing spaces. In this respect, I delineate how the transition from oral to print and then to new media culture configure diverse forms of poetry which emerge in and with diverse writing spaces. In oral culture, for instance, poetry is created in an oral space that is the space in which the word is uttered and transmitted. Because the oral poet writes directly to the minds of the audience, the space of poetry writing becomes the space between the poet and his audience. With print culture, poetry is tied to page as a writing space. This space records the spoken words on the page in the form of script that becomes a poem only when readers encounter it. In new media culture, poetry relies on the use of various computer media in the composition, generation, or presentation of the text. The making of digital poetry integrates the zeros and the ones of the digital writing space. As a result, the writing space in which the poem is made manifest fosters a particular perception vis-à-vis the act of writing. Then, I bring up specific works from the early 1900s poetic experiments and the concrete poetry tradition. In this sense, I cite the French and Italian influential poets Stéphane Mallarmé, Guillaume Apollinaire, and Filippo Marinetti who raised awareness on the significance of space in the meaning making of their works. My study dedicates more space to the concrete poets’ manifestos from the sixties who theorized the conceptual use of space in their poetries. I specifically analyze how in Eugen Gomringer’s Silence space carries semantic meaning and is endowed with a dual function: it is a container and a contained element which brings words together and holds them. Based upon these theoretical considerations, I frame my understanding vis-à-vis the configuration of space in digital poetry. This article proposes the concept of ›trans-medial‹ space by re-fashioning Bolter’s ›topographic writing.‹ In 1991 new media theorist David Jay Bolter traces the changing technologies of writing and associates the emergence of hypertext with the ›topographic‹ quality of digital writing: the mathematical arrangement of verbal ideas in visual spaces. My concept examines how digital poetry exists, emerges, and is experienced only within a digital space and how it conveys a perception of the writing space as multiple and changeable. This concept also provides a significant paradigm for thinking about the space(s) engaged in the making of digital poetry, insofar as I consider the spaces of the computer screen, source code, and code execution. I explicitly address questions regarding the configuration of space in digital poetry and the interspatial relationship between screen and source code spaces. This digital writing space is made of multiple spaces of encoding and decoding which interconnect with one another and give birth to an in-between space . The primary space is the source code where the poet installs the code which contains the script of the poem. This code has a meaningful existence only when it is encountered, received, and reconceived by the reader. Hence, there is also the screen space where the code becomes work only through the reader’s access. Both spaces are transformative in the sense that they are physically in a morphing state: screen space evolves out of source code space. In this way, this digital writing space is a ›trans-medial‹ space: it forms itself as it self-transforms. My close reading of Brian Kim Stefans’s digital poem, The Dreamlife of Letters , considers the dialectics between the spaces of the poem in its print, index, and onscreen performance versions and, therefore, epitomizes the significance of trans-medial space. The fact that the present technologies of writing call for the trans-medial quality of writing opens up new venues for the reading of the digital works by re-fashioning the concept of the writing space of our digitized world. Moreover, this ›trans-medial‹ approach to space expands the lines of continuity between poetry from oral culture, traditional print, and the present forms of digital expression. Such a perspective also reinforces the theoretical understanding of the close connections between literature and modern media.

Like its primary medium language, poetry exists in two distinct forms: as written text and in oral performance. Nowadays, live poetry – poetry performed or ›read‹ by the poet to a live audience – constitutes an important mode of publication for poets and thus a prominent mode of experiencing poetry for the ›reader.‹ Given the increasing popularity of literary festivals, open mics, and poetry slams, one could justifiably claim that the English-speaking world is currently experiencing a live poetry boom. As such, live poetry entails a direct encounter and physical co-presence of poet-performer and audience in a specific spatio-temporal situation, a fact which has for a long time been neglected in the methodologies traditionally applied to the study of poetry. Starting from a conception of oral performance as a basic manifestation of the art of poetry rather than a mere presentation of an essentially written text, this essay reflects upon the ways in which the workings of literary communication need to be reconsidered when the ›lyric I‹ is voiced by a real-life person who addresses an equally real audience. Drawing on examples from selected live poetry events and on concepts from theatre- and performance studies and verbal art studies, the status of the poet-performer will be theorised in relation to the audience as well as to the poetic text. Due to its status of ›shared experience,‹ live poetry requires a thorough contextualisation. In verbal art studies, live performance is defined as a »specially marked, artful way of speaking that sets up or represents a special interpretative frame within which the act of speaking is to be understood« (Bauman & Briggs). Performance can thus be explained as a simultaneous relation to different contexts. A central question for the interpretation of live poetry is therefore how these contexts relate to each other. As in the overwhelming majority of poetry readings/performances the performer is also the author of the text performed, the poet appears in a double role of ›poet-performer.‹ Focusing on the role of the poet-performer vis-à-vis the audience, an important aspect that needs to be addressed is the relation of the actual and the fictive speech situation: i. e. the relationship established between poet and fictive speaker in performance, as well as the relationship of the actual spatio-temporal situation and audience to the fictive spatio-temporal situation and addressee evoked by the poetic text. For this purpose I will introduce Fernando de Toro’s notion of the theatrical actor as an »icon of the character being performed« and Umberto Eco’s conception of theatrical performance as two simultaneous speech acts. However, unlike in theatre live poetry audiences cannot usually draw on a conventionalised distinction between a real-life actor and an easily identifiable character whose name can be listed in the programme brochure. The poet-performer physically presents him- or herself rather than representing a fictitious character. This will be thematised in relation to Peter Middleton’s notion of »the performance of authorship« in live poetry and the idea of a »performance self« (Anthony Howell) – a personality projected by the poet in performance. The poet’s twofold role of ›poet-performer‹ is also the reason why the person of the poet is more easily confused with the persona in the poem in live poetry. As the fictive ›speaker‹ emerges in performance through the person of the author, the conceptual split of author/speaker is much harder for the audience to realise in live poetry than when dealing with print. The audience are thus invited to enter the »autobiographical pact« (Lejeune), and examples will demonstrate that some poets consciously work with this identificatory effect of live poetry performance. Similarly, live poetry may create an interesting relationship between the physically present audience and a poem’s fictive addressee(s). I will identify factors and preconditions for this identificatory mode, and its possible effects. Conceiving of the audience as participants in, rather than recipients of, a performance, live poetry analyses must further take into account »spectator performer communication« (Elam) – which has been theorised by Erika Fischer-Lichte as a self-regulating ›feedback loop‹ – as well as »spectator-spectator communication« (Elam). Finally, Gérard Genette’s notion of paratext will be modified to examine the functions of the poet’s ad-lib. The examples discussed will serve to demonstrate the context-dependence of live performance: its emergence through spatially and temporally defined performer-audience relations.

This article is concerned with the formal definition of a factor in narrative which, being of mainly theoretical relevance for western literature of the modern age, has largely gone unnoticed in narratology, but should be recognized as a general constituent of narrative form: the impact of the material appearance for which a narrative is destined on its structure. Recent research on the materiality of texts has pointed out that the spatial arrangement of a text’s script makes up a substantial part of the formation of its meaning in the process of reception. In the case of narrative literature, this state of affairs affects the level of the plot: The fashion in which a text is visually aligned on its pages and the fashion in which its book is designed for use regulate the dispensation of plot information to the reader and the way in which the reader is guided to connect elements of the plot. They thus contribute significantly to the formation of narrative coherence and meaning. This only fails to stand out because, from approximately the eighteenth century onwards, western narrative literature has typically been printed in a stereotyped low-key linear layout that strongly de-emphasizes the spatial dimensions of script and text. Books from this period are generally presented with single columns of continuous, monochrome, non-illustrated text, without variations in font size or other forms of spatial emphasis, with only static headers or none at all, and with chapter headings which, if at all extant, normally do not serve the purpose of dispensing or connecting plot information, but rather serve the purpose of setting pauses, providing bridges or creating tension. This type of linear presentation, however, is a poetologically specific and historically recent convention that can be tied to the emergence of distinctively modern strategies of constructing narrative temporality and causality. It forms only a comparatively brief episode in the history of the material shape of narrative (and is, at present, being systematically supplemented by hypertextual and other spatial forms). In contrast, European narrative literature of the later Middle Ages and the early modern period is typically presented in highly differentiated spatial layouts based on frequent chapter divisions, hierarchical systems of initials, informative rubrics and illustrations, while, in turn, high medieval narrative is typically based on another type of linear presentation. The article points out that the immanent structure of a text, as regards to its form and contents, has to conform to that of its material presentation. Thus, if the spatial arrangement of a narrative text affects its plot, and if this plot is, naturally, strategically conceived by the author, then it is already during the process of production that the – anticipated – material shape of a narrative text contributes to its structure. To conceive a narrative, then, includes pre-visualizing a graphic, spatial layout that accompanies the linear process of writing and thereby flows into the composition. Unless authors are, as for instance in avant-garde literature, intentionally aiming at experimental graphic designs for their texts, they will (consciously or subconsciously) have in mind a material shape corresponding to their respective historical-cultural prototypes. If one thus imputes to the author a mental vision of the appearance of the narrative he is composing, then this vision has importance for the form which he will accord to his text: the spatial dimension is, as it were, inscribed into the narrative – before it even exists. The text henceforth contains the spatial dimension ›negatively‹ or abstractly, that is, independently of its actual (and possibly quite different) material form. It becomes an implicit factor of the text’s structure. These considerations lead to an analytic concept that, cautiously echoing Booth’s ›implied author‹ and Iser’s ›implied reader‹, is designated as the ›implied book‹. It denotes an author’s historically assumable, not necessarily conscious idea of how his text, which is still in the process of creation, will be dimensionally presented and under these circumstances visually absorbed. Assuming that an author’s knowledge of this later (potentially) substantiated material form influences the composition, the implied book is to be understood as a text-genetically determined, structuring moment of narrative. Historically reconstructed, it thus serves the methodical analysis of structural characteristics in a completed text.