Get 20M+ Full-Text Papers For Less Than $1.50/day. Start a 14-Day Trial for You or Your Team.

Learn More →

Materiality and the Digital Future of Inscription

Materiality and the Digital Future of Inscription forum: Rethinking Paul de Man MATERIALITY AND THE DIGITAL FUTURE OF INSCRIPTION AVERY SLATER In his 1981 essay “Hypogram and Inscription,” Paul de Man sets out to unravel certain claims and assumptions of formalist poetics through a reading of the prosopopeiac poem by Victor Hugo, “Written on the Pane of a Flemish window” (1837). Where formalist critics such as Michel Riffaterre vaunted this poem’s fi gurative, descriptive powers, de Man delves into the hidden import of Hugo’s epigraph-title: Écrit sur la vitre d’une fenêtre fl amande. Although this poem’s lyric pyrotechnics create quite a phantasmatic impression on the reader, de Man stresses that the only real, textual event of this poem is its title that draws attention to the material substrate (alphabet etched in glass) necessary for any writing. De Man gestures toward writing’s otherwise transparent medium, the “unseen crystal” across which and into which its code is written. Lyric promises of lively, absorptive interfaces with readerly phenomenality are systematically dismantled by de Man as hallucinations that wither and disintegrate while material inscription’s implacable logic inorganically proliferates. Dismembering these lyrical operations, de Man performs an “undoing of the phenomenality of language” that equally entails “the undoing of cognition and http://www.deepdyve.com/assets/images/DeepDyve-Logo-lg.png symploke University of Nebraska Press

Materiality and the Digital Future of Inscription

Slater, Avery
symploke , Volume 26 (1) – Nov 28, 2018
Download PDF
9 pages

Loading next page...
 
/lp/university-of-nebraska-press/materiality-and-the-digital-future-of-inscription-RouTLt6USG

References

References for this paper are not available at this time. We will be adding them shortly, thank you for your patience.

Publisher
University of Nebraska Press
Copyright
Copyright © 2008 symploke.
ISSN
1534-0627

Abstract

forum: Rethinking Paul de Man MATERIALITY AND THE DIGITAL FUTURE OF INSCRIPTION AVERY SLATER In his 1981 essay “Hypogram and Inscription,” Paul de Man sets out to unravel certain claims and assumptions of formalist poetics through a reading of the prosopopeiac poem by Victor Hugo, “Written on the Pane of a Flemish window” (1837). Where formalist critics such as Michel Riffaterre vaunted this poem’s fi gurative, descriptive powers, de Man delves into the hidden import of Hugo’s epigraph-title: Écrit sur la vitre d’une fenêtre fl amande. Although this poem’s lyric pyrotechnics create quite a phantasmatic impression on the reader, de Man stresses that the only real, textual event of this poem is its title that draws attention to the material substrate (alphabet etched in glass) necessary for any writing. De Man gestures toward writing’s otherwise transparent medium, the “unseen crystal” across which and into which its code is written. Lyric promises of lively, absorptive interfaces with readerly phenomenality are systematically dismantled by de Man as hallucinations that wither and disintegrate while material inscription’s implacable logic inorganically proliferates. Dismembering these lyrical operations, de Man performs an “undoing of the phenomenality of language” that equally entails “the undoing of cognition and

Journal

symploke – University of Nebraska Press

Published: Nov 28, 2018

There are no references for this article.