Annotated Bibliography Assignment

By Robin Chin, Alice Adaptation Team

1. Bolter, Jay David, and Richard Grusin. Remediation: Understanding New Media. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999. 3- 50.

Bolter and Grusin address the contradictory imperatives for “immediacy” and “hypermediacy” that together form the “double logic of remediation” in modern day culture. Though seemingly two exclusive logics, the authors make the claim that immediacy and hypermediacy “not only coexist in digital media today,” but are in fact “mutually dependent” on one another. Still, while they identify this complex oscillation between the desire for transparency and for opacity as an important characteristic of new media, Bolter and Grusin are quick to point out that remediation does not begin with the introduction of digital technology. Rather, they write, its process can be detected in Renaissance paintings (e.g. linear perspective), Baroque furniture, and many other pre-digital media. Thus what is “new” about new media comes from the particular ways in which such media refashion older media, and the ways in which older media (television and film especially) refashion themselves to answer the challenges of new media. “New digital media … emerge from within cultural contexts, and they refashion other media, which are embedded in the same or similar contexts,” the authors claim. Accordingly, some new media seeks to justify themselves by granting access to the older media in an attempt to be transparent, while others, emphasizing their difference, offer themselves as improvements over the older media forms to which they nevertheless stand in relation. The chapter ends by proclaiming that digital media will function in a constant dialectic with earlier media, and will never radically break from the past.

2. Carroll, Lewis. The Annotated Alice: Alice's Adventures in Wonderland & Through the Looking Glass. Edited by Martin Gardner. New York:Bramhall House, 1960.

In this classic edition of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865) and Through the Looking-Glass (1871), mathematician/philosopher/editor Martin Gardner adds a full annotation to the original texts and illustrations of Carroll’s Victorian works. Commenting on both the diverse interpretive history of the texts as well as on sources relevant to the their compilation/publication history, Gardner’s edition has become the standard (if still somewhat idiosyncratic) volume for serious non-academic readers of the two Alice novels. In the “Introduction” to the 1960 edition, Gardner discusses the necessity of annotating Carroll’s text in order for modern audiences to understand the “very curious, complicated kind of nonsense, written for British readers of another century” (7).  Indeed, Gardner claims, while to the untrained reader Carroll’s nonsense may seem to be the result of mere whimsy, “the fact is that [this nonsense] is not nearly as random and pointless as it seems” (7). At the same time, however, while Gardner emphasizes the deep intention behind Carroll’s many puns and linguistic jokes, he takes pains in his introduction to defend the author against the various interpretations of psychoanalytic critics, who are understandably attracted to the dreamy premise of both texts, and to their many references to eating and violence.  Likewise, Gardner also acknowledges and rejects the validity of past critics’ speculation with regards to Carroll’s sexual attraction to young girls such as the “real Alice,” Alice Liddell. He concludes his commentary reemphasizing the importance of the nonsense in the texts: “[Carroll’s last level of metaphor is] that life, viewed rationally and without illusion, appears to be a nonsense tale told by an idiot mathematician” (20).

3. Hill, W. Speed. “The Theory and Practice of Transcription.” New Ways of Looking at Old Texts: Papers of the Renaissance English Text Society, 1985-1991. Edited by W. Speed Hill. Binghamton: Renaissance English Text Society, 1993. 91-125.

In this article, Hill comments on the problems of textual transcription with reference to three terms: evidence, medium, and audience. In his section on “evidence,” Hill describes the duty of the traditional scholarly editor as that of discriminating between data of “textual significance,” or “textual information,” and irrelevant textual non-information. The editor’s responsibility, in other words, is “to suppress certain kinds of data as not textually relevant – as interfering with or obscuring the transparency of the text to a reader” (28). The problem, therefore, of transcription with relation to evidence is how to decide which details are or are not “textual.” By contrast, the problem of transcription with relation to medium is not only one of deciding which details to transcribe, but of the “irremediable changes that take place in [a text’s] transcription” from one material medium to another (i.e. how to best transcribe details and conventions of one textual medium to another with an entirely different set of conventions and parameters?). Pricing is often a factor in this transcription problem, notes Hill, as certain expensive media carry with them high expectations of “accuracy, consistency, and typographic polish” (29). Finally, in the “audience” section, Hill asks the all-important question: “for whom, then, are such data [records of the transcriber’s editorial decisions and research] intended?” The answer, he claims, seems not to be the readers of the critical text, so much as the collaborative teams behind such texts – publishers, peer-review panels, and grant-making agencies. It is for this reason that Hill later asserts “audience” as currently the most problematic of his three original terms. The essay concludes with Hill reoffering “these three benchmarks” to his readers, leaving the decision of “what to record, what to suppress, and in what form to transmit it” open to future discussion.

4. Manovich, Lev. The Language of New Media. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001.

Manovich attempts in this book to contribute to the developing field of new media studies by describing the logic behind “the language of new media,” or the conventions that current designers use to structure new media objects. Specifically, Manovich moves to analyze this language “by placing it within the history of modern visual and media cultures,” and thus identifying “the ways in which new media relies on older cultural forms and languages, and … the ways in which it breaks with them” (8). His text later recognizes three main cultural traditions that have shaped the interfaces of new media objects: the traditions of print, cinema, and human-computer interface (10). However, while the importance of all these traditions are duly noted, Manovich is particularly interested the deep parallels the history of cinema – the medium which he identifies as “key cultural form of the twentieth century” (9) - and that of new media. This extended comparison eventually leads him into a discussion of the difference between the “narrative” form of cultural expression – the form that, according to him, both the novel and cinema privilege – and the “database” form of expression, which the computer age introduces and new media seems to favor. By claiming that the materiality of computer culture reverses the traditional relationship between these two opposing impulses, giving the database paradigm the advantage, Manovich sets up modern media as “the new battlefield for the competition between database and narrative” (234). This conclusion is further supported by Manovich’s earlier five-point definition of new media itself, which he suggests can be distinguished from “old media” by its unique tendency toward numerical representation, modularity, automation, variability, and transcoding.

5. McGann, Jerome. “The Rationale of Hypertext.” Electronic Text: Investigations in Method and Theory. Edited by Kathryn Sutherland. New York: Oxford University Press, 1997. 19-45.

In a conscious revision of W. W. Greg’s 1951 essay “The Rationale of Copy-Text,” McGann focuses on the physical character of literary works, eventually proposing that literary scholars recognize the growing pedagogical/theoretical importance of the electronic medium. McGann begins his “Rationale” by examining the limits of the printed critical edition. For example, he notes how this traditional critical edition problematically  “deploys a book form to study another book form” (21); that is to say, “the logical structures of the ‘critical edition’ function at the same level as the material being analyzed” (21).  However, as McGann notes, this problem disappears when a book is “translated” into an electronic medium. Indeed, the digital environment opens up the edition to several new “hyper-“ possibilities hitherto impossible to explore. These possibilities include simultaneity, or non-sequential forms of knowledge; hypermedia, or the inclusion of audial and/or visual documents into a textual system; and hypertext, or the ability create, define, and modify the relationships between the elements of a text-encoded language. McGann goes on to stress the present “need” for the creation of hypermedia editions, using numerous examples of complex physical texts to drive home his point. He concludes by reiterating that scholars should exploit hypermedia environments (i.e. non-hierarchical digital archives), as scholarly editions have been “forced into … abstractions [by the] physical constraints of a traditional book format” (36).