Synopses & Reviews
Jerome McGann has been at the forefront of the digital revolution in the humanities. His pioneering critical projects on the World Wide Web have redefined traditional notions about interpreting literature. In this trailblazing book, McGann explores the profound implications digital media have for the core critical tasks of the humanities.Drawing on his work as editor of the acclaimed hypertext project
The Rossetti Archive, he sets the foundation for a new critical practice for the digital age. Digital media, he demonstrates, can do much more than organize access to great works of literature and art. Beyond their acknowledged editorial and archival capabilities, digital media are also critical tools of unprecedented power. In McGanns practical vision, digital tools give scholars a flexible, dynamic means for interpreting expressive works—especially those that combine text and image.
Radiant Textuality demonstrates eloquently how new technologies can deepen our understanding of complex, multi-layered works of the human imagination in ways never before thought possible.
Review
"Jerome McGann offers a Guide to the Perplexed, providing solid, illuminating, and playful studies of the implications of digitalization for the humanities--scholarship, teaching, criticism, and literary and cultural studies."--Charles Bernstein, Director, Poetics Program, SUNY-Buffalo
"Playful yet scholarly, erudite yet engaging, I recommend this to all who wish to know where literature is going in the new millennium."--Marilyn Deegan, University of Oxford
Synopsis
This book describes and explains the fundamental changes that are now taking place in the most traditional areas of humanities theory and method, scholarship and education. The changes flow from the re-examination of the very foundations of the humanities - its theories of textuality and communication - that are being forced by developments in information technology. A threshold was crossed during the last decade of the twentieth century with the emergence of the World Wide Web, which has (1) globalized access to computerized resources and information, and (2) made interface and computer graphics paramount concerns for work in digital culture. While these changes are well known, their consequences are not well understood, despite so much discussion by digital enthusiasts and digital doomsters alike. In reconsidering these matters, Radiant Textuality introduces some remarkable new proposals for integrating computerized tools into the central interpretative and critical activities of traditional humanities disciplines, and of literary studies in particular.
About the Author
Jerome McGann is the John Stewart Bryan University Professor, University of Virginia, and a founding fellow of UVA's Institute for Advanced. He is a leading scholar in fields ranging from 18th century to contemporary literature to the theory of textuality.
Table of Contents
Beginning Again: Humanities and Digital Culture, 1993-2000 *
Part I: Hideous Progeny, Rough Beasts: 1993-1995 * The Alice Fallacy * The Rationale of HyperText * Editing as a Theoretical Pursuit * Appendix to Part I Chapter 3 *
Part II: Imagining What You Don’t Know: 1995-1999 * Deformance and Interpretation (with Lisa Samuels) * Rethinking Textuality
* Part III: Quantum Poetics: 1999-2000 * Visible and Invisible Books in N-Dimensional Space * Appendix to Part III Chapter 1: “What Is Text?” * Dialogue and Interpretation at the Interface of Man and Machine * Beginning Again and Again: The Ivanhoe Game Beginning Again: Humanities and Digital Culture, 1993-2000 *
Part I: Hideous Progeny, Rough Beasts: 1993-1995 * The Alice Fallacy * The Rationale of HyperText * Editing as a Theoretical Pursuit * Appendix to Part I Chapter 3 *
Part II: Imagining What You Don’t Know: 1995-1999 * Deformance and Interpretation (with Lisa Samuels) * Rethinking Textuality * Part III: Quantum Poetics: 1999-2000 * Visible and Invisible Books in N-Dimensional Space * Appendix to Part III Chapter 1: “What Is Text?” * Dialogue and Interpretation at the Interface of Man and Machine * Beginning Again and Again: The Ivanhoe Game