Consciousness, Literature and the Arts

Archive

Volume 5 Number 1, April 2004

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A New Alphabet:  Iconographic Language & Textual Embodiment
by Jeanie S. Dean
<http://pw.english.uwm.edu/~jdean/index.html>.  2000

Reviewed by

Dene Grigar

Jeanie Dean’s “e-book”, A New Alphabet:  Iconographic Language and Textual Embodiment, looks at the notion of embodiment as it plays out in “ideas,” “text as language and print matter,” and “theories about embodiment, using the body as the representational surface in pictures for characters in an alphabet book” (“Introduction”). 

To be honest, the A New Alphabet is not technically an “e-book,” for that term now applies to texts that emulate conventions of print texts and run on particular software programs produced by companies like Adobe, Microsoft, and Palm.  According to The Globe and Mail, over 20,000 such e-books are available online, and over a million will be sold in 2003.  It is a growing business struggling to establish a traditional market delivery system in the not-so-traditional setting of the web.  Self-published works written in HTML code, like Dean’s work, is better described as a hybrid form of a webtext––that is, a genre of electronic work that captures the spirit of the print-based scholarly essay but which makes good use of the web’s attributes. The print aspect of Dean’s hybridity can be seen in the way A New Alphabet parallels a book’s “format,” replete with a linear representation of a “title page,” “introduction,” frontispiece,” table of contents,” and “epilogue;”  the webtext aspect of her hybridity, in the intertextual hyperlinks used for its navigation and in its content.  That said, calling Dean’s work a hybrid webtext instead of an e-book should be viewed as its strength since as a webtext, it makes better use of the components of the electronic medium than an e-book generally does. 

A New Alphabet is divided into two help “pages,” a term that in webtext terminology would actually be referred to as “nodes”; three introductory conventional book components that include a title page, introduction, and front piece; thirty-three “letter icon pages”; three source pages that include a “reprise,” a works cited page, and list of figures; and an epilogue.  The letter icon pages are categorized under letters of the alphabet rather than numbers, which cleverly serves to embody the work’s theme.  Further, each letter icon page is divided into two sections:  an image section that appears on the right-hand side of the page and a “commentary” section that appears in the “scrolling frame” on the left.  The image section reflects what occurs in cultural practice, and the commentary focuses on the theory(ies) underpinning that practice.  As Dean writes:  “This book proposes that theory usually follows practice, and argues for embodied experience (practice) as the motivating source informing new cultural theory and critique” (“A Avant”).  This claim is borne out in the letter icon page, entitled, “C2 Cyborg.”  Here, the reader would find images of Auguste Rodin’s Striding Man and Alberto Giacometti’s Walking Man, overlaid with segments of Donna Haraway’s “The Cyborg Manifesto.”  The commentary section discusses the implications of such theory in culture.  It is a brilliant way to visualize argumentation and the essay genre, and for this reason, readers will appreciate Dean’s work. 

Dean provokes with what she says inscriptively as much as with what she does graphically.  One example occurs when she suggests in “C2 Cyborg” that the loss of the book’s body (i.e. the digitalization of text) happened just when  “human body [was] reconstituted” (“Cyborg”)––an interesting notion when one considers that many theorists, like Sven Bikerts, have argued that the death of print-based books will result in the demise of Western civilization.  So, arguing that the death of books has actually brought about a rebirth in anything much less an emphasis of the body challenges conventional wisdom.  Additionally, her argument in “G” that Charles Sanders Peirce “anticipates certain features of embodiment theory” may inspire a few scholars to revisit semiotics. 

Though the work itself is highly engaging to read and readily accessible to readers, it misses a few opportunities.  In many ways A New Alphabet offers the reverse of N. Katherine Hayles’ Writing Machines.  In that work Hayles produced a print text that simulated aspects of electronic media as a way to think about assumptions we make about texts. On the other hand, Dean produces an electronic text that simulates aspects of print-based media as a way to think about embodiment.  Yet she does not go far enough to question the way embodiment affects experimental electronic texts such as hers.  For example, how do images come to be embodied in the new media of the computer?  Are they different for the ephemeral world of the web than they are for the more static environment of mass-produced CD-ROMs?  What happens to the embodied electronic text when an author takes the reader away from it in an intertextual hyperlink as Dean frequently does?  How truly static are the images of electronic text in comparison to print-based texts?  When Dean writes in “P2 Printing” that “the printer embodies the text on the page,” we may ask what happens to the artist in this act of embodiment?  What happens when there is no printer, as in with an electronic text?  What is the role of the programmer?  The computer?  The reader?

The work would also benefit from a good editor, a luxury that many self-published texts many times cannot afford.  For example, Lev Manovich’s academic title is rendered “New Nedia Research: Associate Professor . . .”  (“A”).  In some cases, the images sit on top of text, making it impossible for readers to see the text as happened in “C1” when this reviewer visited the page.  One page, “V,” never loaded.  As in many electronic works with multiple nodes, authors are referred to in their full names throughout, which makes the work seem repetitive.  This happens frequently with Johanna Drucker’s and Lev Manovich’s names.  The “Links Page” presents links with no obvious order.  Readers may not miss the lack of an alphabetical listing, but they will be confused when they cannot make sense of the material found on that page for the lack of any organization.  Also, not all citations are found in the “Works Cited” page, making it impossible for scholars to track down a needed reference.  Peirce does not show up in it, for example, even though several references are made to him.  The “U” page contains the same commentary as the “T” page.  These are little problems that do not hinder an enjoyment of the work at large, but speak to the difficulty those writing electronic texts have with publishing a final product that meets the assumptions and expectations set by print-based publishing.

In sum, scholars involved in the arts, literature, and new media will find much to value from Jeanie Dean’s A New Alphabet.  Innovative and provocative, the work makes good on its promise to underscore “how visual images and new modes of reading become encoded characters in a new alphabet of collective reference, as an effect of post modernism and digital culture. Experimental formats in page design and assemblage of image and text in this critical work, demonstrate new iconographic modes of reading and writing” (“Epilogue”).  Readers interested in this form of writing would enjoy looking at webtexts offered elsewhere as well, such as those published by Kairos:  A Journal of Rhetoric, Technology, and Pedagogy (http://english.ttu.edu/kairos/).  It is a form of writing that holds much promise for the future of electronic writing and may be preferable to e-books for those scholars of new media looking to produce electronic texts.