Consciousness, Literature and the Arts
Archive
Volume 5 Number 1, April 2004
_______________________________________________________________
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.