Summary
Laura Mandell is an English professor at Miami University of Ohio and editor of Poetess Archive, a site for scholarly entries on poetry written by women in the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries (http://www.users.muohio.edu/mandellc/). As part of an ongoing project to investigate how technology influences modern readings of eighteenth century fiction and poetry, Mandell authored “What Is the Matter? Or, What Literary Theory Neither Hears nor Sees” (2007). Here, she draws on linguistic, psychoanalytic, and computative analyses to examine two poems by William Wordsworth, arguing through her analysis that technological operations of new media texts influence our understanding of both modern and historical textual forms for making meaning.
The analysis she presents as support of her argument is multifaceted. Foremost, Mandell examines the ways Wordsworth’s poems, “A Slumber Did My Spirit Seal” and “Surprized by Joy—Impatient as the Wind,” might work to generate an acoustic effect for readers. The author relies on the linguistic theories of Paul Saegner (1997) which posit that written words (i.e., graphical representations of speech as visual images and physical material) are often times understood and interpreted instantly and silently by readers as images rather than acoustic words fully sounded out. Based on Saegner’s breakdown, Mandell acknowledges a dilemma, then, for literary theory, which views the power of poetry as coming out of its ability to evoke emotion from readers through constructions of sound. Since Mandell suggests modern readers are not likely to read these poems in the original handwriting of the author, nor hear these poems recited as intended by the author, nor even sound out these poems (either out loud or silently), she questions how Wordsworth’s poems might still create an acoustic quality for readers.
In response to this question, Mandell utilizes computational coding to explore the ways Wordsworth’s poems accomplish acoustic effects through words and letters acting as images, not as phonetic streams of sound. She claims that “Wordsworth’s poetry can move the reader from seeing visual to hearing acoustic images by exploiting the very visuality of the printed letter” (767). In other words, she illustrates from her coding that typographic letters and words act as images provoking acoustic connotations: she shows how repeated sounds and images of negation (“no/know/not/neither/nor”) signify the narrator’s denial in “A Slumber” and repeated open mouth sounds (“au,” “ooo,” “or”) and unusually high occurrences of the letter ‘O’ signify the moans of the narrator’s pain and mourning in “Surprized by Joy.” Thus, even if readers do not sound out the words from Wordsworth’s poems, emotional responses may still be elicited from readers through the acoustic connotations associated with the actual image of certain letters.
Mandell’s argument relies heavily on theoretical concepts concerning technology and new media, which she discusses early on within the article. She views texts as being models for making meaning since we can analyze them for how meaning is constructed: “Manuscripts,” for example, “do not simply communicate ideas; they represent their own process of meaning making in a specific material form” (756). Mandell asserts that while we have previously viewed texts and writing as being representations of meaning transmitted through the production of physical materials, there is an obvious lack of physical material of new media texts since textual input may not lead to materialization if the text is never printed or published. For Mandell, this ‘immateriality’ of digital texts “disrupts our view that textual materiality and physicality are identical,” leading us to re-envision broader definitions of the term (757). Mandell claims that texts convey information, create meaning, and ultimately influence readers emotionally and cognitively through their medium (e.g., utilized graphics and utensils for production) and their interface (e.g., the material or ‘immaterial’ design and layout). Content, medium, and interface cannot, therefore, be separated, and so Mandell seeks to gain insight on the various meanings that readers arrive to depending on the complex interactions between texts’ content, mediums, and interfaces—analysis which she suggests literary theory has not thoroughly considered.
Mandell also argues more broadly that sublimation can be historically located through computational coding and these practices will impact current approaches to literary theory. Through her analysis of eighteenth century poetry, Mandell wishes to show how the invent of typography—which she sees as enacting historical and psychic sublimation—is analogous to how current uses of digital texts are dramatically altering the ways we view and understand how texts make meaning. To illustrate this point, she references Gunther Kress’ theories on modern literacy practices from his book Literacy in the New Media Age (2003), and then aligns her own analysis to his notions about images and literacy:
About our current technological moment, Gunther Kress has said that “the dominance of the mode of image and the medium of the screen will produce deep changes in the forms and functions of writing. This in turn will have profound effects on human, cognitive / affective, cultural and bodily engagement with the world, and on the forms and shapes of knowledge.” The same is true of the moment of typographical revolution around 1800: it is a moment when the mode of word image in the medium of the printed codex ascends to dominance. That mode’s self-effacement as a representational strategy hides from us the knowledge that print protocols are programming codes. (p. 767)
According to Mandell, then, Wordsworth’s poems are examples of the ways technology has shaped how readers make meaning out of texts: typography worked to shape the way readers read for images—not sounds—and the ways lexical images of the poem have acoustic connotations. With her alignment to Kress’ theories, Mandell implies that literary theory will have similar “profound effects” if it is recognized that technologies such as typography, new media, and computational coding shape how we make meanings of both modern digital texts as well as historical material texts. It is for grander purposes of arguing that literary research and scholarship will be influenced by the ways that new media shapes reality and our perspectives of physical, materialized texts that Mandell uses computational coding of typographical texts. Her analysis of Wordsworth aims to illustrate how technology of the past and present influences the ways meaning and knowledge are constructed and reconstructed.
Works Cited
Kress, Gunther. (2003). Literacy in the New Media Age. New York: Routledge.
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