Jul 16, 2025
The case of Charles Dexter Ward
Case of Charles Dexter Ward: Lovecraftโs manuscript digitized
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The case of Charles Dexter Ward
Case of Charles Dexter Ward: Lovecraftโs manuscript digitized
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The Ontology of Text
The ontology of text refers to the study of the nature, structure, and being of text, focusing on what text is at its most fundamental level. This exploration can span several philosophical and theoretical perspectives, often addressing questions about the existence, identity, and categorization of text as an entity. Hereโs a breakdown of key aspects:
1. Text as an Ontological Entity:
Material vs. Abstract: Text can be considered both as a material object (e.g., a book or a written document) and as an abstract entity (e.g., the content or meaning conveyed by the text). The ontology of text thus involves understanding how these two aspects coexist and relate to each other.
Text as a Work vs. Text as a Document: The distinction between a text as a work (the conceptual or intellectual creation) and as a document (the physical or digital manifestation) is crucial in ontology. For instance, different editions of a book may be considered different documents but the same work.
2. Identity and Persistence:
Sameness and Variation: The ontology of text deals with the question of what makes a text the same across different instances or versions. What remains consistent between different editions or translations of a text? How much can a text change before it is considered a different text?
Temporal Aspects: How does the identity of a text persist over time? This includes considerations of how historical context, authorial intent, and reader interpretation might affect the identity of a text.
3. Structure of Text:
Hierarchical vs. Network Structures: Text can be seen as having a hierarchical structure (e.g., chapters, paragraphs, sentences) or a network-like structure (e.g., hypertext or intertextuality). The ontology of text examines how these structures are constituted and how they affect the nature of text.
Units of Text: What are the basic units of text? Words, sentences, paragraphs, or perhaps even smaller or larger units? The ontological inquiry involves defining and categorizing these units.
4. Function and Intent:
Authorial Intent: The role of the author's intention in the ontology of text is a major consideration. Is the meaning of a text tied to what the author intended, or does it exist independently?
Reader Interpretation: The ontology of text also considers the role of the reader or audience in constituting the text. Is the meaning of a text something inherent, or is it something that comes into being through interpretation?
5. Intertextuality and Contextuality:
Intertextual Relations: Texts often reference or build upon other texts. The ontology of text considers how texts are related to one another and how these relationships affect their existence and identity.
Contextual Dependency: The meaning and existence of a text can be dependent on its context, including cultural, historical, and situational factors. The ontology of text examines how context shapes what a text is.
6. Digital and Hypertext Ontology:
Digital Texts: The advent of digital texts introduces new ontological questions. How do digital formats affect the nature of text? How does hypertext, with its non-linear structure, change our understanding of text?
Versioning and Fluidity: Digital texts can be easily modified, leading to questions about the stability and identity of texts in a digital environment. What does it mean for a text to have a version, and how does this affect its ontology?
7. Philosophical Perspectives:
Structuralism and Post-Structuralism: These schools of thought provide frameworks for understanding the ontology of text, focusing on the underlying structures of language (structuralism) and the fluidity and instability of meaning (post-structuralism).
Phenomenology: This approach might consider the experience of the text, focusing on how it appears to consciousness and the role of the reader in bringing the text to life.
The ontology of text is a rich and complex field that intersects with many areas of philosophy, literary theory, linguistics, and digital humanities. It seeks to answer fundamental questions about what text is, how it exists, how it maintains identity, and how it relates to both its material form and its interpretation by readers.
An ancient metaphor: thought is a thread, and the raconteur is a spinner of yarns โ but the true storyteller, the poet, is a weaver. The scribes made this old and audible abstraction into a new and visible fact... a textus, which means cloth.
Robert Bringhurst, The Elements of Typographic Style
[E]very imagined authenticity presupposes, and is produced by a present circumstance of felt inauthenticity. But Williams's treatment suggests that such projections need not be consistently located in the past; or, what amounts to the same thing, that the 'genuine' elements of cultural life need not be repetitiously encoded as fragile, threatened or transient. This sense of pervasive social fragmentation, of a constant disruption of 'natural' relations, is characteristic of a subjectivity Williams loosely connects with city life and with romanticism. The self, cut loose from viable collective ties, is an identity in search of wholeness, having internalized loss and embarked on an endless search for authenticity. Wholeness by definition becomes a thing of the past (rural, primitive, childlike) accessible only as a fiction, grasped from a stance of incomplete involvement...And this is approximately the temporal distance that many conventional ethnographies assume when they describe a passing reality, 'traditional' life, in the present tense.
Clifford, James.ย โOn Ethnographic Allegory.โ Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography. Clifford, James and George E. Marcus, eds. (1986) p. 114.
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Proof that I'm actually a 50yo woman: I just told my daughters "don't sit so close to the ipad, your eyes will go square"
If we cannot locate aesthetic value of texts in themselves (...) yet do not want to abolish questions of value altogether, it needs to be located elsewhere. The author, pronounced dead in post-structuralism, and in any case conspicuously absent in most mass-mediated forms of textuality, has proven an unsuitable basis for textual interpretation and evaluation. However, if we can distinguish texts and meaning creation as radically as Jenkinsโs (1992) distinction between exceptional texts and exceptional readings suggests, the reader appears to be a no-better indicator of the aesthetic value of texts, since exceptional readings would thus appear to be based upon form of audience activity quite independent of texts themselves. If we cannot locate aesthetic value in the author, text, or reader alone, it is in the process of interaction between these that aesthetic value is manifested.
Sandvoss, C. (2007). The death of the reader: literary theory and the study of texts in popular culture. In Gray, J. A., Sandvoss, C., & Harrington, C. L. (Eds.). Fandom: Identities and communities in a mediated world. NYU Press. In some ways this is a meta-paper about some big questions that the Cultural Studies turn to the active audience - and to fans specifically - raises. The key question Sandvoss is grappling with is, how do we judge the aesthetic value of a text? How do we know if it's any good? He raises several challenges to such aesthetic judgements that Cultural Studies has come up against. One is the vastly expanded definition of "text": Cultural Studies doesn't just look at novels and poems, which is what we might ordinarily imagine as texts. It investigates TV shows, songs, games, ads and even, on occasion, crisp packets. Another challenge is the "death of the author" - the idea that what the author intended doesn't actually matter hugely when it comes to what a reader or an audience gets out of a text. Not only that, but the author becomes an incredibly nebulous concept when we start thinking about texts like video games or TV shows. So authorial intent doesn't really help us in judging the aesthetic value of a text. Neither, says Sandvoss, does the text itself, as Cultural Studies has become increasingly sceptical of the idea that the text has any intrinsic meaning: rather meaning is made by the audience. (Have a look at some of our previous posts for some ideas on how this is done in fanfiction.) So aesthetic value isn't a feature of the author, the text, or the reader on their own. It must therefore lie in the interaction between the three. Sandvoss goes on to argue that aesthetic value can be measured in the gap or distance between reader and text. How much of a challenge is the text to the reader's preconcieved notions about the world? How much does it make the reader think, feel, re-evaluate what they thought they knew? That's where Sandvoss ultimately pins aesthetic value. What do you think?
โThere is nothing outside of the textโ
Fromย The Encyclopedia of Literary and Cultural Theory
In Of Grammatology, Derrida claims that โIl nโy a pas de hors-texte.โ Spivak translates this as โThere is nothing outside of the text.โ This famous statement has been much misunderstood as meaning either that there is nothing outside of language, or that politics, history, and social context are irrelevant in textual exegesis. Rather, Derrida emphasizes the manner in which differance affects all experience, including politics and history, and that, through deconstructive reading, all texts are revealed to be knit into their contexts in a field-dependent fashion. โTextโ is a metaphor, like writing, for the fact that all things are differentially mediated; all things exist in time and space and therefore are shaped by non-presence as much as presence. โTextโ is the name for the fact that all things are relational and differential.