How have reading and writing changed in the digital era?

Digital Humanities is not a unified field but an array of convergent practices that explore

will the Digital Humanities become a separate field whose interests are increasingly remote from the Traditional Humanities,

allow us to talk about different kinds of initiatives and activities in the intersection between the humanities and information technology or the digital.

fragmented body

psychological concepts hardly seem less appropriate for shedding light on these matters than ridiculous attempts to reduce them to the supposedly supreme law of adaptation.

The child, at an age when he is for a time, however short, outdone by the chimpanzee in instrumental intelligence, can nevertheless already recognize as such his own image in a mirror.

. It has everything to do with the structures of alienation, splitting, and identification which together produce a self and an other, a subject and an object, an unconscious and a conscious, an interiority and an exteriority.

he message about Christmas was clear: if you don’t put in the effort, you won’t be rewarded with family togetherness.

Social semioticians are interested in the way socially accepted meanings change as society evolves. For this project, the most relevant social change over the last 20 years in both countries is that most women in both countries are now in full time or part time work.

hird, much qualitative research with consumers has been about the emotional attachments that consumers have to brands

Christmas or Thanksgiving, and for researchers who want to understand the importance of symbolism in the lives of consumers.

Christmas is imbued with deep personal and cultural meanings for consumers. There is nothing quite like it for combining family dynamics, nostalgia and financial stress, to name just three of the potential tensions involved here.

I shall call Ideological State Apparatuses a certain number of realities which present themselves to the immediate observer in the form of distinct and specialized institutions. I propose an empirical list of these which will obviously have to be examined in detail, tested, corrected and re-organized. With all the reservations implied by this requirement, we can for the moment regard the following institutions as Ideological State Apparatuses (the order in which I have listed them has no particular significance):

Let me first clarify one important point: the State (and its existence in its apparatus) has no meaning except as a function of State power. The whole of the political class struggle revolves around the State. By which I mean around the possession, i.e. the seizure and conservation of State power by a certain class or by an alliance between classes or class fractions. This first clarification obliges me to distinguish between State power (conservation of State power or seizure of State power), the objective of the political class struggle on the one hand, and the State Apparatus on the other.

educating the children in whom the proletarian reproduces himself (in n models where n = 0, 1, 2, etc....) as labour power. Remember that this quantity of value (wages) necessary for the reproduction of labour power is determined not by the needs of a ‘biological’ Guaranteed Minimum Wage (Salaire Minimum Interprofessionnel Garanti) alone, but by the needs of a historical minimum (Marx noted that English workers need beer while French proletarians need wine) – i.e. a historically variable minimum.

that no production is possible which does not allow for the reproduction of the material conditions of production: the reproduction of the means of production.

To simplify my exposition, and assuming that every social formation arises from a dominant mode of production, I can say that the process of production sets to work the existing productive forces in and under definite relations of production.

Or, since every rule for a poet is but another side of a judgment by a critic, and since the past is the realm of the scholar and critic, and the future and present that of the poet and the critical leaders of taste, we may say that the problems arising in literary scholarship from the intentional fallacy are matched by others which arise in the world of progressive experiment.

The evaluation of the work of art remains public; the work is measured against something outside the author.

The meaning of a poem may certainly be a personal one, in the sense that a poem expresses a personality or state of soul rather than a physical object like an apple

Poetry succeeds because all or most of what is said or implied is relevant; what is irrevelant has been excluded, like lumps from pudding and "bugs" from machinery.

number of recent discussions,

Successively, and in a regulated fashion, the center receives different forms or names

The concept of centered structure is in fact the concept of a freeplay based on a fundamental ground, a freeplay which is constituted upon a fundamental immobility and a reassuring certitude, which is itself beyond the reach of the freeplay

Thus it has always been thought that the center, which is by definition unique, constituted that very thing within a structure which governs the structure, while escaping structurality. This is why classical thought concerning structure could say that the center is, paradoxically, within the structure and outside it

Nevertheless, up until the event which I wish to mark out and define, structure-or rather the structurality of structure-although it has always been involved, has always been neutralized or reduced, and this by a process of giving it a center or referring it to a point of presence, a fixed origin. The function of this center was not only to orient, balance, and organize the structure-one cannot in fact conceive of an unorganized structure-but above all to make sure that the organizing principle of the structure would limit what we might call the freeplay of the structure

n this sense, this event will have the exterior form of a rupture and a redoubling.

First of all, we can say that today's writing has freed itself from the theme of expression. Referring only to itself; but without being restricted to the confines of its interiority, writing is identified with its own unfolded exteriority. This means that it is an interplay of signs arranged less according to its signified content than according to the very nature of the signifier. Writing unfolds like a game [jeu] that invariably goes beyond its own rules and transgresses its limits. In writing, the point is not to manifest or exalt the act of writing, nor is it to pin a subject within language; it is, rather, a question of creating a space into which the writing subject constantly disappears.

For the moment, however, I want to deal solely with the relationship between text and author and with the manner in which the text points to this figure that, at least in appearance; is outside it and antecedes it.

individualized in a culture like ours, what status he has been given,

what creates general phenomena is the collaboration of all the individuals involved.

) By distinguishing thus between the language and the faculty of language, we see that the language is what we may call a 'product': it is a 'social product'; we have set it apart from the operation of the vocal apparatus, which is a permanent action. You can conjure up a very precise idea of this product - and thus set the language, so to speak, materially in front of you - by focussing on what is potentially in the brains of a set of individuals (belonging to one and the same community) even when they are asleep;

What is general in language will not be what we are looking for; that is, the object immediately given. But nor must we focus on what is only part of it.

Most interesting of all, from a psychological point of view, are the errors language produces. Everyone, left to his own devices, forms an idea about what goes on in language which is very far from the truth.

In attempting to trace the history of a language, one will very soon find oneself obliged to trace the history of a language family.

Necessarily, it should be pointed out, in order to have documentation for all periods, as far as possible, linguistics will constantly have to deal with the written language, and will often have to rely on the insights of philology in order to take its bearings among these written texts; but it will always distinguish between the written text and what lies underneath; treating the former as being only the envelope or external mode of presentation of its true object, which is solely the spoken language.

Thus it came about that the influence of Romance studies was very salutary. One of the great defects, from a scholarly point of view, which is common to philology and the comparative phase is a servile attachment to the letter, to the written language, or a failure to draw a clear distinction between what might pertain to the real spoken language and what to its graphic sign. Hence, it comes about that the literary point of view is more or less confused with the linguistic point of view, and furthermore, more concretely, the written word is confused with the spoken word;

, to follow the language from century to century through documents, and so inspect closely what was happening.

what exactly these connections showed,

phase of discovering that languages could be compared with one another;

Henceforth, language studies were no longer directed merely towards correcting grammar

All traditional grammar is normative grammar, that is, dominated by a preoccupation with laying down rules, and distinguishing between a certain allegedly 'correct' language and another, allegedly 'incorrect'; which straight away precludes any broader view of the language phenomenon as a whole.

Contrary to the popular impression, to say in print what she thinks is the last thing the woman-novelist or journalist is so rash as to attempt. There even more than elsewhere (unless she is reckless) she must wear the aspect that shall have the best chance of pleasing her brothers. Her publishers are not women.[21]

like Hester Prynne in The Scarlet Letter.

but only what men have thought women should be.

To shake loose from one’s wife; to discard that drooping rag of a woman, with her mute complaints and maddening passivity; to escape not by a slinking abandonment but through the public sale of her body to a stranger, as horses are sold at a fair; and thus to wrest, through sheer amoral wilfulness, a second chance out of life - it is with this stroke, so insidiously attractive to male fantasy, that The Mayor of Casterbridge begins. [8]   It is obvious that a woman, unless she has been indoctrinated into being very deeply identified indeed with male culture, will have a different experience of this scene

In a dialogue between these two positions, Carolyn Heilbrun, the writer, and Catharine Stimpson, editor of the journal Signs: Women in Culture and Society, compare the feminist critique to the Old Testament, “looking for the sins and errors of the past,” and gynocritics to the New Testament, seeking “the grace of imagination.”

images and stereotypes of women in literature

images and stereotypes of women in literature

responses may also be rationalizations of the psychic barriers to women’s participation in theoretical discourse. Traditionally women have been cast in the supporting rather than the starring roles of literary scholarship.

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