Abstract
Digital literary productions often combine both the ephemeral dimensions of their screen-readable manifestation and the perennial dimension of their program. Their status thus lies between a totally ephemeral pole of performance and a totally perennial pole of reproducible publication. This “two-sided” status questions our conception of the work. The article begins with a pragmatic analysis of the forms of variability and transience present in print and digital literatures. It then examines how the most common conception of the work deals with these properties by proposing a formulation of this dominant viewpoint in the form of a “front-end dispositive.” Recognizing a blind spot in thinking, he examines how these properties are addressed in models that are better suited to the digital, notably the procedural model. It concludes by proposing the concept of “reading machine,” a technological system that aims to give access to the semiotic dimensions that develop outside screen reading, without suppressing the ephemeral.
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Notes
In computing, a source program is the form of the program the programmer creates: it is readable by a human being but not executable by the machine. For example, a JavaScript file.
Recall that Levy (1998) defines the potential as "that which is known but which only lacks existence" and the virtual as "that which requires a creative force to actualize itself.”
The term text is to be understood here in its broadest semiotic form of "sign tissues" and not in its strictly linguistic sense.
The most complete version can be found in Bootz (2016).
In fact Spinoza reread by Deleuze (2001).
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Bootz, P. The ephemerae of digital literature. Neohelicon 48, 7–22 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11059-021-00583-0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11059-021-00583-0