Thursday March 21 6pm - Joanna Gavins speaking about Text World Theory

From 6 pm tonight Joanna Gavins, Senior Lecturer in the School of English, Sheffield University, will talk about her work with Text World Theory.

Text World Theory is a cognitive-linguistic model of human discourse processing.  Its theoretical origins can be traced to a number of diverse academic disciplines, including cognitive psychology, possible worlds theory, cognitive linguistics and literary theory. 

The basic premise of Text World Theory is that human beings process and understand all discourse by constructing mental representations of it in their minds.  Text World Theory aims to provide the analytical tools necessary for the systematic examination and discussion of these mental representations, or text-worlds. 

The text-world approach to discourse was originally developed by Professor Paul Werth during the 1980s and 90s.  Werth provided a detailed account of the fundamental workings of the text-world framework in his monograph Text Worlds: Representing Conceptual Space in Discourse, which was published posthumously in 1999. 

Werth claimed to have devised a methodological framework capable of accounting for the cognitive processes behind the production and interpretation of all forms of human communication; from telephone conversation to dramatic performance, from church sermons to newspaper reports. These ambitious objectives, coupled with Werth’s infectious enthusiasm and inspiring prose, have continued to generate great interest in Text World Theory beyond their author’s lifetime. 

In recent years, Text World Theory has been tested, enhanced and expanded by a growing number of text-world researchers and students. Their work and that of Paul Werth is collected together in the Text World Theory Special Collection at the University of Sheffield.  http://www.textworldtheory.net/ 

voice-body, body-writing

Bob Cobbing, Worm (1966)

I love the images in your last post - both the image from Derek Beaulieu's Flatland, and the images of physically tracing a text in order to read it (and therefore make the text "real").

Immediately, I had a number of half-formed thoughts, mostly connected with the work of Bob Cobbing: -

1. Bob Cobbing - "communication is primarily a muscular activity"

Music for Dancing:
COMMUNICATION is primarily a muscular activity It is potentially stronger than everyday speech, richer than those monotonous seeming printed words on the page.... Say 'soma haoma'. Dull. Say it dwelling on the quality of the sounds. Better. Let it say itself through you. Let it sing itself through you. The vowels have their pitch, the phrase has potential rhythms. You do it with the whole of you, muscular movement, voice, lungs, limbs. Poetry is a physical thing. The body is liberated. Bodies join in song and movement. A ritual ensues. 1972

2. Cobbing's Alphabet of Fishes and ABC in Sound (1965) are somehow the essential accompaniment to Teige's Abeceda.

I think you saw, Jenny Cobbing performing from the ABC in Sound at Flat-time House, but to my mind it seems to do with the body materially what Teige's alphabet alludes to visually - it is a physical stretching and shaping of the mouth to produce a voice through the material of the body.

3. Somewhere I read the poet Peter Finch write that: “I guess the most important thing that Bob taught me was that the voice could learn from the machine.”

I like this sense of both the material and machine-like nature of text here. While most of my short comments above allude to voice (as distinct from text), I think that the point is for Cobbing these weren't separate so that the visually expressive form of a letter or word, was also produced through the body. And of course, as this final short quotation from Peter Finch suggests - when Cobbing worked with the duplicator and then photocopier these machines became a kind of body for performance also (the performance-production of text-voice with his own body in collaboration).

Replies to Bridget 2 - Versus intertexti and change ringing

The score / diagram for the change ringing is really interesting.  There are the rows of numbers where the order of the numbers changes and then the coloured lines too which trace the pattern of the numbers.  It seems this duplication must be to emphasise the shape of the method as a whole?  I suppose it would be quite hard to recognise the pattern in the spread of numbers on their own, you'd have to read every line instead of 'seeing' it.    Perhaps that's a little like what we apparently learn to do with words - to recognise them for their overall shape rather than having to spell each one out individually to ourselves.

 I just found this image in a book I’m reading (Uncreative Writing by Kenneth Goldsmith) which uses a similar system to the method notation.  It’s a page from Derek Beaulieu’s Flatland (2007) in which he traces the path of each letter as it occurs on each page of Edwin A. Abbot’s Flatland written in 1884.  This takes the idea of ‘seeing’ as opposed to ‘reading’ a text to an extreme. It scrubs out all the possible meaning and sound qualities of the letter arrangements to become purely graphic (although somehow it does look like a graphic representation of sound – different frequencies turned on their side). 

In the last reading group where we discussed an extract from The Gutenberg Galaxy, the conversation turned to ideas of speed reading - a technique McLuhan touches on as an extreme example of the ‘alphabetic dissociation of the senses’ that is one of the book’s central concerns.

“[In the new institutes for speed reading] they are taught how to use the eye on the page so as to avoid all verbalization and all incipient movements of the throat which accompany our cinematic chase from left to right, in order to create the mental sound movie which we call reading.”

A number of the group hadn’t read the text beforehand and so were attempting to get ‘up to speed’ during the discussion - Laura described a technique she’d learned which involves running your finger down the middle of a page and reading those words that it touched, somehow either trusting your peripheral vision to take in the rest or just joining the gaps mentally.  I wasn’t really able to make it work for me – perhaps it requires a lot of practice – but it also made me realise the extent to which I do read aloud to myself, in my head, when I read a text.  I’m not a quick reader at all.  I also thought it slightly ironic that a method which McLuhan’s described as totally visual, was in fact being taught through tactile methods – running a finger over the text.  And that reminded me of how when learning to write at school we were taught to put our left index fingers down on the paper at the end of a word to establish the gap we needed to make before writing the next.  Words were things that needed to be physically separated.  If we made mistakes we would lick our fingers and rub the pencil letters until we got a smudgy mess - there was a lot of touching of words going on.  I think alphabetic writing has a tactility all of its own which McLuhan and Rotman fail to explore again and again – I seem to keep coming back to that.

Reading Group 3 - Unpacking the portmanteau and slips of the pun

Wednesday 20th March, 6pm

Two essays that explore portmanteaus and puns for the last reading group at Site:

Derek Attridge - Unpacking the portmanteau, or who's afraid of Finnegan's Wake?
Soeren Hattesen Balle - Slips of the pun: signifying sex in the poetry of John Ashbery

>> to book a place and to receive both texts by email

puns and ambiguities are to common language what adultery and perversion are to ‘chaste’, that is, socially orthodox, sexual relations. They both bring together entities (meanings/people) that have ‘conventionally’ been differentiated and kept apart; and they bring them together in deviant ways, bypassing orthodox rules governing communications and relationships. (A pun is like an adulterous bed in which two meanings that should be separate are coupled together.) It is hardly an accident that Finnegans Wake, which arguably demonstrates the dissolution of bourgeois society, is almost one continuous pun (the connection with sexual perversion being quite clear to Joyce).

Tony Tanner, Adultery in the Novel, 1979, quoted by  Derek Attridge in Peculiar Language, quoted by Soeren Hattesen Balle in Slips of the pun.

Replies to Bridget 1 - More alphabetic gestures

That particular image of the Meyerhold etudes and your interpretation of them as an alphabet of forms made me think of Karel Teige's Abeceda.  

On squid and sliding down letterforms

I wanted to say, Anna that you have caused me to think about text and its possibilities in new ways! I was due to give a talk on my work on image and affect, and I suddenly found myself writing about sliding into text itself: me and my body sliding down the letterforms on a sheet of newspaper. It's a bit silly and out of context perhaps here but I forgot to tell you about it when we last met and I was quite excited about it. Suddenly, I was writing about cleaning squid and the oozey, gooey insides of the squid splattering onto a piece of newspaper and...

"Splat. The goo flops onto the newspaper that I’ve carefully laid out in readiness. And it sits there not quite inert. Jelly like and flaccid but as if it could ooze away. I look at it up close. To watch it quiver. Its wetness sinks into the paper and spreads. Its total mass starts to deflate and even now it seems uncontainable.

The guts ooze along letterforms occupying both the black outlines of alphabetic shapes and the white spaces that give the shape shape. I feel as if I might morph and move into this mess. It improves the typeface no end, a bit of yellow gutsy stuff dangles over a T, black squid scat makes its way down the letter A. I might just slip down a letter I, squelch through an O. Motion not my own. (What is self and skin anyway? I seem porous.)

Squid guts, body and the alphabet combine, flatten out and join together to enter into the flow. More images more images. White noise, the alarms on the scaffolding going off again, faint voices from upstairs… perhaps a siren. All are images into the mix."
 
Not sure if it makes sense out of context but wanted to let you know what your work has inspired!

Thinking bout pattern poetry and versus intertexti

After our brief conversation last week about pattern poetry, I have been thinking again about change ringing - the peculiar art of ringing church bells. Looking at your entry on pattern poetry (on 29/1/13), I was struck by the visual similarity in the notation of the bell-ringing instructions (called the method) and the example of versus intertexti that you give (except that former uses numbers and the latter mostly letters though numbers count the lines).

In the versus intertexti, letters are arrayed in rows on a grid (and these rows are numbered) and a passage is found or traced through these letters in order to find the hidden meaning in the text. (As an aside, I have to say that my personal fascination with this is twofold - 1. I am extremely diagrammatically challenged myself so looking at these verses makes my head spin, 2. I love the name - it is fantastic to say with all its "s"sounds, as well as "ex" and a sharp "i" at the end.)

In bell ringing or change ringing, there is a "method" which is, I understand, the name given to the notation or score directing a particular order of bell-ringing so to sound a tune. This is a chart of numbers that has a passage marked through it - different colours for different bells. All I know about change-ringing (which the Central Council of Church Bellringers calls, "The particularly British art of ringing bells full circle to a method") is from randomly seeing an image and briefly reading some information (from various websites including the one from which the image above has been taken).

I am fascinated by the idea of finding a text within a text (something that seems near impossible to me) in the case of the versus intertexti, and the articulation of a similarly unreadable (to me) text that is then activated in a particular way through the body and producing sound in the case of the change ringing.

I guess this could be said about any score - that is contains special information waiting to be discovered - but I nevertheless find it all somehow quite thrilling!