 
|
| Figure 1: Double page (collaged) from: Bern Porter, Found Poems, Millerton/NY: Something Else Press, 1972, unpaged [sic!] |
| FACE Página anterior | | | Comunicação e Semiótica | Pós-Graduação | PUC-SP |
Eric Vos**
Esse estudo analisa as vertentes da literatura experimental que fizeram uso das linguagens das novas tecnologias para a concepção e produção de seus trabalhos. O autor estuda a obra dos poetas Bern Porter, Eugen Gomringer e o grupo OuLiPo para discutir conceitos que estabelecem relações entre literatura e tecnologia.
This study analyses the trends of experimental literature that made use of languages of new technologies for the conception and production of their works. The author studies the works of the poets Bern Porter, Eugen Gomringer and the group OuLiPo to discuss concepts that establish relationships between literature and technology.
The following essay (first published in Leigh Landy [ed.], Technology, Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1992 [=Avant Garde vol. 7], pp. 41-65) was written in June 1990. In the six years since then, the situation of digital literature has changed dramatically, even far beyond the expectations of (then) visionary critics like Richard Ziegfeld. To give but one example: in August 1990 the World Wide Web was no more than a mere prototype on Tim Berners-Lee’s computer at CERN, Geneva. Today (October 1996), there are thousands of literature sites on the Web. Other parts of the Internet have expanded similarly. We have seen the introduction of various kinds of mark up and scripting languages (HTML, VRML, Java, etc.), all of which have immediately been explored in literary contexts, giving rise to hitherto unimagined literary forms.
So it must be granted that the ‘contemporary’ context addressed in the sections below (particularly section 2) is no longer contemporary. Still, I do believe that the expounded argument (summarized in section 6) is still valid. Rather than rewriting references to the ‘present’ state of affairs in an attempt to keep up to date, I therefore offer the following ‘links’ as suggestions for further reading and browsing:
- New Media Poetry: Poetic Innovation and New Technologies is a printed anthology of digital poetry. Edited by Eduardo Kac, and published as a special issue of Visible Language (vol. 30:2, September 1996), it is the first collection of its kind, representing hypertext, holographic, video, virtual, cybernetic, computer generated, and animated poetry (and poetics) of poets Jim Rosenberg, Philippe Bootz, John Cayley, E.M. de Melo e Castro, André Vallias, Eduardo Kac, Laslo Pablo Györi, Patrick-Henri Burgaud. It also includes my most recent contribution to the theory of digital literature: Eric Vos, ‘New Media Poetry – Theory and Strategies’ (pp. 214-233), as well as a selected ‘Webliography’.
- George Landow has published extensively on hypertext literature in recent years. See for instance his Hypertext. The Convergence of Contemporary Critical Theory and Technology, Baltimore/London: Johns Hopkins UP, 1992; Landow and Paul Delany (eds.), Hypermedia and Literary Studies, Cambridge: MIT Press, 1991; and Landow (ed.), Hyper-Text-Theory, Baltimore/London: Johns Hopkins UP, 1994 (cf. particularly Espen Aarseth’s essay ‘Nonlinearity and Literary Theory’ in this volume).
- But the best place to keep informed about new developments in the field of literature and new technologies is undoubtedly the Internet itself. Next to various USENET newsgroups, the following Websites may serve as valuable starting points: Hyperizons: Hypertext Fiction (http://www.duke.edu/~mshumate/hyperfic.html) and The Electronic Poetry Center (http://wings.buffalo.edu/epc/). Both sites includes links to authors’ home pages, archives of secondary literature, text samples, on line experiments, and so on.
It is safe to say that the word ‘technology’ connotes some idea of ‘tomorrow's world’. This leads to envisaging technology as not just modern but rather pioneering, as not just a present state of things but rather a look into their future. Many TV-commercials and advertisements from technological industries are but one indication of the fact that this view of technology is widely and actively impressed upon the average consumer of technological products (with headlines such as "Tomorrow's World Today", MacUser [UK] 38, June 1989). From that point of view it may seem surprising, or even contradictory, to discuss the impact of technology upon contemporary literature through four approaches, three of which entered the literary scene between the late 1940's and the early 1960's. Bern Porter's first drafts of his manifestoes on Scilit, "the union of science and literature", date from 1947; Eugen Gomringer's "das gedicht als gebrauchsgegenstand", anticipated by a series of papers published from 1954 onwards, is dated 1960; and the decisive discussions on ‘potential literature’ among the members of the OuLiPo-group took place in 1961 (see Porter 1971, especially 43-46; Gomringer 1969: 277-293; and Lescure 1973: 32 ff., respectively). Three views on yesterday's literature and yesterday's technology?(1)
Not so. Their present relevance will become clear when we break up the heterogeneous theme of literature and technology into more manageable items, thereby concentrating upon ‘the work of literature and technology’ and leaving aside such topics as ‘the study of literature and technology’ or ‘literary life and technology’.(2) I want to suggest a threefold distinction, between literature about technology, literature by means of technology, and literature as technology.
‘Literature about technology’ comprises all those cases of literary works that in some discursive way deal with the theme of technology. This of course is still a widely divergent group, ranging from works that contain no more than mere references to technological topics, through the most commonplace industrial novels and intergalactic-war-type of science fiction, to the postmodern literary interpretation of cybernetics in, for instance, William Burroughs' The Soft Machine ([1966] see Porush 1989). What such works have in common, is that they treat technology as a topic, rather than adopt technological means and insights as a basis for the production of works of literature and the development of technological poetics.(3) A thorough investigation of this multifaceted tradition of literature about technology – by no means limited to the 20th century – will undoubtedly reveal many important aspects of the ways in which literary artists have dealt with the technological innovations of their times. This, however, is not my present concern.
I want to focus upon what I have called ‘literature by means of technology’ and, especially, ‘literature as technology’. The first phrase obviously does not refer to all literary works whose production in some way or another involve technological means, for this would include at least everything ever printed (and one could argue over the question whether or not pen and paper are or were technological means). The fact that most contemporary threepenny novels are written with the aid of computer macros does not make them computer prose. What counts here is the difference between a signbearer (a typescript or a printed page or a book or a floppy disk/CD ROM or an audio tape, etc.) as an industrial product, and a work of literature as a semiotic product. Where those two intersect, i.e. where aspects of the industrial/technological production of a work merge with its semiotic function, there we have literature by means of technology (see part 2, below).
Although it is very likely that technological innovations will be reflected most clearly and most immediately within this group of literary works, literature by means of technology does not in itself exemplify what I see as the core of the rapprochement between the two realms: a poetics based upon technological concepts, or literature as technology. What Porter, Gomringer, and the OuLiPo group have in common is that they address the question of aesthetic innovation in literature from a point of departure that is inspired by developments in science and technology. This basis for their poetics constitutes what I consider to be the exemplary – and certainly not obsolete – value of their activities in the field of literature and technology (see parts 3-5, below).
Walter Benjamin's ‘Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner technischen Reproduzierbarkeit’ (1936) is first in an ongoing series of studies on the effect of new media and new techniques of production upon the nature of and the demarcation between the various arts. There is little doubt that a strong case may be presented in support of the claim that technological innovations (such as the development of printing, the invention of the typewriter, photography and film, the tape-recorder, the copying machine, and perhaps especially the development of multi-media systems in the 20th century) triggered major changes in the state of the arts. I do not wish to challenge that view, nor to reiterate the discussion about it. I do, however, want to discuss one fairly recent example of literature by means of technology in to order illustrate more clearly that, as I have said above, the alignment of literature and technology is at least as much a case of poetics as of production. The example is that of computer literature.
In a lecture presented at the Paderborner Hochschulwochen in 1972, Siegfried J. Schmidt sketched a rather bleak picture of the (aesthetic) qualities and values of the computer poetry produced thus far (see Schmidt 1974). The basic premise of Schmidt's criticism is that no computer performs better than its programmer/operator (ibid.: 138), which implies that the production of computer poetry is to a large extent dependent upon
Computer poetry further suffers from the fact that the theories of language, especially semantic theories, and of literature are insufficiently formalized to allow for their full translation into a computer program. This means, according to Schmidt (ibid.: 133), that the input resources available to the computer poet consist of no more than some elementary syntactical matrices, supplemented by a primitive set of literary rules (for instance metrical rules) and a limited and unsystematically organized lexicon. The production of a computer poem then amounts to the selection and strictly linear combination (i.e. without hierarchic integration into a coherent semantic/thematic whole) of elements from that repertoire, both performed at random. "Damit entfallen alle komplizierten Auswahl- und Entscheidungsverfahren, die beim natürlichen Sprecher zu beobachten sind". If the resulting text includes any surprising images or metaphors at all, they are "zufällige Nebenprodukte des eingeplanten Zufallsgenerators" (ibid.). Computer poetry of this kind appears to be nothing more than "eine technische Spielerei literarischer Amateure ohne tiefere Bedeutung" (ibid.: 139).
Notwithstanding this critical perspective on the state of the art, Schmidt does not discard computer poetry as a blind alley of literature. His twofold diagnosis of the deficiencies of computer poetry is complemented by an equally twofold suggestion for a remedy (ibid.: 139-41). First of all, linguists and literary theorists, allied with information theorists, should strive for a formalization of their theories, thereby allowing computer programmers to write programs capable of representing a natural speaker's activities in a more comprehensive and hence more satisfying way. Obviously, Schmidt does not advocate such a formalization just for the sake of a better computer poetry – linguistics and literary theory themselves would benefit most from such an improvement. Secondly, linguists, literary theorists, information theorists, aestheticians, and, most importantly, literary artists, should join forces in order to investigate more fruitful ways of incorporating computer technology into the production of literary texts. This could, for instance, provide an author with the option of using a computer to test out all possible combinations of a certain repertoire of literary themes, or prosodic variations, etc. But whatever form these developments may take, it is clear at least to Schmidt, that the computer itself can never be more than a "Prüf- und Forschungsinstrument, Dialogpartner, Rechenmaschine, die Arbeitsprozesse abkürzt, Material erweitert, formal variiert" (ibid.: 140-41). Consequently, the author's task is defined by Schmidt (ibid.: 142) as: "in Kooperation mit der Maschine solche Texte zu erzeugen, die im Prozeß literarischer Kommunikation eine Rolle spielen können die mit der handgemachter Texte vergleichbar ist". In other words: the literary product remains what it was before – a text, to be dealt with on the basis of exactly the same considerations that apply to ‘ordinary’ printed literary texts. Technological innovations may change the procedures of its production, but they do not change its aesthetic status.
That was in 1972.(4) I should add that Schmidt did conceive of future developments in generating computermediated texts, leading towards more complex and mixed forms of literary art, that would increase the aesthetic value of the ‘computerization’ of text-production. Although some related experiments in this field had been conducted throughout the 1960's, particularly with the use of synthesizers and recording techniques in phonetic poetry (see, e.g., Chopin 1979: 95-244), Schmidt was right, at that time, to consider these possibilities as "noch sehr unerforscht aber sehr ergiebig" (1974: 141). These future developments, however, did not take more than a decade to become a reality,(5) and they have now enabled us to clearly see the difference between ‘technology’ as a mere productive tool and ‘technology’ as an integrated aspect of the literary work.
In a provocative essay on ‘The Electronic Word’, Richard A. Lanham (1989) discusses various consequences of the rise of electronic media for literary and scholarly life, ranging from severe problems in the field of copyright law(6) to the downfall of the Great Book and the curriculum based upon that notion. Contrary to a printed text, which is fixed and materialized, an electronic ‘text’ is nothing but a temporary constellation of pixels on a computer screen, and as such perpetually adaptable and, as Lanham says, ‘desubstantiated’.(7) Once a ‘reader’ has access to the required hard- and software and has acquired the necessary skills to operate these, he is in a position to alter literally every aspect of such a ‘text’. Pictures and sounds can be added. Fonts, type sizes and styles can be changed, as well as thematic, narrative and prosodic sequences. One can delete old parts of the ‘text’ and include new ones. And those of us who feel reluctant about intervening in an existing work in such a manner still have the opportunity to add notes, comments, summaries, alternatives, etc. in hypertext.
An electronic ‘text’ is thus interactive(8) – it not only allows for, but rather requires a ‘reader’ to participate in its construction, if only by operating a mouse or a keyboard in order to ‘scroll through the text’, which in fact amounts to a radical change in what is visible on the screen. And this implies that we have to rethink much of what we thought to know about ‘texts’, ‘writing’, ‘reading’, and ‘interpreting’. And about ‘literature’, since there is no reason why literary texts should be excluded from this interactive environment. For one thing, digitized sequences of letter- and word-images have no "final cut", to use Lanham's term, and
Of course such Aristotelian principles have been challenged by literary artists long before electronic media became widely available. There are ordinary literary texts with multiple endings and/or beginnings (e.g. Richard Brautigan, A Confederate General from Big Sur, [1964]; Trout Fishing in America, [1967]), as well as ordinary texts with permutable and interchangeable parts (e.g. Julio Cortázar, Rayuela, [1963]; Raymond Federman, Take It or Leave It, [1976]).(9) But these are not interactive ‘texts’. They are presented in a codex format – a final cut – which allows for their identification on the basis of their alphabetical/numerical notation, independent of any particular ‘reading’. Any two undamaged copies of Take It or Leave It count as replicas, precisely because of their fixed "sameness of spelling: exact correspondence of letters, [numerical inscriptions], spaces, and punctuation marks" (Goodman 1976: 115), which can be ascertained on the basis of a theory of notation. No such identification is possible in the case of interactive electronic ‘texts’.
Interactive fiction is capable of realizing Borges' theme of ‘The Garden of the Forking Paths’: each time the narrative sequence ‘forks’, both continuations of the narrative are simultaneously presented to the ‘reader’. Of course he cannot ‘read’ both of them simultaneously, but at least the choice of a route to follow is left open. (The ‘reader’ must select one of the two – or more – continuations of the narrative by clicking a button or by means of a function key, etc.) What, then, is ‘the’ story? This is now an meaningless question. I grant that even this literal multiplication of sequences is not confined to the realm of electronic ‘text’. Although it would be hard to create a codex format that would allow a novel or even a short story to fork in this literal sense, it can be done with a sonnet, as Raymond Queneau has demonstrated. His Cent Mille Milliards des Poèmes (One Hundred Thousand Billion Poems [1961]) consists of ten ‘pages’, each of them cut into fourteen horizontal strips, each of these containing one sonnet verse. No two verses are the same. By – randomly – turning the strips, the reader selects a verse for each of the fourteen lines of a sonnet, the result of which complies with the ordinary prosodic rules and can be read in the ordinary way. This means that the book contains exactly 10 to the 14th power, or one hundred thousand billion potential sonnets. This is about as close as one could get to interactive literature without the use of computers, but, as William Paulson (1989: 297) remarks, "the possibilities of the book format are being strained to the limit [here], and Cent Mille Milliards des Poèmes would be an ideal candidate for a computerized edition".
For computerized interactive literature such permutational possibilities are merely a starting point. Let me give just a few examples of what could follow (some of them discussed in detail by Ziegfeld 1989: 354 ff.).
An interactive ‘traditional’ whodunit – one in which the identity of the murderer is withheld until the end – could contain (additional) clues in hypertext, leaving it up to the ‘reader’ whether or not he wants to know them. The novel would thus present its challenge to the ‘reader’ (i.e. to solve the case before the solution is spelled out) in various degrees of difficulty. Or even better: the ‘reader’ could be asked to interpret clues throughout the narrative, and the next sequence would then depend upon this interpretation, all the way to unveiling the murderer, arresting an innocent character, or giving up the case. The ‘reader’ himself could be a character in a novel by filling in blank spaces in the ‘text’, whereupon the other characters respond to what to ‘reader’ has to say, in much the same way as the computerized psychiatrist in the classical ELIZA game. The ‘reader’ could be given a choice among various levels of descriptive detail, or among alternatives with regard to the fate of the protagonist. Hypertext flashbacks and reminders could be included. Whether a ‘text’ develops its plot as a chronicle or as a mystery could be left to the ‘reader’ to decide. Etcetera, etcetera. (See Niesz & Holland 1984 and especially Ziegfeld 1989 for further examples.) It should be clear that such "author/reader communication options go beyond the traditional media to alter the nature of the literary experience" (Ziegfeld 1989: 354), quite contrary to what Schmidt and even Kostelanetz had expected. In this sense, literature by means of technology is as much a matter of poetics as of production.
That brings us back to the non-Aristotelian adjustments of our poetics that Lanham regarded as inevitable, and that I regard as the basis of the alignment of literature and technology. What sort of adjustments are they? For Lanham (1989: 276), the key issue is that digitized literature – as well as any other form of computer art – is "an unblushing and unfiltered attempt to plot the ranges of formal expressivity now possible", and as such a fundamentally rhetorical affair. That is to say: a work of computer literature, ‘desubstantiated’ as it may be, always oscillates between the two poetic poles of unselfconsciousness and selfconsciousness, denotation and presentation, transparency and opacity. On the one hand, such a work presents a message, the meaning of which is to be determined in the act of reception primarily by ‘looking through’ the symbols to whatever they refer to. But on the other hand, the work presents an amount of information, the structure of which is to be (re-)created in the act of reception primarily by ‘looking at’ the symbols themselves. On the one hand it is a matter of working with the symbols, on the other of working on them.(10)
I agree with much of this. But quite surprisingly, Lanham seems to have overlooked that we do not need a computer-inspired rhetorical turn in order to make the oscillation between ‘looking through’ and ‘looking at’ (one of) the main topic(s) of our contemporary poetics and art theory, for it has been precisely that since the beginning of the 20th century.(11) The idea of a dialectic between ‘looking at’ and ‘looking through’ the text plays a crucial role in the literature and poetics of Ezra Pound, Gertrude Stein and many others (see, e.g., Steiner 1982, 177-96). Concrete poetry originated as an attempt to transfer Constructivist principles – in the first place the Constructivist emphasis upon the opaque materiality of the work of art – into the transparent realm of language. The integration of visual form into the construction of texts has had tremendous implications for modern poetry in general, as Carole Ann Taylor (1985), among others, has convincingly demonstrated. Opacity and self-reflexiveness are key issues in the theory of postmodernist writing (see, e.g., McHale 1987). And so forth. Whereas computer literature may stretch the range of formal expressive possibilities further than could be done before, and hence strongly emphasizes its compliance with Taylor's ‘poetics of seeing’, this poetics does not result from but rather underlies the digitization of literature. Modern poetics and modern technology have found each other when artists(12) discovered that the poetic concept of an opaque and palpable literature could be fruitfully united with technological or generally scientific concepts, means, and methods of structuring and organizing information. In doing so, they created literature as technology.
In I've Left, his ‘manifesto and testament of science and art’, the American artist, poet, publisher, nuclear physicist, and social planning expert Bern Porter (1971) leaves no doubt as to what he thinks should be the starting point for a global restructuring of all language and communication arts:
The arts could be restructured on the basis of an insight in these mechanics. Its task defined in such a way, physics at least in part amounts to cybernetics and information theory. This physics, according to Porter (ibid.: 45), provides literature with methods, principles, terminologies and, most importantly, a "spirit" that will lead to enrichment and extension when incorporated into poetics. It will bring literature beyond its "typographical entrapment traditionally circumscribing it as a visually read experience". How is this done, and why should we want to do it?
The ‘testament’ part of I've Left consists of eight brief chapters plus an introduction in which Porter takes up the role of the master scientist of the world as well as its master ideologist, who researches the ways in which the world behaves, thinks of methods to improve these, and organizes the implementation of such improvements.(13) His range of topics is immense: he deals consecutively with poetry and the literary institutions, the garment industry, theater, architecture (including urbanization and natural supplies), the visual arts, the food industry, the human faculties, and the automobile industry. Random as this collection may appear to be, Porter's treatment of these topics suggests – reveals? creates? – a common denominator. Waste is a key issue for him. The contemporary industrialized human society is a ‘Wastemaker’, as Porter entitled one of his volumes of found poetry (Porter 1972a), since it uses up its resources in such a way that only a very limited part of their potential is actually utilized for the benefit of all people.
The way out of this wasteful behavior is twofold. First, find out – by deconstructing all procedures of common treatment of the resources in question that are responsible for minimizing their utility – what the potentials of these resources ‘really’ are. Second, find a way of maximizing these potentials, which also calls for a democratic distribution of supplies (an equal share of goods and an equal chance of participating in social events) and, at least as far as industrial products are concerned, a cost-effective way of production in order to prevent a waste of labor and financial investments. Whereas Porter's remarks on the latter issue are often utopian, his treatment of the former is certainly not. And this is where physics comes in.
Scipoe, the union of science and poetry, started with an effort to expand traditional poetry in ‘all’ possible physical directions. For instance by conjoining it with and in the long run replacing it by pictures and sounds, schedules and schemes (chemical, physical, mathematical, etc.), and lists of all kinds of listable phenomena: surnames (Porter 1975), garment sizes, recipe ingredients, timetables, catalog numbers, tea brands, etc. (these examples and many more in Porter 1972b). Or by using all kinds of surfaces for printing: posters, walls, playing cards, pieces of garment, "theater tickets, laundry lists, match covers, gum wrappers, toilet and facial tissues: no wasted spaces" (Porter 1971: 5). Or all kinds of printing materials and techniques: colored ink, colored pages, blueprint, embossing, engraving, xerox copying, etc. And, finally, by using various media and channels of communication: printing, audio and visual recording and broadcasting, Laser transmission, screen projection, live performance, etc. As Porter writes (ibid.: 6-7):
Whether this is a factual account of Porter's activities or a fictional account of his utopian role of ‘world-organizer’ is of no concern here. (Actually it is part of both.) What counts is the theme addressed by Porter: the concept of poetry, and literature in general, as a physical entity (note his references to ‘density’, ‘opacity’, etc.), the properties of which should be used to the fullest extent.
Language, the core of all literature and other forms of verbal communication, is itself ‘physicalized’ in Porter's conception. It is restructured by modeling it on the "sending and receiving systems" with which humans are "equipped at birth", and which "would exceed in achievement any other combination, mechanical or electronic" (Porter 1971: 10, my italics; note, again, the cybernetic tone of Porter's formulation), if only the potential of these systems, "known and demonstrated in limited degree for many years", were fully developed in terms of the five human faculties, "in contrast to the accepted method of living a half death of rarely or only partially used senses" (ibid.: 10-11). This, then, is the main contribution of physics to poetics: it allows for an unlimited expansion of the means and methods of literature and in doing so reveals the underlying mechanism of this expanded literary communication, i.e. its total appeal to the various senses and hence its palpability:
The program of Scilit – starting, as quoted above, with a determination of the ‘mechanics’ of communication – can be derived simply from this insight. What is needed first is a determination of
The first result will be a "simplified alphabet", which enables ideogrammatic writing; i.e. visually efficient symbols "that fit an eye space" and patterns of line arrangement that will "provide most direct responsive impression under all conditions of impact" (ibid.). Such symbols will then become part of a "picture language ... a physical or physics tongue and sign so to speak", individual elements of which "denote whole passages of meaning" (ibid.: 43-44). In other words:
This, then, is Scilit (cf. Ill. 1).(14)
|
|
| Figure 1: Double page (collaged) from: Bern Porter, Found Poems, Millerton/NY: Something Else Press, 1972, unpaged [sic!] |
Had Eugen Gomringer been aware of Scilit poetics in the mid-1950's, he certainly would have included Porter among those artists whose work constitute the "entwicklungsgeschichtliche begründung der neue dichtung": i.e. Holz, Mallarmé, Apollinaire, Kandinsky, Klee, Mondrian, Marinetti, Ball, cummings, and William Carlos Williams (Gomringer 1969: 278-79; Gomringer's statements are quoted here according to their original spelling, i.e. without the use of capitals). For the similarities between Gomringer's Concrete poetics and Porter's Scilit are manifold and striking – with one major exception: Gomringer's adherence to the traditional alphabetic word.
Much like Porter, Gomringer starts his investigation of the way in which contemporary poetry could and should be developed by raising the issue of poetry's role in modern society. For Gomringer, the contemporary world is characterized by the demand for swift, economical and international communication. It is a world in which people want to understand and be understood rapidly, "und vielen menschen wollen zudem rasch vor vielen andern menschen verstanden werden" (ibid.: 277, my italics). Language, the prime means of communication, cannot but respond to this demand, most specifically by going through a process of formal simplification. As Gomringer (ibid.) writes:
(Note the similarity with Porter's remarks on the ‘simplified’ alphabet, to be understood by ‘all peoples and races’, etc.) Unlike Porter, Gomringer explicitly regards this development as grounded in the "neue praxis der kommunikation" as defined by information theory and cybernetics (ibid.: 288). The first objective here is to use language as ‘economically’ as possible (cf. note 10); the key words are ‘clarity’, ‘effectiveness’, ‘rationality’, ‘concentration’. But the economic use of language is not a goal in itself. Rather it serves as a prerequisite for
In this sense, formal reduction of language does certainly not lead towards "das ende der dichtung", since concentration upon and economical use of verbal material, resulting in a ‘versatile’ message, are precisely "das wesen der dichtung" (ibid.: 277-78). Gomringer's main point, then, is that while ordinary language has gone through such a process of reduction and simplification in compliance with the demands of contemporary society (demands resulting from developments in contemporary technology), poetry – at least in its conventional prosodic form – has fallen behind:
Gomringer's ‘constellations’ – since 1955 subsumed under the general label of Concrete poetry, which he and the members of the Brazilian Noigandres-group adopted to designate their collective poetic innovations – are attempts to reconstruct this relationship between poetry and modern society.(15)
According to Gomringer, ordinary communication by means of advanced technology is first of all characterized by its immediacy (e.g. telephone vs. letter; radio vs. newspaper [1969: 277]; and, since the Telstar-project of 1962-64, especially telecommunication via satellite). The constellation therefore strives to achieve such an immediate impact as well (cf. Porter's ‘direct impression’):
So "Augenblick" – a single moment – becomes "Augen-Blick" – ‘eye-look’ – as well (cf. Porter: ‘an eye space’). Gomringer achieves temporal reduction of his constellations by reducing the vocabulary of each text to a bare minimum, which would result in "beharrung und momentane konzentration und ein plötzliches bewußtwerden der besonderheit einer bestimmten wortmaterie" (ibid.), and by the abolition of linear syntax with its temporal qualities and connotations. But the constellation primarily becomes a physical reality – to be looked at rather than seen through – by virtue of its replacing the abolished verbal connectives between the used words by their visual typographic arrangement (cf. Ill. 2).
 |
| Figure 2: 'Nahes fernes" by Eugen Gomringer from: Eugen Gomringer, worte sind schatten, die konstellationen 1951-1968, Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowohlt Verlag, 1969, p.63 |
In other words, the constellation – or Concrete poetry in general – purports to be used
Although Gomringer may be credited as one of the inventors of Concrete poetry, and certainly as one of its most important early advocates and practitioners, his views are by no means applicable to all literary products that have been produced under the – rapidly inflating – label of Concrete poetry since the mid-1950's. This holds true for Gomringer's axiom that the word should be the basis of the Concrete poem; an opinion clearly challenged in visual poetry, phonetic poetry, action poetry, etcetera.(16) It also, and perhaps specifically, holds true for his rather far-fetched ambitions with regard to the role that Concrete poetry could play in establishing a universal language and consequently a universal society ("dichtung kann heute den kern der zukünftigen universalen gemeinschaftssprache bilden", which would then be the "ausdruck einer universalen kultur"; Gomringer 1969: 290). Only very few of his successors, however, have challenged his contention that Concrete poetry should be regarded as a poetic form of research in the field of the organization and structuring of language, "mit einem engen bezug zu modernen, naturwissenschaftlich und soziologisch fundierten kommunikationsaufgaben" (ibid.: 286).(17) As such, every Concrete poem invites its reader to use it as a ‘Gebrauchsgegenstand’ – it is both a utensil for and an object of ‘language games’ and therefore ‘thought games’ ("denkspiel"; Gomringer 1969: 280). Concrete poetry triggers further thought and is, therefore, in Gomringer's opinion essentially related to those non-poetic realms of structuring and organizing "denen ein kritisches, doch positiv entschiedenes denken zugrunde liegt" (ibid.: 293), i.e.: architecture, sculptural art, industrial design, industrial organization. This in turn implies that Concrete poetry presents the ideal circumstance for an aesthetic amalgamation of various ways of thinking. In particular it may bring forth the connection between "wortsprachliches denken" on the one hand, and "naturwissenschaftliches, insbesondere mathematisches denken" on the other (ibid.: 289).(18)
The papers of the French group OuLiPo constitute without any doubt the main locus of reflections upon the relationship between literature and mathematics.(19) In much the same way as envisaged by Gomringer, OuLiPo regards ‘structure’ as the tertium comparationis between the two realms. Its members concede that all literature has a certain ‘potential’ value, in the sense that a work of literature achieves its literary quality precisely because of its "quantité indéfinie de significations potentielles", which even cause it to exceed the range of potential meanings as foreseen by its author (Lescure 1973: 31). But this, of course, simply amounts to exchanging one term, i.e. ‘literature’, by another, i.e. ‘potentiality ’, which is hardly interesting nor clarifying. OuLiPo is interested in quite another type of potentiality: one that is not inherent in literary art, but, on the contrary, one that is fully ‘orchestrated’ ("concertée"; cf. Bens 1981: 23 ff.). And that orchestration – "une condition que nous avions imposée tout au début" (ibid.: 32) – is not a matter of signification but of structure.
Queneau's Cent Mille Milliards des Poèmes has often been discussed among the OuLiPo members as a paradigm of such an implementation of potentiality, as a prime example of what could be regarded as "créations créantes, susceptibles de se développer à partir d'elles-mêmes et au-delà d'elles-même, d'une manière à la fois prévisible et impuisablement imprévue", instead of "créations créés qui furent ceux des _uvres littéraires que nous connaisons" (Fournel 1972: 21). But for some, like Jacques Bens, even this did not go far enough. According to Bens (1980: 109) Queneau's work is such a ‘creation créé’, an ‘_uvre’ and, therefore, not a case of potential literature at all, because "l'auteur en a envisagé et tiré toutes les possibilités possible". All possibilities of permutation and combination are given by the format of the text itself: "On ne peut absolument plus rien en faire" (ibid.). From this point of view, Cent Mille Milliards des Poèmes would have to be regarded as a collection of ‘possible’ rather than ‘potential’ texts.(20) This leads to the question of whether there can be any such thing as a potential text at all. Can an existing literary text still possess potentiality, or is literary potentiality exclusively a matter of pre-textual, as yet unrealized conceptual design? François Le Lionnais proposed to accept both possibilities – differentiating between "la potentialité qui permet d'écrire (par des méthodes potentielles) des millions de livres tous différents dans une forme nouvelle" on the one hand, and "la potentialité interne à l'oeuvre, celle qui donne cent mille milliards des possibilités avec les sonnets de Queneau" on the other (Bens 1980: 109). This suggestion returns in the distinction between ‘anoulipisme’ (in which existing literature was studied in order to discover structural possibilities beyond those actually realized in the texts) and ‘synthoulipisme’ (in which new ways of structuring texts were devised). Though generally accepted, this distinction did not by itself settle the issue. That required the agreement among the OuLiPo members to regard synthoulipism as "la vocation essentielle" of the group (Le Lionnais 1973a: 17). Potentiality in literature, therefore, becomes the structure of "c'est ce qui n'existe pas encore" (Queneau; in Bens 1980: 50), it is not "celle de la littérature faite", but it is "c'est celle de la littérature à faire" (Lescure 1973: 31).
This may sound like a contradiction. In what reasonable way can one speak of the structure of a literary work that does not yet exist? Underlying the answer to this question is OuLiPo's conviction, as stated by Le Lionnais in the first OuLiPo manifesto (1973a: 16), that
Far from being regarded as annoying limitations upon the creativity of an author, such constraints and rules are envisaged as "heureuses, généreuses et la littérature même" (Lescure 1973: 27). They constitute and define the indispensable connection between ‘inspiration’ and the literary work. Hence, literature "est un art simple et tout d'exécution" (Le Lionnais 1973b: 19) – execution, that is, of an idea for a work, which is to be revealed by means of the procedures and structures that govern the construction of this work. Le Lionnais concedes that literary history has given rise to a wide range of such procedures and structures, from extremely rigid to very liberal ones(21), which will provide most authors with "un assez grand choix" – yet "L'OuLiPo a la conviction, très forte, qu'on pourrait en envisager un bien plus grand nombre" (Le Lionnais 1973b: 21). Whether or not these newly invented, artificial structures are viable in literary life has to be decided within the permanent ‘Querelle des Anciens et des Modernes’ (Le Lionnais 1973a: 15-16; 1973b: 21-22), but is not a concern of OuLiPo's, at least not of its synthoulipistic branch. What counts here is only "d'ouvrir nouvelles voies inconnues des nos prédécesseurs" (Le Lionnais 1973a: 17).(22) And this is where OuLiPo turned towards mathematics, as an inexhaustible source of "directions d'explorations" (ibid.). Or, as Queneau (1963: 321) has stated:
In this sense an OuLiPo invention such as Jean Lescure's ‘Méthode M ± n’ is indeed the potential structure of future literary works.
This method (described at length in OuLiPo 1973: 139-44 and 1981: 166-70) may very well be the best known of OuLiPo's prosodic inventions. As Lescure says (in OuLiPo 1973: 139),(23)
Thus, N/Adj/Adv (nouns/adjectives/adverbs) + 3 could turn Keats'
into:
A thirst of beaver is a judge for evermore:Like Porter's and Gomringer's approaches, OuLiPo's ‘scientific’ view on literature emphasizes the palpability of literary art. The prime task of literature is to explore possible ways in which language can be used and manipulated. To adopt scientific, particularly mathematic, procedures in order to investigate these modes of manipulation amounts to treating language in the same ‘objective’ way as the sciences treat their objects. In other words: potential literature acknowledges that language is "un objet concret" (Lescure 1973: 29). Much like non-figurative painting draws the spectator's attention away from a signified referent to the signifying "objet-tableau" itself, the ‘unusual’ ways of structuring literary texts as proposed by OuLiPo "renvoie au signe plutôt qu'au signifié" and consequently "fixent le regard de l'observateur sur l'objet singulier qu'est le langage littéraire" (ibid.: 30). Hence,
In the three preceding parts of this paper I have presented little more than a summary of views with regard to the interaction of contemporary literature and poetics, on the one hand, and contemporary science and technology on the other. Are these views really as exemplary as I have claimed them to be (see above, part 1)? I do believe, for instance with Richard Kostelanetz (1982), that much of the work that is produced today in the field of avant garde literature has actually been anticipated by the historical avant garde and in particular by approaches developed between the late 1940's and the early 1960's (a period marked on one end by the rediscovery of Dada, leading towards the widespread re-emergence of aleatoric literature, and on the other by the publication of the first major postmodernist novels). Approaches such as Bern Porter's conception of ‘Scilit’, Eugen Gomringer's Concrete poetics, in which poetry becomes a ‘Gebrauchsgegenstand’, and OuLiPo's mathematically inspired ‘Littérature Potentielle’. But it would obviously take a lot more to support the idea of these innovations being exemplary in the sense that they functioned as models after which the entire contemporary literary avant garde subsequently shaped its work. That, however, is not at all what I had in mind.
In my opinion, the presented views are exemplary in another sense of the word. They illustrate quite clearly what I have attempted to expound with regard to interactive computer literature (as an example of a very contemporary amalgamation of literature and technology), and support a threefold conclusion:
Início da página / Top of the page
ACHLEITNER, Friedrich & Gerhard Rühm. 1980 super rekord extra 100, in: Achleitner & Rühm, super rekord 50 + 50, edition neue texte, Linz, 40-74.
BENS, Jacques. 1980 Oulipo 1960-1963, Bourgois, Paris.
BENS, Jacques. 1981 Queneau oulipien, in: OuLiPo 1981, 22-33.
BENSE, Max. 1969 Einführung in die informationstheoretische Aesthetik. Grundlegung und Anwendung in der Texttheorie, Rowohlt, Reinbek.
CHOPIN, Henri. 1979 Poesie Sonore Internationale, Jean Michel Place, Paris.
CLÜVER, Claus. (forthcoming) Verbivocovisual Signs: Concrete Poetry, Intermedia Works, and Intersemiotic Transpositions.
De ROOK, G.J. (ed.). 1975 anthologie visuele poëzie/visual poetry anthology, Uitgeverij Bert Bakker, Den Haag.
ECO, Umberto. 1986 Semiotics and the Philosophy of Language, Indiana University Press, Bloomington IN.
FOURNEL, Paul. 1972 Clefs pour la littérature potentielle, Paris.
GOMRINGER, Eugen. 1969 worte sind schatten, Rowohlt, Reinbek.
GOODMAN, Nelson. 1976 Languages of Art, Hackett, Indianapolis.
HIGGINS, Dick. 1978 A Dialectic of Centuries. Notes towards a Theory of the New Arts, Printed Editions, New York & Barton VT.
KESSLER, Dieter. 1976 Untersuchungen zur konkreten Dichtung, Hain, Meisenheim am Glan.
KOPFERMANN, Thomas (Hrsg.). 1974 Theoretische Positionen zur konkreten Poesie, Niemeyer, Tübingen.
KOSTELANETZ, Richard (ed.). 1979 Visual Literature Criticism, Southern Illinois University Press, Carbondale & Edwardsville.
KOSTELANETZ, Richard. 1980a Metamorphosis in the Arts, Assembling Press, New York.
KOSTELANETZ, Richard (ed.). 1980b Text-Sound Texts, William Morrow & Company, Inc., New York.
KOSTELANETZ, Richard (ed.). 1981 Aural Literature Criticism, (= Precisely 10/11/12), Kostelanetz & Scobie, New York & Edmonton.
KOSTELANETZ, Richard. 1982 Innovative Literature in America, in: Kostelanetz (ed.), The Avant-Garde Tradition in Literature, Prometheus Books, Buffalo NY, 392- 413.
LANHAM, Richard A.. 1989 The Electronic Word: Literary Study and the Digital Revolution, in: New Literary History, vol. 20, nr. 2, 265-290.
LE LIONNAIS, François. 1973a La Lipo (Le premier Manifeste), in: OuLiPo 1973, 15-18.
LE LIONNAIS, François. 1973b Le second Manifeste, in: OuLiPo 1973, 19-23.
LESCURE, Jean. 1973 Petit histoire de l'Oulipo, In: OuLiPo 1973, 24-35.
McHALE, Brian. 1987 Pöstmödernist Fictiön, Methuen, London.
MOLES, Abraham A.. 1958 Théorie de l'Information et Perception Esthétique, Flammarion, Paris.
NIESZ, Anthony & Norman N. Holland. 1984 Interactive Fiction, in: Critical Inquiry, vol. 11, 110-129.
OuLiPo. 1973 La littérature potentielle, Gallimard, Paris.
OuLiPo. 1981 Atlas de littérature potentielle, Gallimard, Paris.
OuLiPo. 1987 La Bibliothèque Oulipienne, Editions Ramsay, Paris (2 vols.).
PAULSON, William. 1989 Computers, Minds, and Texts: Preliminary Reflections, in: New Literary History, vol. 20, nr. 2, 291-303.
PORTER, Bern. 1971 I've Left. a manifesto and a testament of SCIence and -ART (SCIART), Something Else Press, Inc., New York etc.
PORTER, Bern. 1972a Waste Maker 1926-1961, Abyss Publications, Somerville Mass.
PORTER, Bern. 1972b Found Poems, Something Else Press, Inc., Millerton NY.
PORTER, Bern. 1975 The Manhattan Telephone Book, Abyss Publications, Somerville Mass. & Porter International, Belfast MA.
PORUSH, David. 1989 Cybernetic Fiction and Postmodern Science, in: New Literary History, vol. 20, nr. 2, 373-396.
QUENEAU, Raymond. 1963 Bâtons, chiffres et lettres, Gallimard, Paris.
SCHMIDT, Siegfried J.. 1974 Elemente einer Textpoetik. Theorie und Anwendung, Bayerischer Schulbuch-Verlag, München.
SHANNON, Claude E. & Warren Weaver. 1949 The Mathematical Theory of Communication, University of Illinois Press, Urbana IL
SOLT, Mary Ellen (ed.). 1970 Concrete Poetry: A World View, Indiana University Press, Bloomington IN.
STEINER, Wendy. 1982 The Colors of Rhetoric, University of Chicago Press, Chicago & London.
TAYLOR, Carole Ann. 1985 A Poetics of Seeing. The Implications of Visual Form in Modern Poetry, Garland Publishing, Inc., New York & London.
VOS, Eric. 1992 Concrete Poetry as a Test Case for a Nominalistic Semiotics of Literature. diss. University of Amsterdam
WEISS, Christina. 1984 Seh-Texte. Zur Erweiterung des Textbegriffes in konkreten und nach-konkreten visuellen Texten, Zirndorf, Verlag für moderne Kunst.
WIENER, Norbert. 1948 Cybernetics: Control and Communication in the Animal and in the Machine, Harvard University Press, Cambridge Mass.
WIENER, Oswald. 1967 das ‘literarische cabaret’ der wiener gruppe, in: Gerhard Rühm (Hrsg.), Die Wiener Gruppe, Rowohlt, Reinbek, 401-418.
WIENER, Oswald (et al.). 1968 Die Wiener Gruppe. Eine Kontroverse, Neues Forum, Heft 171-172, 237-243.
ZIEGFELD, Richard. 1989 Interactive Fiction: A New Literary Genre?, in: New Literary History, vol. 20, nr. 2, 341-372.
Início da página / Top of the page
* Este texto foi originalmente publicado em Tecnology [=Avant Garde vol. 7], Cahiers Interdisciplinaire et Internationaux - Arts et Littératures au XXe. Siècie, n. 7, Leigh Landy (Ed.), Amsterdã, 1992.
** Pesquisador e crítico holandês, ex-professor da Universidade de Amsterdã.
(1) Interactive fiction (see part 2) does comply with the ‘futuristic’ view on technology. Its theoretical possibilities, as foreseen by authors like Richard Ziegfeld (1989), have thus far been realized to a very limited extent only.
(2) Two journals of literary theory recently published a special issue on these latter topics. New Literary History, Volume 20/2 (Winter 1989), contains articles on cybernetics and the theory of reading; reading as information processing; technology and publishing; theory of chaos and literary theory; computer science as a model for literary theory; etc. Poetics, Volume 19/1-2 (1990), discusses the role of computer technology, especially data processing, in literary research. See both journals for further references.
(3) Although postmodern cybernetic fiction may also be considered as a borderline case between literature about and literature as technology; see for instance Porush (1989: 383 ff.) on Italo Calvino's cybernetic poetics.
(4) Schmidt's criticism, however, was repeated almost literally by Richard Kostelanetz in 1980: "Computer technology's actual role in artistic creation is limited to assistance. Therefore, anything done with computer assistance must be judged primarily by the contemporary values for the art itself, whether aural, graphic or literary" (Kostelanetz 1980a: 255-56). Again, it is overlooked that literature as technology may change ‘the art itself’.
(5) A decade during which the computer developed from a sophisticated calculator to a ‘personal’ device for writing, drawing, designing, composing, desk top publishing, etc.
(6) Copying is not just a legal matter but also a theme of central importance in the aesthetics of art and technology.
(7) ‘Text’ – as well as ‘reader’ – are placed in inverted commas to indicate the lack of a better term (cf. Lanham 1989: 265). One might object that we should not identify the ‘text’ with what is visible on the screen, but rather with the document or file on the disk. Yet what is that? An non-formated ASCII-‘Text Only’? A string of ASCII, or Hex, or binary codes? Would that be a fixed and substantiated text? And how are we supposed to ‘read’ that? The point is that there is a problem here.
(8) And as such it is a "Dialogpartner" (Schmidt) in a much more literal sense of the word.
(9) The non-hierarchic structure of texts is a central theme of postmodernist poetics; see, e.g., McHale 1987.
(10) Ever since the early days of Wiener (1948) and Shannon & Weaver (1949), modern cybernetics and information theory regard ‘information’ as a strictly quantitative factor, to be sharply distinguished from the meaning of a message. What counts is the amount of information that one can receive once a message is selected from a set of equiprobable messages, not the content of such a message itself. The specific concern of information theory, in Eco's words (1986: 169), "is the most economic way of sending a message", which obviously amounts to an interest in message forms and structures that combine the transmission of a maximum amount of information with a minimal risk of ambiguity and ineffectiveness (which is also a main theme of Bern Porter's and Eugen Gomringer's poetics; see below, part 3 and 4). This, in turn, implies that the symbol systems used in devising such messages are considered only on the level of their internal structure, i.e. as "monoplanar" (Eco: ibid.), opaque devices. Information theory and ‘technological’ poetics share this fundamental interest.
(11) I grant that this may be more obvious in the case of the avant garde tradition of poetics (and art theory) considered here, than in the case of the ‘tradition of Great Books’, with which Lanham is concerned.
(12) Clearly, information theorists like Abraham Moles (e.g. 1958; cf. his influence in the fields of permutational and intermedia art) and semioticians like Max Bense (e.g. 1969; cf. his influence in the field of Concrete poetry) have played an important role in this respect as well.
(13) Which is not to say that Porter is unaware of the utopian nature of his enterprise: "I am reminded of so called civilized cultures where selfishness, haughty show off, over emphasized privacy, superiority, founded on the intrinsically artificial and basically unsound, on the overwhelming singleness of purpose toward personal death that defines an unexplainable factor which points to a refusal to know or do any different. Pity, then, only yourselves in your own stew. As for me, I've left" (1971: 38).
(14) Unfortunately, the majority of Porter's reproducible Scilit works are as yet unpublished. See Dick Higgins' introduction to I've Left (Porter 1971: v-xv; also in Higgins 1978: 110-120) for a description of some of these works, all in UCLA's Bern Porter Collection.
(15) Which also means that Concrete poetry is not as socially irresponsible as some of its critics (e.g. Enzensberger; cf. Kopfermann 1974: 145 ff.) accuse it to be. Whether or not a poet like Gomringer puts too much faith in the possibilities and values of ‘science’ is quite another matter. See Solt (1970), Kopfermann (1974), Kessler (1976), Weiss (1984), and Vos (1992) – to be supplemented by Clüver (forthcoming) – for an overview of Concrete poetics.
(16) See, e.g., De Rook (1975), Kostelanetz (1979), (1980b), (1981), and Weiss (1984) for examples and statements.
(17) Oswald Wiener may serve as an example. On the one hand, he explicitly rejected Gomringer's constellations, as a rather limited genre (1968: 241). But on the other hand, his summary of the activities of the Wiener Gruppe could have been a quote from Gomringer's Concrete poetics: "wenn wir uns als sprachingenieurs, sprachpragmatiker sahen, benutzten wir die worte als werkzeuge, und waren nicht nur am verhalten der worte in bestimmten sprachsituation (‘konstellationen’) interessiert (was das im naturwissenschaftlichen sinne experimentelle an unseren versuchen ausmachte), sondern auch an der steuerung konkreter situationen durch den sprachgebrauch" (Wiener 1967: 401).
(18) Many Concrete poets have, for instance, created such a connection by selecting the vocabulary of their texts from the realm of physics and mathematics; see, e.g., the work by Carl Fernbach-Flarsheim in Solt, ed. (1970), and Achleitner & Rühm (1980).
(19) OuLiPo was founded in 1960 by François Le Lionnais, as an offspring of the Collège de Pataphysique. The name of the group is an abbreviation of Ouvroir de Littérature Potentielle (Workshop for Potential Literature). During numerous sessions (see Bens 1980 for a collection of minutes) the members discussed what they later referred to as the mechanics of the art of literary creation. The Bibliothèque Oulipienne, a series published since 1974 (and collected in OuLiPo 1987), comprises their own literary activities, which are to be regarded as a product of these discussions. The following 25 persons are listed in OuLiPo (1987, vol. 2: xiii) as members of the group: Luc Etienne, Albert-Marie Schmidt, Paul Fournel, Noël Arnaud, Jacques Duchateau, Jacques Jonet, Marcel Bénabou, Jacques Roubaud, Latis, Jacques Bens, Stanley Chapman, Jean Queval, François Le Lionnais, Claude Berge, Ross Chambers, Raymond Queneau, Jean Lescure, André Blavier, François Caradec, Georges Perec, Harry Mathews, Paul Braffort, Italo Calvino, Michèle Métail. Several of the details concerning OuLiPo included in this article have been brought to my attention by Frank Rebel, for which I would like to express my gratitude.
(20) Although Bens (1981: 23), referring to "la potentialité de Cent Mille Milliards des Poèmes", seems to have changed his mind. Queneau himself (1963: 326) appears to regard the two terms as equivalent.
(21) Among the most rigid constraints are palindrome, acrostic, and lipogram; the latter prohibiting the use of at least one specified letter throughout a text; OuLiPo member Georges Perec holds the uncontested world record with his novel La Disparation (1969), an e-lipogram of almost 400 pages. Le Lionnais (1973b: 21) mentions "littérature-cri" – a bruitistic genre created by Marinetti and the Futurists and further developed by François Dufrêne (see Chopin 1979: 97 ff.) – as an example of an extremely liberal procedure.
(22) Such references to the ‘workshop’ character of the group, concerned with ‘pure research’, which is to be made productive by the ‘practical’ applications thereof in the (near) future, neatly comply with the average view on advanced technology. (Cf. also Oswald Wiener's statement quoted in note 17.)
(23) See Queneau (1963: 338) for similar comments. Many other examples of OuLiPo's innovations are included in OuLiPo (1973), (1981) and (1987).
(24) Thank you, A-M, for your valuable comments on an earlier version of this article.
| FACE Página anterior | | | Comunicação e Semiótica | Pós-Graduação | PUC-SP |