Texts
Texts
This chapter discusses text and how it changed writing. In their battle against the spoken language, characters of the alphabet suck the life of the language up into themselves: letters are vampires. Lines formed from these letters that have come alive are called “texts.” There are two types of text. One type communicates, informs, transmits; an example of this is scientific communication. The other is expressionistic, intense, written under pressure; an example is lyric poetry. Most communicative texts want to be comfortably received, to be easy to read. They must therefore be denotative; that is, they must transmit a message with a single meaning. The printed text carries the charge of both the writer’s expression and the publisher’s resistance. It is a clenched fist, and as a clenched text, it is meant to impress both intentions on its future reader. In other words, it is meant to inform a reader. In the face of textual inflation and the informatic revolution, the question is whether writing, publishing, printing, and reading still make sense.
Keywords: text, writing, spoken language, alphabet, letters, informatic revolution, publishing, printing, reading
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