"A galaxy of signifiers”: David Clark’s "88 Constellations" for Wittgenstein as a Paradigm of the Barthesian Writerly/Plural Text

Wojciech Drąg

Abstract


This article argues that David Clark’s digital biography 88 Constellations for Wittgenstein (to be played with the Left Hand) (2008) meets all the criteria of a writerly/plural text as defined by Roland Barthes in S/Z (1970). The discussion focuses on the interactive and reversible structure of Clark’s work, as well as on the plurality and hybridity of its components. The experimental form of Wittgenstein’s biography is examined as an attempt to capture the elusiveness and the contradictions of its subject.


Keywords


electronic literature; digital biography; writerly text; hybridity; experimental life-writing

Full Text:

PDF

References


Barthes, R. (1970). S/Z. (R. Miller, Trans.). Malden: Blackwell.

Butler, K (n.d.). Wayfinding in Wittgenstein’s World: 88 Constellations. Brain Pickings. Retrieved January 1, 2020, from https://www.brainpickings.org/2010/02/03/88-constellations/.

Clark, D. (2008). 88 Constellations for Wittgenstein (to be played with the Left Hand). Retrieved January 1, 2020, from http://88constellations.net/88.html.

Clark, D. (2015). Pictures in the stars: 88 constellations for Wittgenstein and the online “biography”. Biography, 38(2), 290-296.

Cornis-Pope, M. (2014). Literature and multimedia through the latter half of the twentieth and early twenty-first century. In M. Cornis-Pope (Ed.), New Literary Hybrids in the Age of Multimedia Expression: Crossing Borders, Crossing Genres (pp. 3-23). Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

Hayles, N. K. (2012). 88 constellations for Wittgenstein. In Medias Res. Retrieved January 1, 2020, from http://mediacommons.org/imr/2012/02/03/88-constellations-wittgensten.

Hayles, N. K. (2016). Foreword. In S. Groes (Ed.), Memory in the Twenty-First Century (pp. x-xiii). Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

Johnston, D. J. (2016). Aesthetic Animism: Digital Poetry’s Ontological Implications. Cambridge: MIT Press.

Manovich, L. (2001). The Language of New Media. Cambridge: MIT Press.

Montfort, N., & Husárová, Z. (2012). Shuffle literature and the hand of fate. electronic book review. Retrieved January 1, 2020, from https://electronicbookreview.com/essay/shuffle-literature-and-the-hand-of-fate/.

Novak, J. (2017). Experiments in life-writing: Introduction. In L. Boldrini, & J. Novak (Eds.), Experiments in Life-Writing: Intersections of Auto/Biography and Fiction (pp. 1-36). London: Palgrave Macmillan.

Nye, D. E. (1983). The Invented Self: An Anti-Biography, from Documents of Thomas A. Edison. Odense: Odense University Press.

Olsen, L. (2005). Notes toward the musicality of creative disjunction, or: Fiction by collage. Symploke, 12(1), 130-135.

Pavić, M. (1984). Dictionary of the Khazars. London: Vintage.

Pavić, M. (1998). The beginning and the end of reading – The beginning and the end of the novel. Review of Contemporary Fiction, 18(2), 142-146.

Prager, K., & Hannesschläger, V. (2017). From “anti-biography” to online biography? In W. Hemecker, & E. Saunders (Eds.), Biography in Theory: Key Texts with Commentaries (pp. 256-262). Berlin: Walter de Gruyter.

Rettberg, S. (2019). Electronic Literature. Cambridge: Polity Press.

Solove, D. J. (2004). The Digital Person: Technology and Privacy in the Information Age. New York: New York University Press.

Spiegelman, A. (1980). The Complete Maus. New York: Pantheon.

Van Dijk, Y. (2014). Picking up the pieces: History and memory in European digital literature. In M. Cornis-Pope (Ed.), New Literary Hybrids in the Age of Multimedia Expression: Crossing Borders, Crossing Genres (pp. 107-122). Amsterdam: John Benjamins.




DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.17951/lsmll.2020.44.2.113-122
Date of publication: 2020-07-14 13:48:38
Date of submission: 2020-02-12 08:55:13


Statistics


Total abstract view - 1179
Downloads (from 2020-06-17) - PDF - 688

Indicators



Refbacks

  • There are currently no refbacks.


Copyright (c) 2020 Wojciech Drag

Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.