Oh, God, that was a book I shouldn't have read. Not now. Not while desperately trying to finish a dissertation in style.
Of course I should have read it, at least in my lifetime, preferably a few years ago. But not now.
I have been aware of it for a long time, naturally. People do mention books to me, and this has been pointed out as relevant by at least three people whose advice I listen to. But if you are to read everything before you begin, you never begin.
I have weak spot for elegant theory, nice categories, models, boxes and hierarchies that put everything in place. And with it goes the pleasure in tearing down those that aren't what they promise. (Maybe I should have taken more math after all, and skipped this soft media mess. But they have Gödel, don't they?) And then of course I enjoyed Genette's Architext. Starting with Plato, going all the way to Todorov, Frye, Scholes and others, he just rips all the categories and generic systems apart. Architext is not unlike Eco's (rather unreadable) Focault's Pendulum, where Eco first makes the reader believe in any kind of numerology and myth, before he crashes it all by demonstrating that every hot dog stand has some measure that can be multiplied into the circumference of the Earth or the distance to the moon, and that all accounts of afterlife are similar to birth: narrow tunnel, sudden light, nice relatives on the other side. Gennete shows that triadic models may be constructed anywhere, and if you make an empty box in your matrix, you fill it the next instant.
But what with my own work? Am I not proposing a summary of computer literature in three (yes, of course!) levels: machine, cybertextual and semantic. Have I not deviced a rhetoric that forms a triadic (or bipod, but still the wholy number 3) relation to medium and genre? Do I not wish to point out restraints of rhetorical convergence that number three: of distribution, of display, and of sign system?
Oh my.
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