Posthumography: The Boundaries of Literature and the Digital Trace
Craig Saper
University of Central Florida
Si vous ètiez mort, quelqu'un devrait bien le faire à votre place. [If you were dead, someone would do it even better in your place].
— Gérard Genette to Roland Barthes, as recounted by Genette, 2006.But knowing that she will not always be around, she has also trained other artists to re-perform some of her work.
— Arthur C. Danto, "Sitting with Marina [Abramovic]," NY Times, May 23, 2010.... [Martin Gardner] had read some of my work, and trusted me sufficiently that I was welcome to write a blurb myself and attach his name to it. I duly did so, and the hardback edition of Prime Obsession carries a 60-word blurb "by" Martin Gardner on the dust jacket, all 60 of the words actually written by me.
— John Derbyshire, May 24, 2010, "Martin Gardner, R.I.P.," National Review Online.
Write as if you were dead.
— Zen admonition (my translation)
[1] Posthumous publication, with the editor inevitably performing the dead person's imagined identity and wishes, delicately balances between invention or hoax and channeling of the departed's spirit. Once we recognize these issues, those types of publication open on to an entire field of study. The neologism in the title of this essay, and of the planned issue of Rhizomes that never came to pass, names the neglected genre of posthumously published texts (i.e., papers, letters, incomplete monographs, etc.). The announcement of this genre arrives in an era when scholars, archives, libraries, and even fans posthumously publish papers, documents, ephemera, letters, and confessions online and in other digital forms. In fact, much of the focus in the emerging area of digital humanities concerns editorial practices and theories to make these, otherwise inaccessible, posthumous texts widely available. The first two epigraphs suggest a rather mundane situation where future performers or editors will reproduce the artist's work. The third hints at a more nefarious affair. Derbyshire waited until Gardner had died to publish the private correspondence, and, in a twist, he confesses that the work attributed to Gardner was actually written by Derbyshire. Gardner cannot object to this scenario from the grave. Gardner's identity was always already actually Derbyshire, and that extreme case hints that the posthumously published text has more than a little of the editor's identity.
[2] Considering the importance of those texts at the boundaries of publication in the digital humanities, it remains under-theorized. The text never published in the author's lifetime (and often expressly prohibited by the textual testament of the author's intentions) shares some of the theoretical concerns of other boundaries of publication. The first epigraph here suggests that there is always a performative aspect to the posthumous publication. When the artist or writer is no longer "around," then others will have to "re-perform" the works. That performance now involves storage, retrieval, and reissuing in digital or other forms, all of which attempt to recreate the experience of reading the original text.
[3] The editorial process is never simply allowing a window onto the text, but requires interpretation, transcription, annotations, formatting, and the usually invisible process of OCR (optical character recognition) or the process of scanning papers and documents into a digital portable document format (PDF). There is a transition now well underway to translate into electronic digital form and OCR the contents of archives and libraries and much more. Printing techniques, marginal notes in an author's book, and even the writing desk become important considerations. The e-readers and online publication modes, now omnipresent, arguably the dominant mode of publication, make the boundary issue particularly pressing. The boundaries (the scanned papers, the handwritten note, the writing desk used, the type of printing techniques, the illuminated manuscript, etc.) become crucial concerns.
[4] This fascination with the facsimile appears in fine press publications as well as digital archives. For example, recently Flying Horse Editions, that I am informally associated with, commissioned scholar/printer Michael Phillips to produce an edition of William Blake's Songs of Innocence. The project includes a 40-page pamphlet describing and documenting the printing process. The Blake pamphlet-length poem was printed using the same dauber technique that Blake had used. And, the printing was made on handmade paper using "historically accurate pigments," specially produced for this edition. Important libraries and archives have purchased the limited edition in an effort to recover the aura of the original. A more interesting experiment would examine how the facsimile differs from the original in spite of the performance to copy each step and every material, including the pigments, but instead one sees what looks like an old degraded original. Similarly deluded, the goal of much of the digital humanities is to reproduce the facsimile copy in all of its glorious degraded, smudged, decaying, unreadable, illegible, and previously inaccessible form. Those signs of the text's philological distance from what was originally produced now, in the digital age, becomes proof of a new OCR'd originality.
[5] Others have examined these issues, especially the new wave of philologists, led by Jerome McGann, interested in the visual design of literature and the use of databases to open texts to the historical circumstances of publishing, printing, and designing. McGann seeks to reproduce archival materials in facsimile form and include annotations that highlight "the social intercourse of texts—the context of their relations [...] conceived [as] an essential part of the 'text itself' [...] to gain an adequate critical grasp of the textual situation" (McGann, 2001, 12). The theoretical approach sometimes thought of as opposed to the philologists' sought to locate the production of meaning with general cultural codes and forces, formal and stylistic effects, or the actively collaborating reader. A literary critic did not tack the work down to a single determining circumstance of an author's situation, but sought to explore the polysemy of the possible meanings, either cultural, poetic, or reader associations. These activities opened texts to multiple avenues of meaning except the philological, seen as old fashioned and restrictive. When critics sought to return to historical studies of the circumstances of a literary work's production, they sought to expose the prejudice against the archival historical efforts considered boring and "Dryasdust scholarship" (McGann, 1985, 93). One aspect of that production, the status of the text as posthumously published, might now take on new significance.
[6] Unfortunately, the apparent opposition made by both camps allows them to dismiss, or ignore, aspects of the text's status as it relates to the boundaries of publication. The move to the digital trace has made the published text's status – its infrastructural boundary off the published page (i.e., its structuring absences or status) – of crucial significance. The theory versus philology split made the text's status an area that neither could claim. The philologists did not see it as a material constraint of the text's production, and the theorists thought of it as an attempt to tack down the text to a monolithic determining factor of an author's biography (e.g., whether the text was published with the author's conscious approval or posthumously with or without a testament of approval). Avital Ronell traces the line of reproduction and technologies' recall devices as they call us into a monumental and impossible forgetting, suggesting that what the new technologies uncover inevitably further sediments the direct line to the text's production, and the supposedly mute philological efforts add noise to the line, but without those efforts we would have no access at all. It is not that Ronell claims that one can choose ignorance of a text's history and social context of production (or reading) over clear lines and answered calls without consequence. Her challenge of that false choice led to a new set of literary theories that set philosophical issues in con- or disjunction with philology. One of the most interesting scholars now working on the theoretical issues surrounding the interactions of authorship and a text's status is Richard Burt.
[7] When Richard Burt and I first proposed a special issue, and an MLA panel, on boundaries of publication, both specifically dealing with rejection letters left sitting unpublished in an archive's box, as one aspect of the boundaries of publication, we were bemused by the lack of response. We couldn't account for this lack of response. Certainly there are taboos. We did not call for confessions or abject displays of embarrassment. It still remains unaccountable to us.
[8] Certainly, there was interest in this area. Articles related to posthumous publication appear frequently in newspapers and magazines, and academics are often quoted in them. What do scholars do with the parts of a posthumous collection that do not fit in the larger portrait of an author's significance that they are attempting to present? Theorists and philosophers have examined the issues of that which is not published (e.g., a scribbled note), most notably Jacques Derrida, but in only a few limited cases does the issue of the text's status as posthumous play a role in appreciating its meanings, significance, or contradictions. One might read in an introduction that, for example, a Franz Kafka story was posthumously published, but does its status as posthumous change the story's meaning? What if the author left explicit instructions not to publish papers, texts, stories, journals, or letters? What does it mean to publish these various kinds of writing posthumously? What kind of status does an unpublished manuscript have? [i] What about an unpublished manuscript rumored to exist?
[9] In "Dialogue and Dialogism," Paul de Man grants the reader who has exclusive access to unpublished manuscripts extraordinary power. After quoting a passage from Leo Strauss's Persecution and the Art of Writing about ways in which oblique forms of speech constitute responses to persecution, de Man writes:
Strauss could have added another salient feature: the circulation of more or less clandestine class or seminar notes by initiated disciples or, even more symptomatic, the rumored (and often confirmed) existence of unpublished manuscripts made available only to the enterprising or privileged researcher and which will decisively seal one interpretation at the expense of all rival modes—at least until one of the rivals, will, in his turn, discover the real or imaginary counter-manuscript on which to base his counter-claim. (The Resistance to Theory, 108)
Remarkably, de Man appears to find immaterial the difference between a rumored or imagined manuscript and a real manuscript that has been determined to exist. The reader's power to seal an interpretation is necessarily not due to the existence of a manuscript; the researcher can be practicing a hoax (or taking a manuscript and interpolating additions of his or her own as Burt has done here). De Man does not pursue this possibility, but instead subtly leaves open just what the researcher has power over: de Man writes that access "will decisively seal one interpretation," but he doesn't specify what over the entire oeuvre of an author. If so, how does access to unpublished manuscripts leverage a sealed reading of published texts? Or is de Man saying that the research extend just over the unpublished manuscript, in which case the researcher does not have much power at all? [ii] And is "one interpretation" to be understood as monological rather than as dialogical? Is access to the unpublished manuscript anti-dialogical? If so, de Man implies that even the "community tied together by the common decrypting the repressed message hidden in the public utterance," a "community bound to be small, self-selective, and likely to consider itself as chosen elite" (108) will always be turning a textual fiction, that "does not mean to say what it actually says" into what the "right community of readers" (108) regard as fact.
[10] Posthumous publication helps throw into focus a broader question: What is the relation between publication and print? Consider a change in the "Works Cited" section in PMLA in an introduction to a cluster of essays on philology by Michelle R. Warren (See Figure 1). The conventions of introductions make it virtually impossible for a philologist like Warren to analyze the meaning of the word "Print" that follows some of the references in the "Works Cited" section of her own essay and of those in the essays she introduces. Why should the PMLA confuse print with presumably bound paper, as if electronic editions of the PMLA were not print, as if the pdf of a PMLA article could not be printed out from a computer? Are they using a now archaic form of the word "print" as in the pre-digital "Books in Print" catalogues? Was there an internal debate over the use of the word "Print" by PMLA's editorial board? How did this new convention find its way into PMLA? Again, it raises the question, "What is print?" What is the difference between the book and its support (paper or computer screen or vellum, etc)? (see Derrida's "The Book to Come" in Paper Machine; Michelle Warren "Introduction: Relating Philology, Practicing Humanism," (PMLA 1 2 5 . 2 (2010), 283-88).
[11] The additional word makes the certain citations (books but not articles) refer to an impossible binary between the non-printed and the printed. In our essays, the posthumography examines precisely this false opposition as the scanned, OCR'd, and exact digital copies suggest a sometimes better (built-in magnification or zoom-in, easy computer aided comparison with other printed-and-scanned texts) than original unpublished (unprinted) version. In the example below, it is fascinating to note that the philological literary critic Erich Auerbach's Mimesis was not read/cited as Print. What a perfect title to not include the word "print" after the citation as "print" adds a new dimension to mimesis. Maybe the MLA bibliographers should have insisted that the word "mimetic" follow the citations. If the MLA bibliographers had meant to refer to paper reproductions of books, then they would have chosen the word "paper," but that wouldn't explain why only books are indicated as "print" and not journals. In publishing, there is a third possibility, print-on-demand, that has no place in the current guidelines.
[12] The MLA's use of "print" in the narrow sense of paper ignores a further alteration of writing from textual production to textual processing that arguably alters the status of what ends up being published. As N. Katherine Hayles notes, even the paper copies of books and articles now begin in digital form, spend all the steps of production in digital form, and only as an un-necessary possibility get printed (by digital presses and printers) on paper. If the word "print" was meant to indicate the ideology of a print-literate culture as opposed to the "electrate" culture, then how does one cite a book printed on paper by Greg Ulmer on electracy, as "electrate print"? Dealing with archival materials and publishing those materials, as I have in a couple of recent critical editions, the archivists scanned the texts into digital form. We worked on those scans, made changes to the scanned text, reset some of the indecipherable text, and made it available in at least six forms: online on the website, as a PDF for download on to a computer (which the reader could then print), and as laminate, paper, wire, or cloth bound printed on paper versions. How would one indicate that text's status? The obvious effaced binary with the use of the word "print" is that the other side of the effaced opposition (digital? unprinted? not paper?) sets up a hierarchy. Here is the screen-grab of a Works Cited section from a recent issue of PMLA. I read the page in my paper copy, but used a PDF screen-grab sent to me via email from Richard Burt, converted to a jpg, placed in a word processing document, and, then sent to a journal for publication (how it was reviewed, as a pdf or online, and how the technical editor formatted it in html, I am uncertain). I am quoting a style, a convention as in the required use of a word, equivalent to marking a posthumously published text with the [sic] mark rather than the author's text in the Works Cited section.
[13] The working title of our special issue of Rhizomes was "Boundaries of Publication: What Remains Unpublished, Unpublishable, Resisted, Rejected, Lost, Set Aside, Buried, Posthumously Considered, Unthought, Merely Mentioned, Called Up, Cited but Nonexistent, Elicited without Execution, Crossed-out, Under Erasure, Forgotten, Undone To-do List, Incomplete, An Undiscovered Sleeper, Interminably Incubating, Accidentally Deleted, Un-recovered Data, Etc.. A special issue of the journal Rhizomes: Cultural Studies in Emerging Knowledge, co-edited by Richard Burt and Craig Saper." The description of the issue explained that publication, one reasonably assumes, oscillates between the poles of acceptance--what comes to define an archive—and rejection—that which is excluded from it, symbolized by the rejection letter. To be published then depends on a frame, and piece of the process, that exceeds the outcome, but which few have studied. Our special issue sought to trouble the notion of a stable archive defined by the boundaries it draws between published and unpublished/unpublishable work. We invited studies of rejected, lost, forgotten works, articles on the topic of (un)publishability, and theories of the boundaries of publication.
[14] We set this call for papers in the context of historically significant rejections and unpublished texts. Richard Brooks, director of Faber & Faber in 1944, rejected George Orwell's Animal Farm. Twenty-five years later, The Times published the rejection letter he wrote to Orwell, described as an "extraordinary document." Walter Benjamin's infamous rejections by editors and publishers had serious consequences; some have suggested it was a matter of life and death. In his essay "Books by the Mentally Ill: From My Collection," Benjamin wrote that a sense of personal embarrassment is often a productive occasion for criticism. Purge yourself of your embarrassing rejections. As a way of historicizing rejection, we invited authors to follow Benjamin's lead and send us their own rejection letters, historical rejection letters, and essays about the theoretical and historical machinations of press rejections to be published in a special issue of Rhizomes, and we formed a theoretical school (like the Yale School that formed around Jacques Derrida's work decades ago): the Rejectionist Movement.
[15] We invited essays from the author's point of view, the editor's, and the mss. reader's. The theoretical issues could address the language of rejection letters: "submission," "revise and resubmit," "blind submission." Essays may also examine what rejection means, how it differs from failure, data loss, deletion of data, and other kinds of necessary (self)destruction; how it resembles romantic rejection, abandonment, dejection, abjection, and so on since we are what, and how, we write. Perhaps this paraphernalia of publishing – anacoluthon, supplement, a (discarded) remainder of the process – functions as a structuring absence. Perhaps rejection letters mark the bridge between the current interest in archival research (David Kasten, Pete Stallybrass, Jerome McGann, et al) and the sociopoetic theories of cultural production (Dominick LaCapra, Mieke Bal, et al).
[16] Given our history of editing books and special issues of journals, the near total lack of response to our calls for papers and MLA papers astonished us. We received one abstract for the MLA panel, two potential papers for the special issue (one of which was submitted simply because it was rejected by a slew of other editors), and two or three vague proposals for the special issue (one consisted of previously unpublished rejection letters to a prominent Beat poet that did not have the poet's estate's permission to publish or even mention; even now I'm not sure how to handle the names or the materials). We also received many one-liners and anecdotes about rejection (and mock rejections of our project from scholars like Jean-Michel Rabaté). [iii] When we expanded the call for papers, we received no new material. At first I suspected that perhaps our reputations as theorists using contentious approaches made potential contributors shy away from sending us anything. On more careful consideration, I recalled how I had edited other volumes recently and received many contributions, as had Richard Burt, so our association with the project could not (completely) have poisoned the well. Furthermore, Rhizomes has an international reach, and is widely considered an important venue for cutting-edge research and emerging knowledge in cultural theory; and, they also get many submissions to their calls for papers. The topic seemed like the sticking point. It was by definition interdisciplinary, contentious, and under-theorized precisely because it focused on the boundaries of publication and knowledge (so, outside scholars' primary focus on the accepted, published, and justified as significant by publication). To examine the unpublished or the tenuous status of the posthumous publication would weaken the case for the significance of the work and by extension weaken the significance of an author's oeuvre. A letter, papers, or incomplete texts not intended for publication, what Roland Barthes would have called the "receivable," a little known third term in the readerly versus writerly binary, is a "text, guided, armed by a notion of the un-publishable, [that] would require the following response: I can neither read nor write what you produce, but I receive it, like a fire, a drug, an enigmatic disorganization" (Barthes, 118). This has been precisely the terrain of much of my interdisciplinary career, an interest in the boundaries of publication: the un-publishable, the posthumously published counter to the directives of the deceased, and infrastructure surrounding, but ultimately absent from, publication. This certainly did not prove the significance of a work (a key aspect of much traditional humanities scholarship); it focused on the biographical issues (considered old fashioned) like the author's intention not to publish, and it by definition dealt with a series of boundaries – the fiction of the author's non-fiction intention and meaning from the grave, the publication of the un-publishable, and the digital duplication of the original text (not merely a transcription).
[17] In place of the special issue of essays that never materialized, we decided to publish an extended essay by Richard Burt on posthumous publication, a shorter essay by Julian Yates on Walter Benjamin focused on the disappearance of a manuscript in his briefcase after Benjamin committed suicide in Port Bou, Spain, and this introduction. After we had built the non-issued special issue (which appears here as a section of a journal), we worked with an artist and designer, Chris Burnett, in preparing Burt's essay. What follows in this issue is Burnett's watermark and red typewriter tape ribbon project running throughout Burt's essay. Burt's transcription, running over 36 thousand words (perhaps among the lengthiest scholarly journal articles in the humanities), suggests that posthumography offers much to investigate especially in terms of issues like storage/collecting, reading/access, and originality/posthumous editing and publishing. Burt's research recommends him to transcribe and publish the definitive (or at least first) sustained study of the posthumous status of a text.
[18] It was a sunny Florida afternoon when Professor Richard Burt first approached me about editing a volume on rejection letters as the structuring absence of publication. He had misplaced his glasses before a talk he was scheduled to give, and confessed to me that he was blind without them. We were already late, and I imagined my colleagues waiting impatiently for us to appear.
[19] Over the next year, he sent me hundreds of leads, and we began working on the idea for writing the entire issue ourselves as a kind of serious hoax. We could make clear the intellectual stakes raised by our topic by telling an intellectual auto-co-biography. We also thought we might push gently against the subtitle of the journal Rhizomes and talk about re-merging knowledges or residual knowledges, or failed, never to emerge knowledges – kind of a Museum of Jurassic Knowledges (modeled on the Museum of Jurassic Technology in Los Angeles). We thought about setting up the issue as a defense of metaphysics (as in, it's not over) and philosophical / deconstructive practices of resistant (not) reading. These ideas grew out of Burt's interest in what I have called "scandalography," and it was that research that first linked Burt's research and mine.
[20] Burt staged a conference at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst in the early 1990s, and he invited me to talk on scandalography. We began a twenty-year conversation during that conference about the peripheral issues (structuring absences) surrounding writing and interpretation. I had argued that Jacques Lacan used scandal – a scandalizing intervention – as the key aspect of his analytic technique, and I played this scandal-writing against Fatty Arbuckle being written out of film history by a scandal he could not control (and for which he was completely exonerated). Burt investigated how adaptations and posthumous revisions to Shakespeare's works often employed similar techniques. He eventually played the role of a scriptwriter and pornographer to write the script for a porn version of Othello, after he was contacted by porn director Roy Karch, who had read Burt's Unspeakable ShaXXXspeares: Queer Theory and American Kiddie Culture (1999).
[21] Our relationship took a new turn some years later when Richard Burt and I planned to attend a conference on psychoanalysis at the University of Minnesota. As it happened, I could not attend the conference; so, Richard agreed to play me at the conference – to read my paper on "Freud on Vacation," in which I argued that the unconscious was structured on, and like, a vacation – in addition to playing himself when he read his own paper. Although he announced at the outset that he was not Craig Saper but Richard Burt delivering Saper's paper, his presentation of my paper was greeted with enthusiasm by those that continued to think of him as Craig Saper, by those who accused him of inventing the name and character of Saper to give this particular paper, and by those who wrote to me telling me it was the best paper I had ever delivered. The subsequent anthology did not include the paper, and did not even mention either Burt or me. We were the vacationers of the unconscious.
[22] Burt's interest in posthumous publication might be said to date back to a Derrida conference held at the University of Florida in 2006. Burt gave a paper, called "Shock Jacques" or "Derrideath," that was expressly supposed to be merely an introduction to a session. In presenting the paper, he mimicked Flava Flav, the rap star, and investigated the shock appeal of Derrida, and reading Derrida posthumously. The oddly humorless crowd of Derrideans (Peggy Kamuf, Geoff Bennington, and J. Hillis Miller, all of whom were there not to listen to Burt but to the speakers he was supposed to be introducing) greeted Burt's pun-filled Derridean paper with at first silence (and then the next day with outrage). Suddenly, Derrida's status had changed in his new posthumous apparition, a holy ghost who deserved only idealization and its repressions. Had Derrida lived to attend the conference as originally planned, he would no doubt have marveled at the issues involved as he was often using similar strategies in his work and provoking angry rebuttals. From that experience and his other performative works, Richard Burt has here undertaken to produce the first extended analysis of posthumography.
Notes
[i] Richard Burt on Paul de Man (this section written by Burt).
[ii] For a fictionalized account of a researcher discovering a few pages of a manuscript hidden inside the cover of a book, see Perec and Mathews, 2003.
"Dear Richard,
Many thanks--I don't think I have something for you, but my friend and colleague Paul Saint Amour might have, since he has worked on copyright issues to do with the Joyce archive; I will also pass this to a student of mine who works on the same topic. Good to hear from you!
Warmly,
Jean-Michel"— Jean-Michel Rabaté, email sent to Richard Burt: Wednesday, October 14, 2009 9:10 AM
"Of course! I wish I had been more offensive in "rejecting." Something
like: "You'll never publish a line by me in your creepy roots!"
Very best,
Jean-Michel"— Jean-Michel Rabaté, email sent to Richard Burt, Thursday, October 15, 2009 4:02 PM
Works Cited
Barthes, Roland. Roland Barthes. originally published in French, 1975. The discussion of the receivable takes place in the section entitled, "Lisible, scriptable et au-delà -- Readerly, writerly, and beyond." Trans. Howard, Richard. 1st American ed. New York: Hill and Wang, 1977.
Benjamin, Walter. "Books by the Mentally Ill: From My Collection." Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings. Ed. Michael William Jennings, Marcus Paul Bullock, Howard Eiland, Gary Smith, Edmund Jephcott, and Rodney Livingstone. Cambridge, Mass: Belknap, 2004.
Blake, William. Songs of Innocence. Ed. Phillips, Michael. Orlando: Flying Horse Editions, 2010.
Brooks, Richard. "T.S. Eliot's Snort of Rejection for Animal Farm." The Sunday Times March 29, 2009. 2009: n.p.
Burt, Richard. Unspeakable ShaXXXspeares: Queer Theory and American Kiddie Culture. 1st ed. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1998.
Danto, Arthur C. "Sitting with Marina." New York Times, May 23, 2010 ed.
De Man, Paul. The Resistance to Theory. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989.
Derbyshire, John. "Martin Gardner, R.I.P." National Review Online 2010.
Derrida, Jacques. Paper Machine. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2005.
Genette, Gérard. "Secretaire," Bardadrac. Paris: Seuil, 2006, 152.
Hayles, N. Katherine. Electronic Literature: New Horizons for the Literary. The Ward-Phillips Lectures in English Language and Literature. Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame, 2008.
Hotel O. Dir. Karch, Roy. Script by Richard Burt. Team Video. 2002.
Mathews, Georges Perec and Harry. "Roussel and Venice: Outline of a Melancholic Geography." The Case of the Persevering Maltese: Collected Essays. Ed. Mathews, Harry. Dalkey Archive Press, 2003. 173-85.
McGann, Jerome J. The Beauty of Inflections: Literary Investigations in Historical Method and Theory. Oxford Oxfordshire, New York: Clarendon Press ; Oxford University Press, 1985.
––– Radiant Textuality : Literature after the World Wide Web. New York: Palgrave, 2001.
Rabaté, Jean-Michel. "Re: Rejection." Ed. Burt, Richard. Email, 2009.
Ronell, Avital. The Telephone Book : Technology--Schizophrenia--Electric Speech. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1989.
Strauss, Leo. Persecution and the Art of Writing. Glencoe, Ill.,: Free Press, 1952.
Ulmer, Gregory L. Internet Invention : From Literacy to Electracy. New York: Longman, 2003.
Warren, Michelle. "Introduction: Relating Philology, Practicing Humanism." PMLA 125.2 (2010): 283-288.