N. Katherine Hayles, « Print is Flat, Code is Deep : The Importance of Media-Specific Analysis », Poetics 2004. Observation préliminaire :
the long reign of print made it easy for literary criticism to ignore the specificities of the codex book when discussing literary texts. With significant exceptions, print literature was widely regarded as not having a body, only a speaking mind.
En conclusion, après avoir dressé le portrait des enjeux médiatiques de la littérature hypertextuelle :
In retrospect, we can see the view that the text is an immaterial verbal construction as an ideology that inflicts the Cartesian split between mind and body upon the textual corpus, separating into two fictional entities what is in actuality a dynamically interacting whole. Rooted in the Cartesian tradition, this ideology also betrays a class and economic division between the work of creation—the privileged activity of the author as an inspired genius—and the work of producing the book as a physical artifact, an activity relegated to publishers and booksellers. As the means of production moves into the hands of writers and artists for both print and electronic media with desktop publishing, fine letter presses run by artists’ collectives, such as the Visual Studies Workshop Press, and electronic publishing on the Web, the traditional split between the work of creation and the work of production no longer obtains. This shift in the economic and material circumstances in which literary works are produced makes all the more urgent the challenge of rethinking critical and theoretical frameworks accordingly. We can no longer afford to pretend that texts are immaterial or that text on screen is the same as text in print. The immateriality of the text has ceased to be a useful or even a viable fiction.
