http://mith.umd.edu/eng738T/william-blakes-reorientation-of-textual-space-in-the-book-of-urizen/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=william-blakes-reorientation-of-textual-space-in-the-book-of-urizen English 738T, Spring 2015 Sat, 12 Nov 2016 04:10:10 +0000 hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.3.1 http://mith.umd.edu/eng738T/william-blakes-reorientation-of-textual-space-in-the-book-of-urizen/#comment-1345 Collin Lam Tue, 12 May 2015 19:53:35 +0000 http://mith.umd.edu/eng738T/?p=1395#comment-1345 I think plate 15 that you have shown offers a great example of Blake's obvious attempts to disrupt the text, but, more specifically, his desire to interrupt consciousness. The placement of the image forces the reader to break their reading mid-strophe. And yet, Blake uses images throughout his work to enhance the written text or represent something not expressed in the text. This textual/imagistic disruption functions sort of like discrepant supplementarity. The image and text may be inconsistent, but they only work in conjunction with each other. I like to think that that moment of interruption by the image or text, depending on how you look at it, mimics Blake's overall theme; his great distrust of a singular perspective or continuity. If it does, then it certainly begs the question whether his form mimics his content, or if his content mimics his form. I'm sure he would argue neither, but they form each other. I think plate 15 that you have shown offers a great example of Blake’s obvious attempts to disrupt the text, but, more specifically, his desire to interrupt consciousness. The placement of the image forces the reader to break their reading mid-strophe. And yet, Blake uses images throughout his work to enhance the written text or represent something not expressed in the text. This textual/imagistic disruption functions sort of like discrepant supplementarity. The image and text may be inconsistent, but they only work in conjunction with each other. I like to think that that moment of interruption by the image or text, depending on how you look at it, mimics Blake’s overall theme; his great distrust of a singular perspective or continuity. If it does, then it certainly begs the question whether his form mimics his content, or if his content mimics his form. I’m sure he would argue neither, but they form each other.

]]> http://mith.umd.edu/eng738T/william-blakes-reorientation-of-textual-space-in-the-book-of-urizen/#comment-1343 Ruth Mon, 11 May 2015 15:05:44 +0000 http://mith.umd.edu/eng738T/?p=1395#comment-1343 Your post made me think of our first conversation about Blake and hacking the book. Before, we discussed how books can be hacked and what counted as ‘hacking’. I think discussing how the text and the images work together to create the alternate, storyworld of Blake would be another access point of discussing the kind of hacking we did at the beginning of the semester. In Adam Komisuruk’s article he describes the ‘flicker’ of the eye between the text and the image. He mainly focuses on anomalies, glitches, found on the page that stick out and therefore make the reader keep going back to them. However, I think what he describes is similar to the way you discuss your approach to plate 15. I think part of the shuttling/flickering that happens when reading Blake is between the text and the image. Even more so, perhaps, in the editions we had in class where the text was in two places, in the front as Blake’s prints and in the back typed out. I constantly moved my eyes from the printed text to the front where the images were and even on the page from the text to the image. I think that kind of interaction opens up different spaces in the text that could be accessed and ‘hacked’. By space, I mean the blank space between text and image and the moments between glances, like Komisaruk describes, it creates a lot of ‘in-between’ moments of reading and looking at the images. Consciously tracking those movements and ascribing their purpose and reason would be a different way to hack Blake’s book. The reader would no longer be just a passive viewer of the storyworld, but they would be slightly more active in understanding how the image is being produced in their mind so that ‘reading’ becomes a way of hacking a text as long as the reader is aware of the spaces they are navigating. Your post made me think of our first conversation about Blake and hacking the book. Before, we discussed how books can be hacked and what counted as ‘hacking’. I think discussing how the text and the images work together to create the alternate, storyworld of Blake would be another access point of discussing the kind of hacking we did at the beginning of the semester.
In Adam Komisuruk’s article he describes the ‘flicker’ of the eye between the text and the image. He mainly focuses on anomalies, glitches, found on the page that stick out and therefore make the reader keep going back to them. However, I think what he describes is similar to the way you discuss your approach to plate 15. I think part of the shuttling/flickering that happens when reading Blake is between the text and the image. Even more so, perhaps, in the editions we had in class where the text was in two places, in the front as Blake’s prints and in the back typed out. I constantly moved my eyes from the printed text to the front where the images were and even on the page from the text to the image.
I think that kind of interaction opens up different spaces in the text that could be accessed and ‘hacked’. By space, I mean the blank space between text and image and the moments between glances, like Komisaruk describes, it creates a lot of ‘in-between’ moments of reading and looking at the images. Consciously tracking those movements and ascribing their purpose and reason would be a different way to hack Blake’s book. The reader would no longer be just a passive viewer of the storyworld, but they would be slightly more active in understanding how the image is being produced in their mind so that ‘reading’ becomes a way of hacking a text as long as the reader is aware of the spaces they are navigating.

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