"Remediating the Book Form: Textual Spaces in the New Media Age"

In his 1991 Writing Space. The Computer, Hypertext and the History of Writing, David Bolter addressed the crucial cultural implications of new digital technologies. Arguing that patterns of writing and reading are not 'universally human' but contingent results of specific technological circumstances, he claimed that every 'writing technology' (from the old papyrus roll to modern digital screens) produces a distinctive 'writing space', which in turn affects the organization of the whole text, the perception of its meaning, as well as wider notions of textuality and authorship. Such remarks acquire further relevance in the context of what David Bolter and Richard Grusin have more recently defined 'remediation', a process which implies the rivalry between different media aiming at refashioning prior media forms: "what is new about new media comes from the particular ways in which they refashion older media and the ways in which older media refashion themselves to answer the challenges of new media. (Bolter-Grusin 1999: 15) The remediation of the book form offers one of the most relevant instances of this process. Important issues are raised by modern hypertexts which echo the layout of Medieval manuscripts as well as by the amazing flexibility of computer graphics allowing for movement, color changes, video and sound clips to be incorporated into a webpage. Digital facsimiles of works originally published in 'old' media format, such as Early English Books Online, also deserve particular attention in this perspective on account of their "multi-layered genesis from printed work to microfilm, to digital facsimile". They include various forms of text encoding (Kichuk 2007: 291) which raise important issues as whether and to what extent "the process of digitalization and remediation can entirely transform the original work into a virtual artifact" (Kichuk 2007: 300, 291). In the light of the ongoing theoretical debate, my paper proposes to investigate assorted examples of multimedia adaptations or rewritings of canonical literary texts in which the 'remediation' of the book form and of its textual space is mostly prominent. Meaningful examples include Peter Greenaway's film version of The Tempest in Prospero's Books (1991), where the 1623 in Folio Edition of Shakespeare's plays is persistently visualized in frames embedded one into another within the screen. By exploring the intricate relationship between the potentialities of new multimedia digital screens and the ‘materiality’ of the book, the film's focus on the 1623 Folio sheds light, as I will argue, on our still print-based notion of Shakespeare's authorship within the multifaceted cultural background of the "late age of print" (Bolter 1991, Striphas 2009). A different 'remediation' of the book form occurs in Shelley Jackson's hypertext version of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, or a Modern Prometheus in Patchwork Girl of a Modern Monster (1995). Entirely constructed upon the metaphoric association between the fragmented body of the creature and the disjoined textual space of the hypertext, it includes entire sections of the original 'book' and emulates the layout of 18th and 19th century title pages in the opening node, while introducing an extensive use of open-endedness and implying a radical reconfiguration of writing/reading space and authorship. By transposing and adapting renowned literary works to radically different new media, these works mostly epitomize distinctive attempts at absorbing, appropriating and reinterpreting 'the book form' in the context of an accelerated proliferation of media interactions where words, images and sounds are all changed into digital information (from ‘atoms to bits, as Nicholas Negroponte labelled it) thus allowing them to flow across platforms. In this sense they encourage reflection on notions of 'textuality' and 'intertextuality in the new media age (Kress 2003) where media specific distinctions have been eroded beyond recognition. (Friedberg 2006: 2-3).