Wednesday, April 04, 2007

Prefaces and the Implied Respondent in the Digital Text

The continuing saga of a thesis chapter. I will not be blogging so much over the next 12 days (17 April deadline) as panic has set in (always a good motivator).....I think if I hold my self together I may just make it. Here is the opening page as it stands at the moment (a Work in Progress is there ever was one):

Prefaces and the Implied Respondent in the Digital Text


A digital text is situated in contexts of storage and distribution. Even before a particular text is opened it has to be located and installed on a computer. The process of text location and installation is framed by the figure of the implied respondent as much as the perceived center or ‘inside’ of the text. Pre-texts, such as the systems of copyright applied to the text attempt to compel a particular set of responses to the text. Foundations for the implied respondent as an interactive agent are present in the pre-texts. Such pre-texts I shall refer to collectively as the preface. The preface of the digital text implies separation by treating the narrative (the ‘interior’ or ‘center’ of the text) as its subject, but at the same time the preface qualifies and joins the ‘main’ text.
The storage and distribution of the text contributes towards the form of the implied respondent. The implied respondent in text storage and distribution exists under conditions of use such as being stored on the World Wide Web or the rights asserted by the publisher of the text. The legal claims made upon the text are prevalent at this stage of reception and I take up copyright and the responses to the text asserted by its legal prefaces. The more overt preface forms, such as author’s introduction, that comment on and qualify the text are then discussed. A summary of cultural values will be made using the attributes of the implied respondent/s in the corpus texts based on their response orientated dialogues. A critical model of addressivity is used to determine what responses are appropriate to the text. The author-writer-reader arrangement and the interactive relations of the text will be clarified here using the figure of the implied respondent. As well it is evident that spatial tropes (metaphor, allegory, and metonymy) in address are relied upon for the figure of the implied respondent in relation to the text. The implied respondent of the preface will be compared to the implied respondent of the ‘main’ narrative texts in the following chapter.

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