Explore The New World

To produce many copies of a document in a short time, a machine to print is necessary. Printing has a long history. Chinese printers were the first to structure printing in a way that hinted at mass-production in the 8th century. They used wooden blocks with characters carved into them, which were then inked and stamped on paper. Extending the Chinese monopoly on printing, in the 11th century Pi Sheng created a primitive form of moveable type (made of wood), which allowed for the letters to be rearranged. In a neighboring country Korea, moveable metal type was tried in the early 15th century but it was not very successful due to the large number of characters in Korean script. In Europe printing developed a bit later. Till the beginning of the 15th century, they followed the method introduced by Chinese — block printing.

The invention of a machine to print became possible. An innovator in Germany, Johann Gutenberg spent over ten-years developing the western-style moveable type. He then developed a method using lead and tin alloys to mold moving type for individual letters of the Roman script. He also invented a machine, the printing press that was based on the design of presses used by farmers to make olive oil. The first printing press used a heavy screw to force a printing block against the paper below and the ink used was a mixture of turpentine, lampblack and linseed oil.

James Joyce (1882-1941) was an Irish expatriate writer, widely considered to be one of the most influential writers of the 20th century. He is best known for his novel “Ulysses”. “Ulysses” used the structure of the Homeric Odyssey as a contrast to the lives of the Dublin working class.

Joyce’s technical innovations in the art of the novel include an extensive use of interior monologue. He used a complex network of symbolic parallels drawn from the mythology, history, and literature, and created a unique language of invented words, puns, and allusions.

If “The Odyssey” of Homer was in the purely oral universe, “Ulysses” was in the heavily textual environment. The text of “Ulysses” is not organized in memory and unfolded in time, but both organized and unforlded in what we may call technological space: on printed pages for which it was designed form the beginning. Joyce is acutely aware that the mordern Homer must deal with neither an oral culture nor a manuscript one, but with a printing culture.

Authorship is a cultural convention so familiar that it is almost invisible. Readers habitually interpret texts using their knowledge about who wrote them. However, as recent literary theory and cultural criticism has shown, our usual assumptions about authorship mask some complex questions about knowledge and identity. Authorship is conventional rather than natural.

According to Grusin, “to understand what is new and different about electronic authorship, we need to look at the way in which the network of inscriptions that constitue electronic wring circulates within a heterogeneous social space of cultural, linguistic, and technoscientific practices”.

While for Bolter, “electronic writing empahsizes the impermanence and changeabitity of text, and it tens to recuce the distance between author and reader by turning the reader into an author”.