Literature is about removing the arbitrary.
Hofstadter makes an argument about bugs in software being like unclear sentences in writing. It's a bug. It's a sentence not functioning the way it's supposed to, sometimes casting unfortunate implications for the sentences that surround it.
"The reader's freedom is a holy thing."
— William Gass
Within the mind, "words [...] enter into psychological relationships and are not independent or isolated from each other."
— Delacroix
"It is precisely because these symbols have become so general, that we
have been able to give computers their infinite possibilities."
— Georges Ifrah
"As
long as there were no machines, programming was no problem at all; when
we had a few weak computers, programming became a mild problem; and now
we have gigantic computers, programming has become an equally gigantic
problem."
— Djikstra!
"We've got quite a way to go before the web has its own native tongue,
one that simply isn't just a quilt of stylesheets and XML and
javascript, but something unified that you could speak fluently if you
tried."
— Paul Ford @ Ftrain
"If art teaches us anything ... it is the privateness of the human condition."
— Joseph Brodsky
"I investigate the literary behavior of certain types of textual phenomena."
— Espen Aarseth
"Showed me [...] vividly [...] the enormously exaggerated attributions an even well-educated audience [makes] to a technology it does not understand."
— Joe Weizenbaum
Professor Russom has an interesting, though mechanical, definition of narrative.
"An interesting event that could provide the basis for a narrative has at least one human agent who changes something outside himself by means of the action named by the active verb."
And he presented it to us like gospel.
Sven Birkerts argues that readers will choose the dominion of strong
authors over the chance to write parts of the text themselves. He
claims that readers want access to "private, unsocialized, dreaming
selves," under the constraint of "univocal linearity." Keep Sven in
mind.
