ENG 4815 Spring 2022 Healy

The word "textuality" names a problem and opens a possibility. This course is a sustained inquiry into textuality, texts, and their meaning(s), playing with different notions of how a text comes to be and do work in the world. In order to explore textuality, this course will play with text(s + uality) as techne. Aristotle defines techne as a useful, teachable, and productive art—a practical skill with a systematic knowledge or experience which underlies it. However, many theories have questioned the role and even nature of text, author, and utility in the production, circulation, and reception of texts.

We will use historiography to explore how texts come to have histories and operate as always-already contextually and rhetorically situated, using archives and archival practices to situate and build relationships between texts. We will consider how digital technologies have shaped our notions of textuality, especially when considering questions of audiences, computation, and the experiences of texts. In doing so we will examine how algorithms, circulation, and hypertext have both changed and reinforced notions of textuality. We will work at places of praxis, where theory meets practice, to critique, study, and produce texts.