Gestures of Academic Writing
| Title in English | Gestures of Academic Writing. |
|---|---|
| Authors | |
| Year of publication | 2014 |
| Type | Appeared in Conference without Proceedings |
| MU Faculty or unit | |
| Citation | |
| Description | My lecture is inspired by Vilém Flusser's text about gestures of writing. I want to focus on gestures of contemporary academic writing with the help of computer and Internet, which I try to describe using a method of metaphors analyse and interpretation. At first I present Flusser's key theses about gestures of writing, which he sees as reading and listening of inner voice. I interpret these abstractions as metaphors, according to interactive theory of metaphor (Black, 1962, etc.). I ask myself, what metaphor of academic writing can be? Applying Fluser's method of introspective observation of writing process to academic writing allows me to interpret this special style of writing as hypertext, according to poststructuralistic tradition (Barthes, Derrida), because the author of academic text makes several types of something I call "linking gestures" (making a topic, move with the parts of text by shortcut keys, choose key words, refer to another text, create hypertext links, etc.). Can we describe these gestures as gestures of programming? Can we interpret them as gestures of symbolic movement, as Flusser suggest? With the aim to place the problem in a broader context, using a method of conceptual metaphors analyze, I want to show, how academically writing people, involved in the "apparatus-operator-complex", how Flusser said, think novadays about computers. Are they still our colleagues, slaves or only filing cabinets, as Lawler in his inspirational text Metaphores we Compute by (1988) supposed? The aim of my lecture is to show, how modifications that we can observe in our gestures of academic writing allow us to 'read' the existential changes we are currently undergoing in this area, how I will show with some data of contemporary academic writing and reading researches. |
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