William Blake

Carla Oliveira

Manuel Portela

Quatro Visões Memoráveis inclui quatro livros de William Blake (1757-1827) - 'O casamento do céu e do inferno', 'Visões das filhas de Albion', 'O [primeiro] livro de Urizen' e 'O livro de Ahania'. Em 'O casamento do céu e do inferno' (1790), através da voz do diabo e dos provérbios do inferno, denuncia a moralidade da igreja e do estado e proclama a soberania do desejo e da energia natural da vida. Esta perspectiva heterodoxa surge também em 'Visões das filhas de Albion' (1793), na representação livre da sexualidade e na crítica ao colonialismo e à escravatura. Os dois últimos poemas - 'O [primeiro] livro de Urizen' (1794) e 'O livro de Ahania' (1795) - constituem uma paródia dos livros do Génesis e do Êxodo. Nesta 'Bíblia do Diabo', a narrativa da criação do universo - que produz a separação da eternidade - é reescrita através do conflito entre razão e prazer. Além do texto inglês, a edição reproduz 32 gravuras a cores.

QUATRO VISOES MEMORAVEIS

In Scripting Reading Motions, Manuel Portela explores theexpressive use of book forms and programmable media in experimental works of both print andelectronic literature and finds a self-conscious play with the dynamics of reading and writing.Portela examines a series of print and digital works by Johanna Drucker, Mark Z. Danielewski, RuiTorres, Jim Andrews, and others, for the insights they yield about the semiotic and interpretiveactions through which readers produce meaning when interacting with codes. Analyzing these works asembodiments and simulations of the motions of reading, Portela pays particular attention to the waysin which awareness of eye movements and haptic interactions in both print and electronic media feedsback onto the material and semantic layers of the works. These feedbacks, he argues, sustainself-reflexive loops that link the body of the reader to the embodied work. Readers' haptic actionsand eye movements coinstantiate the object that they are reading. Porteladiscusses typographic and graphic marks as choreographic notations for reading movements; examinesdigital recreations of experimental print literary artifacts; considers reading motions in kineticand generated texts; analyzes the relationship of bibliographic, linguistic, and narrative coding inDanielewski's novel-poem, Only Revolutions; and describes emergent meanings ininteractive textual instruments. The expressive use of print and programmable media, Portela shows,offers a powerful model of the semiotic, interpretive, and affective operations embodied in readingprocesses.

The Codex and the Computer as Self-Reflexive Machines

Scripting Reading Motions

How can we use digital media to understand reading, editing, and writing as literary processes? How can we design the digital medium in a way that goes beyond the printed codex? This book is an attempt to answer those fundamental questions by bringing together a new theory of literary studies with a highly dynamic digital environment. Using the digital archive of the modernist masterpiece Book of Disquiet, by the Portuguese writer Fernando Pessoa (1888-1935), as case study and site for simulation and practical experiment, Literary Simulation and the Digital Humanities demonstrates how computational approaches to texts can fully engage with the complexities of contemporary literary theory. Manuel Portela marshals a unique combination of theoretical speculation, literary analysis, and human imagination in what amounts to a significant critical intervention and a key advance in the use of digital methods to rethink the processes of reading and writing literature. The foregrounding of the foundational practices of reading, editing, and writing will be relevant for several fields, including literary studies, scholarly editing, software studies, and digital humanities.

Manuel Portela

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