Literature, cross-fertilized with the New Criticism, structuralism, and deconstruction, took a “linguistic turn” in the mid-twentieth century, privileged form over content, emphasized spatial relations between words, puns, intertextual allusion, parody, and self-referentiality; how the novel subverted plot and character, experimented with open structures and permutations, turned into increasingly cerebral wordplay, or became indistinguishable from lyrical prose. (p: 4 - 5)
In this carnivalesque conception of language, meaning is no longer the stable image of a world in which the reader projects a virtual alter ego, nor even the dynamic simulation of a world in time, but the sparks generated by associative chains that connect the particles of a textual and intertextual field of energies into ever-changing configurations. Meaning came to be described as unstable, decentered, multiple, fluid, emergent—all concepts that have become hall-marks of postmodern thought. (p: 5)
Though this game of signification needs nothing more than the encounter between the words on the page and the reader’s imagination to be activated, it is easy to see how the feature of interactivity conferred upon the text by electronic technology came to be regarded as the fulfillment of the postmodern conception of meaning. Interactivity transposes the ideal of an endlessly self-renewable text from the level of the signified to the level of the signifier. (p: 5)
In this carnivalesque conception of language, meaning is no longer the stable image of a world in which the reader projects a virtual alter ego, nor even the dynamic simulation of a world in time, but the sparks generated by associative chains that connect the particles of a textual and intertextual field of energies into ever-changing configurations. Meaning came to be described as unstable, decentered, multiple, fluid, emergent—all concepts that have become hall-marks of postmodern thought. (p: 5)
Though this game of signification needs nothing more than the encounter between the words on the page and the reader’s imagination to be activated, it is easy to see how the feature of interactivity conferred upon the text by electronic technology came to be regarded as the fulfillment of the postmodern conception of meaning. Interactivity transposes the ideal of an endlessly self-renewable text from the level of the signified to the level of the signifier. (p: 5)
