CANONS ON THE WEB:

Preservation and Dissemination vs. transformation and depletion

 

Ziva Ben-Porat

The Porter Institute for Poetics and Semiotics

Tel Aviv University

 

This talk will be divided into three parts:

I.                   A theoretically oriented discussion of the manifestations of The Western European Literary Canon on the web in general and a comparative look at English Language and Hebrew web sites.

This discussion, although it will contain some statistical data, is not about web statistics. Rather, it focuses on the difference between faithful representations of such works and/or the knowledge surrounding them as one type of manifestation and references or allusions to the canonic texts as the opposite type, with hybrids such as full-scale rewritings and parodies as a third type, and attributive memes as a forth. The first, I claim, are memory-free instances; by which I mean that a performance of King Lear does not presuppose a prior knowledge of the tragedy, its history, its various interpretations, and at least some of its earlier performances, as well as familiarity with texts composed in dialogue with it. Much as it is hard to believe, the activation of such knowledge structures, located in a user’s mental encyclopedia, is not a pre-requisite for the comprehension and enjoyment of the particular performance. The second group, consisting of references and allusions, is, in contrast, conventionally (if not always) memory-dependent: the canonic text must be recalled and activated for the encountered text to be properly processed. The third group consists of texts that are memory-dependent by genre conventions if they are to be experienced as the complex intertextual structures that they are; but they are comprehensible as autonomous texts.  All three types appear on the web as a new technology for communication, but have little use for the internet as a new model of communication. The forth type of canonic manifestations consists of cultural memes and the second part of the lecture will be devoted to it.

II.                Cultural memes as memory-free instances of intertextuality.

Cultural memes, as Richard Dawkins christened them, are the basic ‘hereditary’ units of culture that replicate themselves via imitations. “We are built as gene machines and cultured as meme machines” (The Selfish Gene, 2006, 201). However, I’ll show that when canonic texts, rather than the ideas they contain, act as memes - or are used as such - it is a depletion process, a transformation of cultural units into lexical units, which assures their success. True to Darwin’s Evolution Theory, mutation turns out to be more important than imitation. When an attribute that used to function as a synecdoche and trigger immediate activation of the text it has come from loses this ability – is depleted of its historical cultural content - but acquires different signifying potentials, it achieves the ultimate goal of continuous life. Although memes of this type are not restricted to Computer Mediated Communication, they are part of the necessary equipment used in it. Only under such conditions of depletion can canonic attributes be used in a virtual community whose members do not necessarily partake of the same cultural heritage. This will be illustrated by examples from Anglo-American and Hebrew blogs, which, among other things, show what little effort bloggers make in order to reconnect the victorious memes with their past glories.

III.             Conclusion.

 

In the conclusion I’ll discuss the contribution of Wikipedia and Googling to facilitate familiarity with canonic texts. I’ll compare it with my earliest vision for the project CULTOS (Cultural Units of Learning – Tools and Services), in which the idea was to use hypertext to reactivate literary canonic intertexts for a generation growing less and less familiar with the canon, by linking popular contemporary mass media references with the original passages.I’ll conclude the whole talk by answering the following questions: does the internet contribute to the sustenance of our cultural heritage (in as much as we agree that the literary canon is one of its important components)? Can memes contribute to the preservation? Do the real citizens of cyberspace, the inhabitants of the web, take advantage of the accessible canonic data? Are Wikipedia and Google the greatest friends of our cultural tradition or have they inadvertently become destructive forces? How can the internet in general and linking in particular be recruited to the battle over cultural memory in the Age of Googling?