The Letter of Lord Chandos has stuck with me more than any other reading I've done so far relating to my thesis. But I don't know what to do with it yet, so I squished it until it became unintelligible.
It's kind of how my brain feels at this point. I'm overwhelming myself with information and I don't quite know what to do with all of it.
looks like conceptual writing. concrete too.
ReplyDeleteof course, that text contains many potential texts to be extracted (via means of erasure, etc.).
find out some more about Hofmannsthal, I suppose.
what if you pull at some of the threads in that closely knit text/texture?
maybe they come out in an order different than he wrote it (though in German).
and fragments, writing with fragments (Schlegel comes to mind, Romantic era fragments... why fragments?).
see NYTimes article (today's) on Generation Z. maybe of interest, possibly of relevance.
a lot of "letters" in that letter.
ReplyDeletealso, the grooves in his finger (that he notices, ruminates about) and the furrows on a field (while out riding, before his thoughts turn to his rats). grooves. words. letters. there is surely something you can do with/from this particular text, before turning to next chapter (of your project).
I may have mentioned Zoë Sadokierski's UTS (University of Science, Sydney) dissertation : Visual Writing: A critique of graphic devices in hybrid novels, from a Visual Communication Design perspective.
ReplyDeletetake a look at the excerpts here. I have a printed copy too.
I think that you can visually elucidate the Hoffmannsthal, in something like the way (or distinctly other that the way that Emigré "diagrammed" the Frances Butler essay on punctuation (, or the dream of legibility).
p.s., go up several steps to he-publishing-lab.com/references, and to main page too.
ReplyDeleteto reiterate, a good initial exercise can involve re-presenting a text, in different form, for an audience or purpose to be determined by you.