(PDF) Blogs and the Narrativity of Experience

1

Blogs and the Narrativity of Experience

José Ángel García Landa

Universidad de Zaragoza

garciala@unizar.es

http://www.garcialanda.net

Blogs and the Narrativity of Experience

This paper undertakes an analysis of the narrativity of a form of discourse

which has appeared recently (blogs) within the framework of an

emergentist theory of narrativity and its discursive modes. The

narrative/discursive characteristics of blogs emerge from a preexistent

ground of more basic or less specific communicative practices; and

narrative discursivity itself is an emergent phenomenon with respect to

other cognitive and experiential phenomena. A number of formal and

communicative characteristics of blog writing and of the blogosphere are

discussed as emergent modes of experience within the pragmatic context of

computer-mediated communication.

_________________

2

We shall undertake an analysis of the narrativity proper to a discursive

form of recent appearance, weblogs or blogs, within the framework of an

emergentist theory of narrativity and of its discursive modes. The narrative-

discursive characteristics of blogs emerge from a prior basis of simpler or

less specific communicative practices. And the narrativity of discourse is

itself an emergent phenomenon with respect to other cognitive and

experiential phenomena which necessarily underpin it, and are the basis on

which its emergent nature must be defined. That is to say, there must be

processes first, in order for processual representations to exist, and these

representations must exist in simple forms before they give rise to complex

narrative forms, associated to specific cultural and communicational

contexts—for instance, the development of computer-mediated

communicative interaction on the Web.

Processes - Representations - Narratives - Narratologies

Let us begin with absolute generality—with the narrativity of experience

itself, situating narratives, and narratology, within an

emergentist/evolutionary theory of reality. One might argue that narrative

is already located there, to some extent: there would remain the labour of

spelling out and describing in words that mode of location—make it

emerge, in fact, causing the relationship between narrativity and reality to

be more communicable, more understandable, and noting in passing the

way in which narratives and narratologies are linked to other natural and

cultural phenomena, and to the disciplines which study them.

Like almost anyone, I am ill equipped for this labour, which would require

not just an encyclopedic extension of treatment, but also having at one's

3

disposal the head that wrote the Phenomenology of Spirit, or, at the very

least, someone able to understand both that book and (say) Hawking's Brief

History of Time—someone able to connect them to narrative humanities

and spell out their significance for narratology. As to myself, I am working

on the subject; I have translated George Herbert Mead's The Philosophy of

the Present, a text half-way between those mentioned, and one which

should be another piece of this philosophical puzzle or (to say it with

Shakespeare) another cipher of this great account. Be as it may, we will

have to make do with whatever we may be able to pull off in this little

space—and forgive the bending author if the muse of fire is once again

missing, so that the story is told by fits and starts, with missing parts and

without sound effects.

There is some advantage on my side—the story waiting to be told is, in

some intuitive ways, a well-known one. It is the story of narrative as a part

of the history of communication and language, as part, therefore, of human

history—a chapter, therefore, in the history of evolution, and more

specifically in the history of the evolution of the modes of temporal

representation. But, in order that there may be temporal representations,

there must be, first, beings capable of constructing those representations,

and to cut a long story short indeed, there must exist an ability to

experience time, and before that, there must exist complex processes, such

as life and consciousness, which allow the existence of "experience", and

before these complex processes there must exist simple processes and their

flow in time. Hopefully some of that time may be devoted to compress all

of this into one paper—just in case there isn't, it's all here in one paragraph.

To summarize even more: one must consider narrative as a complex and

emergent from of temporal experience—and conceive, or re-conceptualize

4

narratology as being itself an emergent phenomenon, in complex and

dialectical interaction with narrative discourse and with other narrative

forms of experience. I will use here some ideas I put forward in my notes

and papers on emergent narrativity (2006, 2009, 2010). And other things

which will emerge along the way.

A central point to organize the whole reasoning, so it won't get out of hand

as far as possible, is the notion of retrospection. However narrative is

defined, more or less inclusively, it is the case that the more central,

natural, basic, archetypal etc. forms of narrative are retrospective. One of

the definitions I use in my courses on narrative runs thus: narrative is the

sequential and retrospective representation of an interpreted and evaluated

sequence of events. This includes the typical fictional film, drama, the

novel, history, conversational anecdotes, reports… Although there may be

marginal or derivative forms of narrative which are not retrospective (or

less obviously retrospective), or which lack to a greater or lesser extent a

series of events, or interpretation, or evaluation, or which (again) present

transformed modes of the same.

Retrospection (perhaps one should say retrospectivity) is interesting as a a

reference point, precisely because it presupposes a return to a sequence of

action which has already taken place. That is, because of the element of re-

presentation it contains, in the most literal sense, presenting again and

repeating what has already taken place. One might consider of course that a

sequential scheme oriented towards the future, such as a plan (Note 1) is

also a "representation" in a wider sense—although its referent is not yet

"present". Indeed a plan does have narrative-sequential elements, especially

when it is "narrated" or expounded in discursive form. Nontheless, it seems

that a retrospective sequence of signs is a more central and basic mode of

5

representation, being a semiotic return to an already effected sequence of

action. Perception itself is, in a certain sense, retrospective, or at any rate

posterior with respect to the event, as is understanding.

Of course, not just any retrospective return to what has already happened

qualifies as a narrative, at least in everyday parlance. There remains to

specify the element of communication—a narrative is something which is

communicated, a text or system of signs or signals which permits a

dissociation of experience. An a narrative is all the more elaborate the more

it gives rise to this dissociation of experience or "virtual reality". Although

I would not want to suggest that immersive videogames are the most

elaborate form of art just now.

The study of this emergent nature of narrativity, both in the conversational

use of language and in literature, requires that many aspects should be

taken into account. Let us note two two of them:

a) Goffman's (1981) notion according to which language rests on a

submerged iceberg of presupposed action, pre-established schemes of

social communication, which are not verbal but procedural. This is another

sense in which narrative discourse can be conceived as resting on action

organization processes preceding it.

b) The modes of realistic motivation (for instance, focalization limited to

one character) which structure narrative representation on the basis of more

elemental modes of representation, such as perception. Likewise, there also

exist narrative-discursive conventions which justify "artificial", artistic or

complex modes of narrative structuring, built on the motivation of a natural

narrative. This is the case, for instance, of the epistolary novel, based on the

non-fictional epistolary genre; and also of the fictive autobiography of first-

6

person novels, based on nonfictional narratives of personal experience).

(Note 2).

What must be kept in mind is that this difference between an initial

sequence of perceptual processes on one hand and its representation on the

other, or between the conceptualization of a sequence of events on one

hand and the communication of that representation through a text on the

other, is not absolute but rather a matter of degree. Perception is in itself a

semiotic phenomenon, a mode of representation, and that is why narrative

has constant resource, for its structuring and development, to the

reelaboration of perceptual processes (for instance, the already mentioned

case of focalization). Memory is in itself a a second-degree semiotic

elaboration, which involves the activation of signals in brain regions

separated from those regions which process direct perception. (Note 1).

Therefore, the difference between communication and internal experience

is also a gradual, not an absolute one. Memorization is already a mode of

self-communication, and the pragmatic-interactional notion of self-

interaction, that is, of signal that the organism directs to itself (Blumer

1986) is a crucial one in order to gradually build bridges between external

processes, perceptions, memory representations, metal re-elaboration of

action models, and verbalized narratives (or narratives constructed using

other media or technologies).

This is both an ascending and a descending scale, or a two-way street,

given that the cybernetic principle of feedback applies on every step:

linguistic modes of narration (or cinematic modes of narration) influence

the way in which we elaborate mental representations of actions. And

mental representations, memory representations, or more generally any

7

internal signals used in the mental processing of processes, are fed back on

perception and influence the way we perceive the world.

More generally speaking, as Oscar Wilde said in "The Decay of Lying", we

animate nature with our perceptions. Thus, this "Great Chain of

Narrativity" is well joined from beginning to end, from the origin of the

Universe and of time—of the necessary physical structuring of time— in

the Big Bang, up until the narration of this and other stories, and up to the

narrative theory which allows us to conceptualize or analyze these

processes.

Technologies of Temporal Manipulation

Having some spare time, or nothing to talk about, we can speak about the

weather or about the passing of time. Time, like the weather, affords an

ample space to go over what has already been said, and to explore the ways

in which it has been said—especially when it's raining. Sometimes we even

manage to say something new about the weather, or about time, something

which nobody has ever said. It may appear to be difficult, yet it happens all

the time. We might take as a reference point, for starters, the mini-

anthologies of papers on temporal representation from the point of view of

biology which appear in The Loom ("Animal Time Travellers", Zimmer

2007) and The Neurocritic ("Mental Time Travel", 2007). These pass from

the temporal experience of birds or rats to the more complex time of

primates, culminating in the complicated and varied temporal experiences

of humans. Although, as a matter of fact, the human experience of time

encompasses the whole range of temporal modes which have accumulated

in our evolutionary and cultural heritage, from the minimal biological time

8

of consciousness in the organization of present sensations, up to the lengthy

and culturally complex time of a historian or of a primate of the Church.

If our time is complex, that is because our reality is more complex and

inclusive than the reality of animals (plants do not seem to have time for

themselves). And if our reality is more complex, that is because our brain is

more complex, or perhaps versa-vice. The brain, when it is not a cold jelly

or a fried local delicacy, is an extraordinary generator of representations,

and a factory of realities—at this Cartesian level, reality equals

representation. Among them, it generates a number of kinds of temporal

realities or representations. Time, and I mean here experiential time, is not

out there, previous to experience, or is ther only in a sense in which we

cannot say much about it. Time as we know it is a complex relationship

between representations, generated and orchestrated by the brain. Or,

rather, a whole collection of such complex systems: as one can read in the

sources cited, the blue jay's time is not the same as the baboon's or the

human being's. These animals do not inhabit the same temporal

environment (one might almost say that their presence "out there" in our

own space-time is misleading), as they have no way of articulating

complex experiences similar to ours. Although these studies seem to point

out that there is much left to study and understand in the abilities proper to

each species, since it can hardly be supposed that all inhabit a similar

featureless and continuous present. Animals no doubt construct temporal

representations of varying complexity according to their abilities and their

alimentary, reproductive, and social needs… even though this complexity

is far inferior to that of human temporal experiences.

Animals are less intensely semiotized than human beings. Perhaps because

of this, they live in closer contact with the immediate present, and are more

9

closely involved with "real" time—in the sense that present experience has

a real substantiality which is lacking in the past and in the future—which

result from the mere play of representations. Be as it may, what we humans

understand by "the present" (Note 4) has little to do with the present

experience of animals; our present too is complex and multi-dimensional,

since many of its aspects are structured with reference to the past and to the

future: our present, too, is built with those other "less solid" materials. And

the time of present experience is also crisscrossed by a variety of verbal

aspects: iterative, durative, repetitive, inchoative… My point is that our

time is not only structured as the experience of a complex brain, and of

cerebral circuits specialising in the reelaboration of perception, and in the

structuring of memories; in addition, it is structured by a series of complex

technologies and systems of temporal manipulation, beginning with

language (Note 5).

Narrative is one of these tools or technologies of temporal manipulation

(Note 6). It is not merely a linguistic act (although it may be one) but a

multimedia platform, a semiotic interface for the temporal manipulation of

language, of remembered events and of action representations. Here, in this

mediating and multimedial nature of memory, lies one of the original bases

of the narratological contrast between story and discourse, or between the

action (the fabula, nonverbal level) and the narrative text (the work, the

verbal surface), with a number of variations in diverse narratological

theories. Our very cognitive and communicative equipment makes us

distinguish on the one hand the thing itself, and on the other its mental

image or the memory of the thing. This is also why so many aspects of

narrative escape those which approach its study from an narrowly

disciplinary perspective, whether they start from literary theory, from film

studies or from linguistics: many narrative phenomena are not specifically

10

artistic, not even linguistic, but rely on more basic perceptual and cognitive

structures.

Narrative is also built, originally, on the expected and predictable rituals of

social interaction—the nonverbal structures of action alluded to by

Goffman (1981, see esp. "Replies and responses"). It relies, too, on more

general modes of linguistic representation (Note 7). Voice and gesture,

both at the origin of language and at the origin of narrative, are at the same

time foundational elements and a dyad involved in a constant process of

mutual re-structuring, a continual dialectic interaction which is constantly

becoming more complex along its historical development. (Note 8).

The diverse modes of writing, and of written narrative, have enabled the

elaboration of complex conceptualizations of time and of subtle

modulations of temporal experience—as expounded by Paul Ricœur in his

masterful Time and Narrative. An example: writing, with its permanence,

emphasizes the sense of human life experience as something which has to

pass but also to remain, both a flux and a transcendental value (Note 9).

This is clearly appreciated in the Bible, a key narrative in Western culture.

In Psalm 89 (or 90 in some editions) we find the concept of the human

course of life imaged as a story which is told, emphasizing its brevity—

some versions translate "a spider's web" instead of "a tale". The Bible also

alludes a number of times to the Book of God, or the Book of Life, in

which records the names of those who merit salvation, or which (perhaps)

notes down all the actions of men. A Book which is, perhaps, a

transcendental or ideal version of the Bible itself.

Once the development of culture allows to construct narratives in images,

other narrative technologies have been added to spoken and written

11

language. The earliest examples may be found, perhaps, on the walls of

Paleolithic caves, in interaction with ritual and words, but the narrative

dimension or narrative use of these paintings can barely be discerned. It is

not that a sequence of images is necessary in order to create a narrative in

images, since many early (and late) narratives have resource to the

iconographic synthesis of several events unified into a single significant

image (Note 10). Still, the development of visual technologies involves the

elaboration of complex sequences of representation, and, in the case of

film, the pre-perceptual and mechanized adjustment of the represented

action and the representational text. The experience of film emphasizes the

narrative dimension of life experiences—it makes us more conscious of the

multi-dimensionality of time and of its potential semiotic handling (Note

11).

Although many shades of meaning proper to written narratives fall outside

the scope of cinematic aesthetics, film is, of course, one of our most

elaborate time machines. Beyond the chemical and mechanic technologies

of photography, reels, limelights and projectors, or their digital avatars,

there is the technology of narrative structuring—the linkage of narration,

point of view, present experiences, flashbacks, plot and intrigue… a

semiotic dimension which film shares to a great extent with literary

narratives. Developments in the technology of temporal manipulation take

place in this area, rather than in the invention of a new model of camera

lens or a a new digital technique for the generation of images: new modes

of temporal representation in film are associated to new semiotic or

narrative figures, the signals of a new conceptual relation between filmed

sequences. An intertextual (visual or narrative) allusion or a novel use of

images within images connects and enchases the temporal experiences

contained in those previous images—sedimented moments of time, which

12

are used as the ingredientes or building materials for the construction of a

new image. In this way new experiences of perception and of temporal

representation are created, with their novel combination articulating a

previously nonexistent complex experience. Sometimes the experiences are

not wholly novel, but were peripheral in the experience of audiences or

marginal in cultural consciousness, while a new successful articulation

pushes them into the mainstream or makes them widespread and

recognizable. That is to say, there is not a clear-cut border line between

what is non-existent, what is ill-perceived or insufficiently articulated, and

what is marginal, belonging to a minority audience or to an experimental

phase). Film educates the eye and the brain, in order to make visible things

previously disregarded, and in order to establish or bring to consciousness

temporal relationships which did not exist or were not perceived

beforehand. We might as well say that film makes us live in a temporal

medium which did not exist before the invention of film: on this matter, as

elsewhere, we see from the shoulders of giants.

The same thing happens with other technologies of temporal manipulation,

in which time is modified through manipulation of images or through the

manipulation of language. A written book is the voice of the dead striving

to outlast them; writing and written narratives have, from their very origins,

something funeral about them (Note 12). But it is thanks to written

narratives that past history is still alive, or exists at all. History, far from

having the ideal solidity we sometimes attribute to it, the solidity of a

substance deposited in solid strata and stored in a safe place, is purely a

play of communications—a highly elaborate one, of course—a gigantic

system of disciplines of discourse regulating the representation of time, its

images, its texts and the evaluations attached to them… It is a semiotic-

narrative artifact allowing the existence of complex temporal experiences.

13

Of ever more complex tempooral experiences, as new modes, new

technologies, new uses and new protocols of temporal representation and

structuring are developed. Not so long ago, for instance, one could be

nostalgic only about the past: nowadays we can also experience nostalgia

for the future (Note 13)— for the (unrealized) future of the past, or for the

past of the future which is, as yet, still unrealized for us. With the

development of novel time technologies, or of a more elaborate

consciousness of temporality, we can experience the pseudo-present or effet

de présence of recorded live events (Note 14), or the retrospective

distortion of the past due to hindsight bias (Note 15). These are so many

experiences of complex temporality developed through practical semiotic

manipulations and the theoretical elaboration which goes alongside with

them.

As information and communications technologies, and mechanical

reproductions of images and discourse, have penetrated every nook and

cranny of daily life in recent years, we are in the midst of a technological

frenzy in the treatment of images and words, and therefore we inhabit a

temporal atmosphere which is non-coincident with itself, multiple,

disseminated and somewhat unpredictable, a multi-mediated time out of

joint. Telephones, for instance: they are highly unpredictable themselves as

far as their presence and performance are concerned, and they transform

our use of language, of immediacy and presence, of situatedness and

planning, and in so doing they transform our way of inhabiting time (Note

16). This effect has been intensified with cellular phones, intensifying

ubiquity and efectually providing an experience of potentially universal

virtual coexistence: everyone is at last in potential immediate contact with

everyone else—allowing for new effects of unpredictability.

14

Again, a similar phenomenon takes place in the case of permanent virtual

networked presence, through personal websites, blogs and social networks.

The relationship between time and language has been transformed thanks

to a technological tool. For instance, writing has become immediately

transmitted and publicly accessible at a universal scale, thanks to search

engines and web syndication. But this new discourse, closely involved with

the present, remain archived in the web, in a past-present whose dialogue

with its present context becomes audible with additional new echoes once

they are accessed some months or some years afterwards (Note 17). This

new horizon of possible new experiences is awaiting new conceptual tools

which may carry its possibilities further, and make us inhabit an ever more

complex time. Take the case of blogs, every post a potential new

conversation. ¿Has an immediate, public, live conversation, ever been so

visible, and open for years? Not in this way, and not as much. ¿Can such

conversations be followed? In order to make it possible, new tools are

invented (RSS, friending, etc) and new protocols are developed. The global

conversational space, no longer that of a small minority but public and

collective, is becoming more complex with the expansion of the

technologies of information and communication technologies, which

reorganize the way we inhabit our space and our time.

Narrative anchoring

Before we focus on the textual and communicative specificity of blogs, we

will introduce a concept more specifically related to the narrative and

communicational background of experience, the backdrop of both new

media and of more traditional discursive genres. It is the concept I will call

15

narrative anchoring—because of the way in which it locates a given

narrative-temporal experience with reference to the more general

narrativity of experience we have mentioned above. This notion of

narrative anchoring is related in part to some other already existing

concepts (pauca nova sub sole) such as interpretive theory, metanarrative

or intertextuality, but we shall try to provide it with a character of its own.

And we shall also try to relate it to (and differentiate it from) another

related concept, a first cousin as concepts go, which we might call

discursive anchoring— the specific difference being, of course, that the

former refers to specifically narrative modes of anchoring.

Discursive anchoring, which will require further development in a different

future, would refer to the way in which a given text or discourse is situated

with reference to global discursive production—nothing less. The way a

blog is situated in the blogosphere, to use an example at hand which has

communicational characteristics of its won. Discursive anchoring does not

merely have a dimension as a "fact" or phenomenon of discourse; it is also

a theoretical operation effected by a student of such anchorings, a theorist

of discursive mappings or a discourse analyst. But some maneuvers of

discursive anchoring can also be entrusted (explitly or implicitly) to the

reader or hearer, and part of this anchoring may be explicitly effected by

the discourse in question itself, with rhetorical moves and modes specific to

a variety of genres… These moves and modes will be left unspecified

here, with a vague vow of returning to them and to the modes in which

these anchorings have been dealt with, avant la lettre, in linguistics, literary

theory, philology… This vague allusion to a past and to a future may also

serve as a pracical example of discursive anchoring effected by a given

discourse.

16

A discursive (or narrative) anchoring explicitly proposed by the text itself

in a reflexive move may be accepted, complemented, nuanced or countered

by the discursive/narrative anchoring effected by a critical analyst, or (more

spontaneously and in a less publicly communicative way) by the

discursive/narrative anchoring effected by a reader or audience member, as

a mental move, during the process of reading or reception.

The location of a word withing the context of Human Discourse, or the

location of an utterance within the Galaxy of Enunciations, may appear to

be a question which potentially at least may expand to colossal proportions:

thus understood, discursive anchoring provides a theoretical framework in

which narrative anchoring is a mere local section, something like a single

road highlighted amid the tangle of roads crossing the different countries.

But the issue of narrative specificity has, if attended to from a given angle,

an entity of its own. Narrative anchoring appears therefore as bringing

forward a complex tangle of relationships of its own, which are only

partially coincident with discursive relationships, and not necessarily more

limited in scope; it is not necessarily more limited in its scope or less

ambitious as regards the ample horizons it opens to reflection.

The reason is that, if the discursive anchoring of words refers us from one

discourse to another (as Bakhtin [1981] made clear in his theory of

textual polyphony and dialogism), in the case of narrative anchoring as I

am trying to define it, a (verbal) narrative refers us to other (verbal)

narratives and also to proto-narrative phenomena which may be verbal or

nonverbal—thus transcending the limits of "discourse" in the strict sense of

the word. In this sense, the notion of narrative anchoring upholds the

17

interdisciplinary vocation of narratology as part of interdisciplinary

semiotics, not limited to literary theory, linguistics or discourse analysis.

We have begun by speaking of "processes, representations, narratives and

narratologies" as four different phases or emergent levels of narrative

complexity. It may be useful to demarcate these four phases, levels or

frames of reference in order to discuss narrative anchoring.

Let us take, as a global unifying frame and as the background to any

possible narrative, the greatest master narrative of them all, one which has

not decayed at all, pace Lyotard (Note 18)—the global process of the

passing of time, I mean of the only existing time, once we exclude the

alternative timeworlds of fictional or theoretical universes—real time,

linked to the existence of the universe, as the ultimate basis of any narrative

anchoring. It might be argued that there are many versions of this "one and

only" time, ranging from the traditional cosmogonies and theogonies to

present-day "histories of time" like the one propounded by Stephen

Hawking and, by extension, by contemporary scientific discourse (Note

19). In the face of this variety, one possible mode of narrative anchoring

will consist in the intertextual projection of cosmic histories one against the

other, mapping them, locating them with respect to one another, and (why

not) choosing one of them as the main framework, the "true" history of

time—at least as long as there is note a more convenient or convincing one.

That history of time will provide a reference framework within which other

histories appear as historical phenomena, approximations or ideological

versions of the same. There is a measure of heuristic relativism here, of

course, but within limits—a narratology which aspires to intellectual

seriousness will not rely, of course, on mythical accounts of cosmic

processes. It is natural science that will provide the framework for

18

discussion and the topics for debate: narratologists must engage natural

scientists, and their accounts of time, in a methodological and philosophical

dialogue. Science approaches a variety of aspects of time from a variety of

perspectives: cosmological and astronomical time, physical time,

biological, psychological and cognitive time. This dialogue with science

must proceed with full awareness of the fact that there is a science of

science itself, a scientifically and culturally relevant discourse of the

functions and limits of science. It is in this sense that a narratology of

processes must have a philosophical and scientific orientation.

A given narrative may provide anchoring points at this initial level—the

cosmological level, so to speak—situating its small model or temporal

representation of the world within the context of the nature of temporality

itself, and with reference to the processual dimension of the Universe. And

an analyst may complete or modulate this reflexive characterization

provided by the narrative itself, for instance by demythologizing it,

substituting a scientific perspective on cosmic history and development for

the mythical or traditional account favoured by the narrative being

analyzed.

We conceive of the "cosmic" time we have been referring to as a time quite

independent of the way it is treated in the temporal representations that

living beings in general, or humans in particular, may make of it. For a

reflecting mind, the preceding phrase is of course just as paradoxical as the

one which follows. I mean that of course it is impossible to conceive of any

temporal process apart from our own potentialities, abilities or schemes of

temporal perception. There is here a seed of reflection on the role of

representations, and of reflections on representations, as regards the

emergence of modes of time, time experiences, and temporal phenomena.

19

There are more basic, more animal experiences of time, as compared to

others which are culturally complex or elaborate, and it makes sense to

distinguish between them as though the former were more inherent to the

cosmos itself, to the nature of things, and the latter were more mediated by

specifically human abilities, cultures and conventions. But just as clearly,

we must remain attentive to the way in which discoveries about the

temporal experiences of animals, or about the structuring role of memory,

are modifying in substantial ways our conceptions of the nature of that time

which exists independently of the way it is perceived; they are modifying,

too, our ideas about the (cultural) perception of time. Let us refer the

reader, by way of example, to the reflections on the modes of existence of

the present, the past, and the future carried out by George Herbert Mead in

The Philosophy of the Present.

There is one process, specifically, which bears both on the first and the

second levels (that is, both on cosmic history and on the development of

the abilities to construct temporal representations): the evolution of living

forms which are able to construct and experience such representations, or

second-level temporalities. That is to say, the processes studied by the

theory of (biological) evolution, and within it, the study of the evolution of

consciousness culminating (and one must stress culminating) in the theory

of the evolution of human intelligence.

With "time perceived" and "time conceived", therefore, we do not simply a

new phase of consideration of temporal phenomena (building on firmer

ground our narratology of time)—we are forced, in addition, to go back

continually to the earlier phase, in order to reformulate it and reconsider it

from a dialectical perspective. That ideal "time apart from our perception

and culture" contains, always already, and it could not be otherwise, both

20

our perception and our culture; and that is the reason why we have to meet

cosmological problems once and again at all levels of consideration: first as

a fact and as the global framework which we inhabit, but later on also as a

discursive phenomenon (the discourse of cosmology) within a given culture

or intellectual context.

Let me remind that a narrative may refer explicitly (or implicitly) to this

second moment of narrativity which we have called the experience of

temporality, in order to anchor itself on it—or the anchoring may be left to

take care of itself through well established cultural protocols of reception.

Again, the explicit anchoring may be carried out by an analyst or critic, by

relating those aspects of a narrative which are relative to the perception or

unfolding of processes, to a general theory of the perception or unfolding of

such processes. For instance, the theory of point of view, perspective or

focalization might itself be rewritten from this perspective.

I have already mentioned the central role of cosmology and of the theory of

the evolution (of life and consciousness) in order to provide a foundation

for a theory of narrative anchorings (the ocean floor of such anchorings, so

to speak). We may now move on to the second level of consideration: a

theory of human history—the history of the species as a framework for the

history of cultures and of specific modes of social relationship and

communication which take place in them. Cultures are built, from this point

of view, around a number of communicative, semiotic and reprentational

processes and skills. The appearance of language, and its development and

history, is a crucial frame of reference to take account of, since at this level

narrative anchoring shades into the previously mentioned discursive

anchoring. (Note 20) —(Let us note in passing that at this point the grand

landscape we alluded to before, the key to all enunciations, appears from

21

this standpoint as a quite local and specific phenomenon, once it is set

within longer narrative relative to the history of time and of life on Earth).

The history of language, as every philologist knows (there are still a

handful of them scattered among cultural critics) is inseparable from the

history of writing and of literature. And every one of these histories (of

culture, of literature, etc.) provides additional frameworks for the anchoring

of narrative phenomena.

Meanwhile, we should keep in mind that besides the Theory of the History

of Writing or the Theory of the History of Literature which an analyst

adheres to when commenting on a narrative, the author himself, or other

analysts, may also have alternative theories of the same (not to mention

alternative theories of human cultural evolution). Therefore, the conflict of

theories and critical confrontations are inherent to any discussion of the

narrative anchoring of any given text within a discourse or within a wider

narrative theory of reality.

Among such narrative theories which are relevant for narrative anchoring

one might single out (and relate to it the histories of literature, of

communication, etc.) the interpretation of human cultural history as a grand

continuous narrative: either according to the idealist model provided by

Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit or according to materialist cultural

evolutionism which explains the development of consciousness and of the

modes of knowledge as emergent phenomena (Note 21). This is a narrative

(a grand historical scheme, pace Lyotard, if there ever was one) which may

suggest many possible links with theories of economic and social

organization: reading History as the narrative of increasing globalization,

or of the division of work, or of the specialization in production and in

commercial distribution (which amounts to the same). And passing from

22

that to other, more specific, grand narratives: the development of

capitalism/liberalism in opposition to feudal structures and relationships,

colonialism/postcolonialism, the dissemination of Western, or Eastern,

cultural models, languages and technologies… But we must leave all this

aside in order to finish this section with a more specific mention of the

cultural development of narrative itself. (And of narratology as its

theoretical shadow).

Narrative anchorings assume more familiar forms in the context of a

history of enunciations, and of literature: e.g. intertextuality, Frye's theory

of myths, the models for textual structures analyzed by Formalist criticism,

etc. One must remember, nonetheless, that these intertextualities and

generic modes rest on a more fundamental basis of temporal phenomena

and processes which, conceptualized in number of ways, are constantly

feeding back on narratives, bringing to them previously untextualized

elements, alien to literature or language but proper to natural processes, to

human action and to other nonverbal communicative phenomena. Such

processes and phenomena may of course achieve a conscious or textualized

representation (and thereby continue the process of their emergence) in the

work of a given author, or in the reading of the same provided by a given

critic.

This section draws to an end with a closing paragraph: reminding the

reader that any theory of processes, any theory of Time, of Life, of

Evolution, of Mankind or of History, involves a discussion of beginnings,

middles and endings (Note 22). Following Aristotle, we deal with endings

last. Any specific ending can also find its narrative anchoring in a theory of

closure or a Theory of Endings.

23

Narrativity as an emergent phenomenon

What is narrative about a narrative? What makes a narrative more or less

intensely narrative? Which are the specifically narrative elements we can

identify in the structure of a story? Which formal and communicative

resources may be used in a narrative, or which wider textal resources may

be developed in ways which are specifically narrative? Which ingredients

or aspects may legitimately be termed "narrative" in a text which is not

itself "a narrative"? Such questions serve to stake out the issue of narrative

specificity or narrativity (Note 23).

These initial questions overlap to some extent, but they also point out

different dimensions of the problem and different directions for a

discussion of the same. We might therefore distinguish (following Gerald

Prince) narrativehood (the question whether something is or is not a

narrative) from narrativeness (a matter of to which extent or in which ways

it is narrative). These would be different dimensions of narrativity. Or we

might differentiate diegetic from mimetic narrativity (with Ansgar Nünning

and Roy Sommer). We may study the narrativity of the lyric, or the

elements of diegetic narrativity in drama, or else analyze the narrative

specificity of interactive online computer games.

Two of the main orientations given to the issue of narrativity might be

termed as "structuralist" and "poststructuralist". Structuralist approaches

tend to focus on formal aspects of narrativity, and on the narrativity of

"narratives". Poststructuralism, on the other hand, has privileged the diffuse

24

elements arising out of readers' responses, and the narrative components of

nonnarrative phenomena.

A typical structuralist approach to narrativity might begin with the analytic

delimitation of a number of levels of analysis for the study of narrative

texts: for instance, story and discourse, or fabula and siuzhet, or (in three-

level models) fabula, story and narrative text, or action, story and narrative

text (Note 24). Analysis may proceed from there to the narrative specificity

of each level: for instance, which kind of actions evince a higher degree of

narrativity, or which discursive strategies are specific to narratives, or

which ones are favoured by narrative representation. One may study, for

instance, the diverse modes and aspects of diegetic narrativity, or those of

mimetic narrativity; the narrative logic of event sequences, or the varying

significance and modes of narrative endings or closure—at the level of

action, of plot structure, and of the rhetoric of narrative discourse. Many

phenomena constitutive of narrativity are still insufficiently explored from

the standpoint of classical narratology, which remains therefore a fruitful

line of research.

Following a poststructuralist orientation, on the other hand, we might

emphasize the fact that "some narratives are born as narratives, others

become narratives, and some have narrativity thrown upon them" (Note

25). The (inter)active role of the receiver, and the multiple contexts and

uses of narrative would be emphasized thereby. We may recall how in the

heyday of formalism literary theorists tried to provide formal or structural

definitions of literature. These have been largely discredited, and

functional definitions are now preferred. Few theorists would question

today that "some literary works are born as literature, others become

literature, and still others have literariness thrown upon them". It is true that

25

arguing the same about narrative is a much bolder step, possibly a

questionable one. Is not narrative by definition, after all, a structure—for

instance "a structure of events"?

Taken to an extreme, this relativization of narrativity may appear to be

questionable, but still it remains a fruitful line of inquiry for

poststructuralist narratology. Far from being dependent on universal and

context-free structures and traits, narrativity is linked to a great extent to

pragmatic, functional, contextual, generic and cultural circumstances.

Classical narratology provided "grammatical" or structural definitions of

narrativity, but this phase of narratology has been succeeded (without being

wholly displaced) by postructuralist or postclassical narratolgoy. A useful

characterization of both phases may be found in Prince (2006).

Postclassical narratology provides definitions which are more

interdisciplinary and more closely linked to cultural contexts and debates.

Definitions—or perhaps problematizations, as is the case when (as noted

above) the very concept of narrativity is problematized, once it is no longer

taken to be a neutral textual dimension, but one which is defined with

respect to issues of genre, of standard versus nonstandard linguistic usage,

and more generally speaking as an question of social semiotics (as is the

case in Penas 2008).

According to the glossary of the Blackwell Companion to Narrative

Theory, narrativity consists in "the formal and contextual qualities

distinguishing narrative from non-narrative, or marking the degree of

'narrativeness' in a discourse; the rhetorical principles underpinning the

production or interpretation of narrative; the specific kinds of artifice

inherent in the process of narrative representation" (Phelan and Rabinowitz

2005: 548).

26

This definition is sufficiently broad to admit that the narrativity of a text (or

of another phenomenon) is not necessarily pre-determined, but may instead

be subject to reintepretation, or may be collaboratively constructed through

the interaction of the narrator and the receiver or the interpreter.

The question of narrativization must therefore be addressed simultaneously

with that of narrativity. Narrativization implies a structuring, narrativizing

activity, exerted on nonnarrative materials. Or, alternatively, the

reorganization of previous narrative structures in order to produce a new

narrative (García Landa 2008). In Hayden White's historiographic

narratology, narrativization is a task carried out by the histoiran in order to

impose a plot-like structure on pre-narrative historical events: it is the

author who does the narrativizing here. Monika Fludernik, on the other

hand, has emphasized the readers' use of narrativizing structures in order to

naturalize difficult texts—for instance, interpreting them as the

representation of a sequence of events, or as the focalization resulting from

the experience of a given mind.

In distinguishing within narrativity the aforementioned dimensions of

narrativehood and narrativeness, Gerald Prince has drawn attention to the

narrativity of texts that we would not wish to call "narrative texts": such

texts may show different modes and degrees of narrativeness (for instance,

the representation of experientiality, varying proportions of action as

opposed to commentary, or of virtuality as opposed to the actual reality of

represented events, etc.) while having a low degree of narrativehood. A

number of relevant parameters to measure such degrees of narrativeness are

listed by Didier Coste in Narrative and Communication. The main

constitutive elements of narrativity according to Coste are transactionality

27

vs. nontransactionality, transitivity vs. non-transitivity, causality vs. non-

causality, singularity vs. banality, and the presence of alternative courses

of action vs. their absence.

In addition to these scalar categories, Marie-Laure Ryan has observed the

importance in plots of the dimension virtuality vs. reality, as well as the

different ways it is deployed through the contrast between an "actual"

narrative world and the private worlds known or imagined by the

characters. She has also emphasized the relevance of different modes of

narrativity: the simple narrativity of folk tales; the figurative narrativity of

such genres as the lyric, philosophy and history; the complex narrativity of

canonical novels, the instrumental or subordinate narrativity of exempla,

sermons, etc.

The Routledge Encyclopedia of Narrative Theory, a major work of

reference in this area, contains entries on narrativity (Prince) and on

narrativisation (Jan Alber) which deal with these issues. But there are other

entries on narrative in this volume might be considered equally relevant for

an approach to the question of narrativity—those dealing with issues of

genre or text types. An approach to narrativity from the perspective of text

types leads us immediately to the definition of narrative, and (in Alexandra

Georgakopoulou's entry in the Routledge Encyclopedia of Narrative

Theory) points towards definitions like the one given by Chatman:

narrative requires, in order to exist, a double chronology, the chronology of

the rerpresentational discourse, and the chronology of the events

represented in the action (—an issue we shall return to presently).

The study of narrativity from the standpoint of textual typology may deal

with the specific differences arising in the narrativity of narrative genres

28

proper (for instance, kinds of plot structures in the drama as opposed to

those of the novel; the Aristotelian contast between tragedy and epic

poetry; the narrative specificity of the literary short story, etc.)—that is to

say, different modes and kinds of narrativehood. Issues of narrativeness

have also been prominent: delimiting the frontiers of narrative as against

other major text types, such as expositional texts, explications, instructions,

or nonnarrative conversation. Linguistic theories of discourse modes or

Speech Act Theory are also highly relevant to this inquiry.

As noted by Georgakopoulou, some theorists (Bruner, Swales, Virtanen;

one might also add Ricœur, Dennett, Turner, Fisher, etc.) have located

narrative at an even higher structural level, beyond these textual types.

Narrative would be a wider cognitive operation, or a textual macrotype.

These perspectives tend to emphasize the presence of narrativity (the

narrative ingredient) in each of the major text types we mentioned.

Georgakopoulou observes that contemplating narrative at such level of

generality tends to blur the perspective on the specific differences existing

between concrete narratives. Contemporary analytic tendencies tend to

concentrate less on formal abstract elements, and emphasize instead the

specific details of usage in specific forms and individualized situations, in

local generic or social contexts. "One possibility would be—she argues—to

explore narrative as a dynamic conglomeration of more or less prototypical

textual, functional, and contextual parameters" (2005: 596).

Georgakopoulou emphasizes the variable uses of narrative resources which

appear in different contexts, and the diverse degrees of attention that users

grant to these resources, as well as the appearance of local hybrid modes in

specific context and communicative communities.

29

It is clear that what is "a good story" in one community or according to one

set of conventions may nonetheless exhibit serious lacks in narrativity from

a different standopoing (Rudrum 2008). Any discussion of narrativity

needs to take into account the eye of the beholder, and not lose sight of the

issue of deliberate parodies or anti-narratives, which deconstruct narrative

conventions and show something like a negative narrativity, a narrativity

by contrast. (See, for instance, the case of Samuel Beckett's narrative,

which I analyze in Samuel Beckett y la narración reflexiva).

A longer entry by Michael Kearns, "Genre theory in narrative studies", in

the Routledge Encyclopedia of Narrative Theory, also covers part of this

ground, by necessity. We find here once again a conception of genre (of

narrative genre, in this case) as a set of conventions "activated" by the

reader:

"To approach a text as *narrative isto implement expectations about

point, *narrative progression or transformation, *actants, and

*narrator (see NARRATIVITY; TELLABILITY); in fact, any text

containing a sequence of *events invites these expectations." (2005:

201)

Kearns traces back to Aristotle the classical or taxonomical conceptions of

the genre, and observes that in the twentieth century these were displaced

by funcionalist conceptions which integrate literary genres within a wider

linguistic framework. Thus, Genette redefines narrative as a "linguistic

mode", beyond the limits of specific literary genres—a mode which can be

used by any genre. And according to Derrida's "law of genre", texts

participate in genres without belonging to them. This law also bears on the

act of reading: the narratologist must therefore examine the way in which

30

readers use narrative conventions in processing a text, together with those

belonging to other kinds of discourse.

The influence of hermeneutics, Kearns notes, has also qualified the

essentialist and absolutist conceptions of the genre, given that the

hermeneutic circle requires a coming and going between the text and the

reader, and a a negotiation between the diverse elements and components

of a discourse. Nevertheless, none of these reservations raised against the

concept of "genre" puts any limits to the need to study narrative as a

cognitive, linguistic and cultural phenomenon, with modes and a status of

its own, requiring a specific approach. Nowadays theorists do prefer to

approach genres and discursive modes from the standpoint of a multi-

dimensional network of scalar parameters, rather than with binary, absolute

or exclusive categorizations. It is a fuzzier approach to the question of

specificity, both at the level of genre and at the level of the individual text.

Questions of genre are relevant to the textual production, to the textual

processing by the individual receiver, and to the cultural reception of

narratives. On the pole of production, generic schemata act as guidelines,

from the most general level of narrative configuration (understood here as a

basic cognitive process), through the models of master narratives which are

dominant in a given culture, archetypes, or myths, up to the specific

ideologies located in a specific period or community. The processing,

reading or interpretation of narratives equally require such arch-textual and

ideological schemata, which enable communicative interaction. Cultural

institutions and ideological processes then recycle the specific acts of

reception (and further condition them) so that certain narrative schemata,

certain genres, or some specific individual narratives acquire a privileged

cultural status (they become for instance "literature" or "history") or

31

become otherwise associated to specific communities, or specific

communicative functions or contexts. The social uses of narrative schemata

at the levels of production, of processing and of cultural reception interact

dialectically, so that (for instance) producers of narratives do not work in a

void but in a cultural context which receives certain kinds of narratives in

ways which are to some extent pre-established or which follow certain

patterns (although all of this is subject to revision or transformation to a

greater or lesser extent, through a given narrative or individual action).

As observed above, many recent theorists have emphasized the role of

narrative as a natural linguistic mode, and as an ingredient present in a

great number of genres. This "wider" conception of narrative as a general

discourse modality dissociable from specifically narrative texts has also

been subject to criticism in recent years. Shlomith Rimmon-Kenan raises

objections to the genralized use of the term "narrative" in psychoanalysis,

in critical discourse analysis and in other humanistic disciplines. Although

she recognizes the presence of narrative elements in many of the

phenomena which are labeled as "stories" or "narratives" in such

disciplines, Rimmon-Kenan insists on the need of a double temporal

sequence (that of the action and that of its representation) and on the

necessity of a mediating subject (a narrator, etc.) in order for a given

phenomenon to be referred to as "narrative" (Note 26).

We shall discuss this objection of Rimmon-Kenan's in order to delve

further into the peculiar narrativity of the humanities and the social

sciences. Although many (literary) narratologists may have found irritating

this use of the term "narrative" on the part of social analysts or

psychologists, and may share Rimmon-Kenan's objections, the following

observations should be taken into consideration.

32

When an analyst (whether social, psychological, political, etc.) calls

something a "story" or a "narrative", and proceeds to its analysis, s/he is not

necessarily presupposing thereby that the narrative in question has already

been articulated or "told" by someone. Quite often, the analyst plays a

double role, first constructing the narrative, articulating it on the basis of

various dispersed or partially connected elements in the discursive space

being subject to analysis; and immediately (or simultaneously) articulating

a counternarrative which puts forward an alternative version or account of

the events, one which helps configure a more inclusive emplotment—

showing thereby that the narrative which had been identified or brought to

light in the discursive space in the first place was one-sided, limited or

ideologically biased.

It is understandable that, in doing thus, analysts sometimes fashion straw

targets in order to demolish them, or silently close open doors in order to

crash through them. This depends, in part, a third party's standpoint on the

door in question.

Nonetheless, it is quite possible that there is no other way in which this

analytic work can be carried out. For instance, if we speak about "the Lef'ts

narrative on the Spanish Civil War", we create to some extent a fiction,

which will need to be much more extensively argued, articulated in detail,

documented, etc., if we want to avoid a simplistic perspective on this

supposed "narrative", or if our discourse aspires to some analytic relevance.

Be as it may, the argument involves carrying out a selection, a structuring,

interpretation, evaluation, etc., both of culturally relevant discourses on the

Civil War (in order to extract from them a narrative) and of the narrative

subject to which we ascribe this narrative ("the Spanish Left", for instance).

33

And this work of narrative structuring will be carried out, quite possibly, in

order to articulate a critique of the narrative we have just articulated, or

concretized.

Therefore, from an interactional perspective on narrativity—a postclassical,

or sociosemiotic one—the analyst is not a neutral analyst. It is not just that

the analytic process is ideologically articulated: the very object of analysis

is constituted in part by the analyst himself. It is the analyst who must bring

to light the object of study, precisely in order to deconstruct its narrativity.

To be sure, good analysts do not produce that narrativity out of a top hat.

Instead, they provide a clear, well structured, well reasoned account of

phenomena which are socially active, already perceivable or detectable

before the analyst's intervention. And they make us see clearly for the first

time (and never so well expressed) the mutual relationships between

phenomena, relationships whose existence, we feel now, was on the tip of

our tongue, or of our mind. To pursue our example further: the analyst will

offer a perspective on "the Left's narrative on the Spanish Civil War" which

is better articulated (or more articulate) than that of the "Left" itself—who

is, admittedly, a fuzzy narrator. Or better than those of the unofficial

spokesmen for "the Left". Thereafter, the analyst will undertake a critical

analysis or deconstruction of that narrative, which now has for us an

identifiable or characteristic shape, thanks in part to the analytic work

effected by the critical analyst or historian himself.

The main point here is that both the narrative extracted from the cloud of

discourses and the critique it is subject to must be narrativizing acts with a

hermeneutic value, and must help to interpret the phenomenon under study

(the Civil War, in our example), first through the social attitudes expressed

34

through a number of discourses, and then through the critique they

undergo. Both steps must evince the interpretive and emergent value of

narrative, helping to constitute objects of knowledge where, previously,

there were only disparate phenomena.

The social analyst, therefore, does not face the situation that Rimmon

Kenan's critique might make us assume—the task of analyzing well

articulated narratives, with an identifiable narrator, and a double temporal

sequence, ready for analysis. Before they deconstruct a narrative, social

analysts must construct it. This activity may of course involve much self-

congratulatory argumentation, navel-gazing, selective blindness, foregone

conclusions. Still, it cannot be done otherwise. Ideological debate consists

of narratives and counter-narratives.

Yet another question must be mentioned, crucial for the analyisis of

"perceived" or emergent narrativity, one which opens up a metatheoretical

dimension in narrative analysis. One may conceive of the different theories

of anrrative (and the different theories of narrativity), and the practice of

different modes of narrative analysis, as perceptual instruments which

capture narrative "wavelengths" which escape other theories, or as Kenneth

Burke would say, other "terministic screens". Thus, both theoretical

research in narratology and the practice of narrative analysis help develop,

in an emergent way, new dimensions of narrativity. We find here an

interaction between the narrative text and the narratological metatext

which, in turn, feeds back dialectically with the development of new genres

and modes of narrative which exhibit new dimensions of narrativity. Thus,

for instance, a book of narrative theory such as Theorizing narrativity

contributes to a clearer conceptualization of the narrativity of phenomena

which are not obviously narrative—as happens for instance in Meir

35

Sternberg's chapter on the narrativity of legal texts, or Marie-Laure Ryan's

analysis of the peculiar narrativity of online videogames.

To take another example: recent cognitivist analyses emphasize the

psychological narrativity of action sequences, plans, etc., in subjective

experience. One might consider that, according to classical definitions,

there is no narrativity here, given that there is no communication from one

subject to another, no identifiable text, no representation… Although,

perhaps, one might trace a line here and admit that, in fact, there does exist

a representational process. And why not admit, too, that there is also a

process of self-communication. As a matter of fact, consciousness, once it

is conceived in an emergentist fashion as happens in the work of George

Herbert Mead, is a process of self-communication. The symbolic-

interactional notion of "self-indications" directed by an organism to itself is

crucial here. (Note 27).

A narratology capable of including this narrativity of consciousness among

its objects of analysis is the kind of theory which contributes to the

perception of narrativity where none was perceived before—which

amounts almost (though not quite) to say, where there was no narrativity

before—before the intervention of theoretical work, whose job it is to bring

emergent narrativity to the surface. (Note 28).

Let us proceed now to the study of a specific instance of an emergent mode

of narrative: the study of some aspects of narrativity in the Internet,

specifically in weblogs or blogs. This is an especially interesting case due

to their recent appearance and their social impact, but also because of the

technical circumstances of their development (a new technological

functionality opens up, in this area, a new possibility for interaction or a

36

new communicational dimension)—and also because of their specific

involvement with the general narrativity of experience and of subjectivity

that we have been referring to.

Blogs: Some basic formal and narrative issues

Let us start from a provisional definition: "a weblog, or blog, is a

frequently updated website consisting of dated entries arranged in reverse

chronological order so the most recent post appears first" (Walker 2005). A

web log suggests originally "a diary or record of navigation through the

web". Blogs share some general characteristics with other types of

electronic texts (web pages, text archives, e-mail messages…) and other

features are proper to the different kinds of blogs.

We shall not pause over the features blogs share with other types of

electronic texts. Let us merely mention the peculiarity of what, using an

analogy from linguistics, one might call the "triple articulation" of online

texts: an electronic text is (like other computerized processes) a sequence

of binary signals, but this sequence is informationally treated so as to

appear to the user in the shape of the semiotic object which has been

previously codified: an icon, a sound file, a hypertextual file. Different

kinds of semiotic objects are thus combined or embedded in ordered

sequences which constitute the multimedia environment of the computer.

Thus, a hypertextual file may include instructions for the embedding of a

sound file (mp3 for instance), or a graphics file (.jpg, .gif…). Each one of

them is activated by a different program or application, but when the proper

equipment is available and all the plugins are in working order, the

37

computer creates a global unified experience, characteristic of this

multimedia environment—for instance, some paragraphs of text with an

embedded musical video, which in turn includes the subtitles for the song.

The "third articulation" we referred to, in the case of the World Wide Web,

consists in the automatized relationship between the computer languages

for the design of instructions— html, php, xml, etc.— and the active

interface available for the user, in the form of written, visual or audio text.

It is the use of such automatized or "WYSIWYG" programs (the acronym

for "what you see is what you get"), allowing users to design web pages

without any knowledge of computer languages, which has enabled the

launching of the blogosphere as an interactive medium of mass

communication. And it is the Internet protocols, as an organized system for

the establishment of automatic connections between computers, and for the

instant transfer and downloading of files, which lay down the foundations

for the experiential and communicational environment we are referring to

(multimedia computer-mediated communication in a world wide network

of users and machines). It is all of this that blogs have in common with

earlier and more basic communicative phenomena on the web, such as

interactive websites.

As to the specific differences of blogs, one could present this issue as a

model case study in the fuzzy nature of categories. Even concepts which

are apparently clear and well-defined such as "rabbit" or "zebra" turn out to

be problematic from the taxonomic viewpoint (Gould 1990)—but,

admittedly, blogs constitute a particularly fuzzy set of informational

technologies and communicational practices. This is due, in part, to their

versatility, and in part to the fast development of technology in this field.

However, the fluid set of practices involving blogs is sufficiently unified to

allow a discussion of "the blogosphere" as a particular section of the Web

38

(and as another fuzzy set with questionable limits, of course). We shall

mention here some basic characteristics, with the proviso that some

individual blogs might well be lacking one or several of them—however

central they seem—but not all of them.

- Blogs are, in principle, those websites generated by the million by online

publishing platforms devised to that effect (Blogger:

http://www.blogger.com, WordPress: http://www.wordpress.com, Blogia:

http://www.blogia.com, etc.). While there is a relative formal uniformity in

the products they geneate, these platforms offer a number of editing options

and a toolkit from which individual users/bloggers may choose. Not all

platformas offer the same services and features, although most of the basic

tools or options are quite similar. This similarity is found to a lesser extent

in the case of blogs generated with non-standard, individual, personal,

improvised or customized editing systems, for instance webpage editors.

For instance, the "same" blog (mine) can be compared in two versions, one

hosted by a automated blog platform (Vanity Fea, in Blogia

http://garciala.blogia.com and another at a personal website (Blog de notas,

http://www.unizar.es/departamentos/filologia_inglesa/garciala/blog.html).

- A blog is changing. While a traditional website was not defined by its

variability, although it might be occasionally updated, a blog is a website

which is continually being updated, more or less continuously, regularly or

sporadically. A whole gamut of situtations is suggested here, from a

website including a small section of "news" or "updates" withing a

generally static presentation, up to the whosale re-design of the website

with each update. Most blogs, of course, fall exactly in-between.

- In a blog, contrary to the chapters of a book, the sequence of articles or

posts is reversed, resulting from the practice of writing the new material, or

39

the new post, on the top of the web page/screen, pushing previous materials

material down to the bottom of the page/screen or to an archive of older

pages. Usually the new text or post is dated, automatically so in the case of

blogging platforms. There exists, nevertheless, the (less common) option of

including changes or "editing" the same article with modifications—maybe

even opening up a second-degree blog inside the blog. These later

modifications, after the initial creation of an article, are not publicly dated

in such an accessible way. There exists, then, the possibility that readers

may take the automated dating of entries as a register of the "true" editorial

sequence of the text, coinciding with their creation.

- There is a possibility, then (not the only one) that the sequential structure

of the blog may be fictionalized or tampered with—for instance, by

retroactively modifying old articles so that they may prophesy "future"

news or later events, etc. The form lends itself well to such illusionism, due

to the apparent inevitablility and objectivity of the automated functions for

the dating and archiving of entries. One might speak of a manipulability

which is inherent to this technological mirage. This is a possibility which it

is interesting to mention here, as it lends itself to curious communicational

effects regarding the main subject of our concern here, blogging and the

narrativity of experience. One should keep in mind, though, that the

temporal sequence of the written text is only the most obvious one among

the "technologically determined" aspects of the blog which lend themselves

to manipulation (whether artistic-fictional or merely pragmatic-

manipulative).

- A blog is interactive, while a website is one-directional. The blog is

collectively written, with one or more authors/editors who can add entries

or "posts" (the major category of contributions, getting first-rank visibility

40

and prominence) and visitors (either registered users or anonymous

commenters, ranging from a small group to large crowds), who can add

comments to those entries. Comments are second-rank in visibility and

prominnece, often visible for the blog's reader only if s/he chooses to read

them by clicking on a link. There are, though, alternative layouts, which

place comments on the margins, next to the post, or —a frequent favorite—

run them through a "quick" miniblog in an embedded window… etc.

- Levels of interactivity may be adjusted in a number of ways. Besides the

more common options, such as allowing readers to post comments, whether

previously checked or not by the author/editor, there are many other less

common options, such as not allowing any comments, allowing them

selectively to registered users, or allowing any occasional reader not merely

to write comments but also posts, or even redesign the website's layout and

structure.

- The system or platform used for the blog may provide the authors/editors

or the readers/commenters with a varying number of tools for the

management of interactivity, and place them on a similar or quite a

different footing. For instance, it has been a common development in blog

platforms to add tools which enable readers to receive an e-mail warning

that a new comment has been posted. More recently, readers have also been

given more options to receive update notices, which favours the

development of conversations without risking any waste of time, as

happens when readers check back for an answer on a blog which may not

have been updated.

Interactivity may be ensured, moreover, through other ways not accessible

to the rest of readers, such as e-mail, telephone or SMS. The blog can also

41

be subordinated as an auxiliary tool for another medium: a newspaper, an

online magazine, a radio station or tv programme… —and this issue also

has consequences bearing on the blog's interactivity or its public projection.

- There is, moreover, a variety of subscription (or "syndication") options,

mainly through the "feed" signal systems RSS or Atom (or through

"friending" in social networks). Thus, readers are warned about the blog's

updating without having to check in regularly, and there is a greater

communicative fluidity and greater involvement on the part of the

followers. Readers can also read not the blog itself, but a copy or version

(perhaps abbreviated) generated by a system for the management of these

signals—a system which in turn may be a program installed in the user's

own computer, or a website where the user administer their readings, feeds

and subscriptions.

- Blogs usually archive past articles (together with their comments) in an

archive, accesible through a search system or a directory. Recent entries

appear first, a number of increasingly older entries down under, and, in

different pages, but still accessible to the reader, the blog's entire sequence

ir archived—another major difference when compared to printed periodical

publications. A blog, therefore, carries its history along with it, making it

easily accessible. (In my case, when I read a new blog, beginning with the

front matter, it is not uncommon for me to check back to the very first entry

and watch the way it began).

- Another important tool is the classification of articles by subject, or their

accessibility through tags. Sometimes the blog's own internal links

establish reading trajectories or associate posts with a related topic. In this

sense, a blog is a collection of web pages combinable as a moving mosaic

42

in a number of ways, both automated and manual—according to the date of

their creation (in the archives) or thematically (in the subjects lists or tags).

Moreover, external links from the blog to other blogs, posts, or websites

draw an additional network of hypertextual paths. Quite characteristic in

this sense is the use of trackbacks or automated registers of links to a given

article, a tool present in many platfroms. There are also blog tracking

websites, such as Google Blog Search (http://blogsearch.google.com/) o

Technorati (http://technorati.com/), which interact dynamically with the

blogs they list or track down as regards the dissemination of information

and the follow-up of visitors and links.

- Still other elements may be included in blogs, usually organized around

the margins or the header, often in sidebars flanking the articles: besides

the title in the header, a fixed section presenting the blog or declaring its

author or purpose, links to other blogs by the same author or by the

collaborators, or to websites related to the blog (documents, texts,

photoblogs, videoblogs by the same author), a list of recommended or

favourite blogs, blogs with a similar topic or blogs by friends, an embedded

scroll with the blogger's comments on other blogs, etc. To this may be

added the advertisements introduced by the blogger or the hosting platform,

as a source of revenue for either; testimonial links or banners (usually with

associated logos or icons) of an ideological or social nature, events,

pressure groups, institutions, campaigns, etc.

- Moreover, each blog or each post may make a more or less extensive use

of multimedia resources. Besides the text of the entries, a post may use,

alone or in combination, hypertextual links, graphics and photographs,

sound files or podcasts, and embedded videos. There are blogs which are

predominantly photographic (although one may write lots of text on a

43

photoblog at Flickr), others are conceived as videoblogs; many are strictly

textual. And most of them combine to a varying extent all of these semiotic

resources.

- And we have not even mentioned matters of "content" or subject matter:

blogs may be thematic or miscellaneous, with or without a personal

ingredient bringing them close to a diary; they may be more or less

specialised or strict as regards their editorial line. And the subjects are, of

course, potentially infinite (What are books about? What are blogs about?).

In order to cut a long argument short, we will not deal any further with this

issue, except as it bears on the personal and experiential thematic

dimension dealt with in the following section.

- In sum, given that there are a multiplicity of systems, platforms, options,

automated templates, layouts and skins, and many optional tools and

applications to choose from, given that their combinations are innumerable,

and that the subject-matter is infinitely varied, every blog is an individual

text with quite singular formal characteristics and a dynamic of its own—

even though there may be more or less similar "neighbours" on the same

platform, or on the same circle of interests. Part of this dynamic comes

from the way in which the blog is kept alive, updated, visited, commented,

promoted by other blogs and other media… a whole collection of

interactional dynamics quite independent from one another. Some blogs are

quite lively as regards their number of visitors, but comparatively static as

regards updates and commentaries, or viceversa; a blog may become an

original and enriching event for a small number of readers, or a repetitive

but still worthwhile activity for a greater number; it may be primitive and

simple-minded but quite active and lively, or complex, intelligent and

ignored. Or vice-versa—there is a lot or everything in the blogosphere.

44

Blogs and personal experience

A blog may specialize on any subject, just like a magazine or a book. Or it

may avoid any specialization—and thus a new scale is suggested, on which

blogs may be placed or through which they may move. Among the

parameters to consider in this respect are not ony the thematic coherence of

the editorial line, but also the relative uniformity as to the blog's

impersonality (personal/impersonal axis): for instance, among strictly

technological blogs, a blog which examines new technologies as they

appear on the market will tend to be more impersonal, as compared to a

blog which examines them as they attract the blogger's attention, apart from

their novelty.

A non-thematic blog, on the other hand, spontaneously tends to approach

the personal pole: any post becomes an index of the blogger's present

interests, without a coherent principle of selection to set limits on them.

And more generally, the blog as a form tends to foster an degree of

subjectivity and personal experience which differentiates it from other

thematically oriented publications. Gadgets, news, or books… anything

which is reviewed in the blog tends to be given, to a varying degree, a

personal evaluation, an individualized assessment. It is not for nothing that

the blog is a personal publication, different from books or journals in the

degree of independence available to an individual, or a group of

individuals, in disseminating their materials and opinions without any

further editorial filters. There are, of course, blogs with editorial filters and

established guidelines for contributors—but in that direction we begin to

45

move towards another genre with characteristics of its own, the electronic

magazine, whose borderlines with the blog are of course a fuzzy grey area.

The personal bias blogs tend to show is a direct function of the publishing

medium: universal accessibility through the Internet, the easy generation of

contents, the platform's limited responsibility for content published in each

blog, the author/editor's personal control on what is published, and perhaps

above all the low production cost (and the advantageous relationship

between cost and potential distribution), which makes considerations of

economic benefit either disappear or become far less relevant. Blogs are

less subject to the control of the marketplace than journals are, which helps

give wings to personal expression and to subjectivism.

Steve Himmer observes that blogs, as a genre or form, tend to resist

commercial reification—although one should exclude in this respect the

"splogs", advertising in the form of pseudo-blogs generated automatically

by spamming programs.

In general . . . the content of weblogs actively collapses many of the distinctions

that traditional commodity journalism (or, for that matter, fiction and memoir)

relies on, mixing the deeply personal with the factual and the interpretive. While

this collapse serves, over time, to allow authors to develop and deepen the public

persona presented through their work, incorporating more and more of the

personality traits and quirks which would not, typically, emerge in public

writing. (Himmer 2004)

Blogs proliferated particularly in their beginnings as personal online

diaries. And this is still, to some extent, the natural form around which the

genre gravitates, with increasingly fuzzy outskirts in the direction of

academic publishing, of fanzines, of specialised bulletins, or the online

46

curiosity journal. If blogs are thematic, it is largely because people are

thematic—because the ensemble of interests and activities an individual

engages in and communicates about, eventually give a weight and bias to

the blog in the direction of those subjects of special interest, be they

professional or amateur.

A blog in the most shapeless sense of the term—a blog managed in the

random direction which makes it similar to cutout albums, occasional

notes, quotation books, collections of anecdotes or curiosities—is unified,

in the last analysis, by the very act of collecting or of attracting attention to

a subject in writing a blog note: the blogs, one might put it thus, are their

own history, and carried by this weight of personal history, they tend to

gravitate in the direction of the authors' emotional, intellectual or personal

history, and to show in their development the development of the bloggers'

attitudes not just towards a number of aspects of the reality surrounding

them, but also (and quite prominently) towards the blog itself, and towards

the blogger's own activity as a communicator of that reality and a

structuring subject in the blog. This genre acquires, therefore, a prominent

reflexive dimension, and all the more so in its more personal and

spontaneous modes.

Both the reflexivity and the narrativity of the self are emphasized by the

communicative modes favoured by blogs. It must be kept in mind,

moreover, that an important dimension of the blog is its interactivity, its

integration within a virtual community of communicators, mutual

commenters, imaginary friends, and the creation of an audience of readers,

observers, lurkers and participants around the blog itself. This very process

of socialization has its own history and vicissitudes ("the development of a

number of prominent commentators", "the battle against the troll", "a post

47

with mediatic relevance", etc.) which confer to the process of writing an

additional narrative dimension.

Narrativity and literariness of the blog

In order to examine the issue of the narrativity proper to blogs, we must

take into consideration a number of different dimensions of narrativity.

Temporal sequencing itself, the chronological dating inherent to blogs,

provides them with an important narrative potential of a special kind: what

Genette calls interpolated narration (typical of diaries). But there exist

many other dimensions of narrativity, apart from mere sequentiality.

Let us take, for instance, retrospectivity or hindsight. The typically

interpolated narration of blogs ensures that, at the moment of a post's

composition, hindsight extends to what has already been written or

commented, not to what is yet to be told or commented (or, as a matter of

fact, yet to happen). The blogger is innocent of the future of his own text,

which is not designed in advance, just like the life we are to live is not

designed in advance. (And yet, one must emphasize that this effect, just

like any other textual effect, may be fictionalized, reused as an expressive

element in an aesthetic structure which utilizes the primary structure of the

blog as an imitated form or as a compositional material).

The blog may contain temporal references (to the past or to the future)

which emphasize narrativity, by signalling or underlining sequences of

action, causality, expectations… Thus, there may exist references and links

to previous posts, emphasizing a narrative development, or the blogger may

draw attention to a number of hypothetical developments, plans, and

48

unresolved unknown quantities, which must be resolved by time. And,

although we are taking particular notice here of the narrativity emphasized

by the text's self-reference, it goes without saying that there may also be

references to the past and to the future which are not at the same time

references to the text which is to portray that past or that future—both at

the level of the personal life and doings of the blogger, and at the level of

the blog's specific subject matter—technological developments, political

events, etc. By generating a uniform and sequential text, in dealing with

any given process, the blog emphasizes the narrative dimension of the

process in question.

Blogs tend to favour one type of retrospection which is closely linked to

texts in process—texts which are published not as the result of a global

prior design, but as a gradual work in progress; it is the revaluation of prior

data, events, circumstances, entries, etc., in the light of unforeseen or

supervenient events. Quite often it is readers who point out the potential

ironies brought about by time, as they comment on an entry some months

or yeas after it was written. This relationship of blogs or diaries—and of

life—with the unforeseen dimensions and the contingencies of temporality

also helps to make them vital narratives, texts which emphasize the

narrative nature of the course of life, and which, as a matter or fact, acquire

something like a life of their own, subject in their progress to the

happenings and unforeseeability of the life of their author. Note, too, that

this narrativity of the self becomes especially intense by virtue of being

watched and communicated to a "live" audience. A similar narrative with

similar event, contemplated retrospectively in a diary written in the past,

does not involve in the same way the present of the writer with that of the

reader.

49

At this point we must refer the reader, as Viviane Serfaty does in her book

on online diaries (2003) to the narrative of the self in the diary tradition.

(Note 29). Theorists such as Philippe Lejeune and Georges Gusdorf point

out three main traditions underlying this personal writing: catholicism

(Saint Theresa of Avila, J. H. Newman), English puritanism (e.g. Bunyan)

and the libertine tradition (from Pepys to Rousseau). Writing for oneself

articulates a space of freedom where thought can move apart from dogma

(Serfaty 2003: 6); this becomes in Rousseau a rule of desire as the prime

mover of the modern individual. The experience of modern subjectivity

finds its space of expression and of development in diaries. Diaries

constitute truth as a space of interpretation and transformation: according to

Serfaty, the dating of the entries and their chronological ascription are

essential to their significance, but there is always a place for revision and

reinterpretation, so that the claim that the individuals' reality is faithfully

transcribed is also open to question. Individuals represent themselves,

justify themselves and recreate themselves through life writing, and the

very process of writing feeds back on the experience of life, becomes an

essential part of it, a prime element in the subject's self-fashioning and self-

understanding. Serfaty notes that blogs as online diaries favour a diachronic

view of the self (2003: 28). All this is done in a dispersed and

multiperspectival mode, through monologues, dialogues with the audience,

photographs, videos, constituting a considerably innovative and

unprecedented phenomenon of personal self-representation and social

interaction—although precedents do exist in part, they are only

fragmentary and limited. (Note 30).

The emergence of the Web was unforeseen, as was the sudden appearance

of blogs and other forms of improvised public writing within it. An art

theorist might expect, perhaps, that once a powerful multimedia

50

environment has appeared which, like the computer screen, is able to

combine color and image, typography, sound, creative writing, narrative

and poetry, music and video, some kind of amazing Gesamtkunstwerk

should be bound to appear, a powerful artistic genre rising to the challenge

of the new age and the new technology… but in fact any ordinary blog

already provides this complex combination of media, in the form of a

hypermedial work in progress, joined simultaneously to an art of personal

expression and of social interaction, and a feast of intertextuality—the

polymorph narrative of a virtualized subject's intermedial online

experience.

Blogs may appear to be too living, colloquial and fluid to qualify as art in

any usual sense of the term—even if it can be readily granted that some are

more artistic or more valuable than others from a literary viewpoint. Steve

Himmer (2004) writes on blogs as a new literary genre, a typically modern

genre, of work in process, after the death of traditional art, but with a

Benjaminian aura they acquire thanks to their incidence on real time.

Himmer observes that a blog, contrary to a traditional literary work, has

multiple entrance points for the reader:

Those entrance points are determined not by the author, but rather by the

engagement of others with the text(s) the author has produced. It is only possible

for a reader to arrive at a posting of mine via another site if that other site (or its

author) has chosen to offer a link to my work. The multiple entry points, then,

are not only dynamic, but entirely beyond the constraint or control of the

original author and the original text. (Himmer 2004)

One privileged entry point must be recognized, though: the blog's present

state or URL, the destination of most links, aggregators, browser favorites,

etc. For the blog's followers, in fact, most other entry points are in fact

51

invisible, and each post is a day's wonder, lasting at most the few days a

discussion goes on, assuming one is started, until it stops or peters out. It is

different for those finding the blog for the first time. Search engines may

take a visitor to any past post which has not been erased, and the visitor

tracking tools may reveal to the blogger that, surprisingly, most of the

visitors to the blog were looking for something else. Many visitors reach

the blog through links placed by other blogs—not to the blog's main URL,

but to that of a specific post (it is essential for the blog's canonical form that

every post should have a URL of its own, so that the blog turns out to be a

gigantic collection of web pages crisscrossed by a multiplicity of

intertextual paths). Therefore, a blog is a kaleidoscope of posts, or a

labyrinth with multiple entrance points, even though it does happen to have

a front gate. And even when the front gate is used, we do not get to the

beginning, as we do in a book, but at any rate to the end so far, a

provisional and variable open ending, a gateway joined (as in newspapers)

to the evanescence of the present. (Note 31).

A blog may be reread, but its main interest is joined to the unforeseeabilty

of the new.

Much like Ulrich Beck defined risk, bloggers deal with hazards and

insecurities induced by never-ending waves of modernization. What

is blogged is the relentless uncertainty of the everyday. Whereas

entrepreneurs colonize the future, energized by collective

hallucinations, bloggers expose the present they find themselves

caught in. (Lovink 2007)

Although, according to Himmer,

52

That the weblog is always in process, never completed, can be read

as both its greatest strength and, in another way, its weakness as a

form. (Himmer 2004)

One should point out that a blog is completed, at least in a certain sense,

once it stops being written—like Tristram Shandy was completed by

Sterne's death. Many blog are born complete, as a matter of fact, or die as

abandoned babies; others are given a formal ending. But the ending most in

keeping, perhaps, with the narrativity proper to this form is that which is

reached in cases like Steve Vincent's, a blogger murdered in Irak as a

consequence of his reports (Note 32)—or that of other bloggers whose live

broadcast diary is interrupted at the same time as their lives. Usually, the

commentary section keeps on growing for some time, until the blog itself

dies. There is a handful of posthumous possible destinies—see Ferri

Benedetti's post on dead blogs (2003).

Now, how does one know that a blog is alive? They could all be recent

casualties—just like one might say that men are growing a beard whenever

they are not having a shave. One will have to conclude that many of the m

appear to be alive, some more than others. Above all when lively

discussions in commentaries bring them to life, and we are expecting an

answer in a given exchange. That is the advantage of live writing: the blog

becomes a living drama, a conversation which leaves a public record and is

being written in the air, a literary work which is getting written at the same

time as it is being lived. But literary is not of course the right word. Blogs

are a place where literature, and diary writing, and journalism, lose their

name and shape and acquire a different one—blog, a kind of crossover

between bog and blob, a growing and shapeless textual fog floating at the

edge of town, an indistinct, swamp-like and changing semiotic mass… the

53

term blog is much more suggestive than web log, which seems to suggest a

purposeful movement, a course under control.

Axel Bruns notes, in the final chapter of Used of Blogs, that among

definitions of blog vary, some defining it as a kind of genre, others as a

kind of technology, although of course there exists some connections

between the technologies and the genres they enable or favour:

Clearly the technological features of publishing technologies also help determine

what genres may be possible within their confines; but at the same time

technologies are also shaped by the social needs that are present in contemporary

culture and may drive the rise and fall of particular genres of expression." (2006:

250)

In the case of blogs, an important factor is the rise of produsage, a

combination of use and production, something enabled at the same time by

the technology and demanded by the users, who will favour the adoption of

technolgoies which satisfy these social needs of communication. There are

many technologies available, but the crucial issue is not whether they exist,

but whether they are adopted and become widespread (otherwise they are

practically nonexistent). If blogs are an excellent medium, but people

prefer Twitter because it is closer to the SMS format, then Twitter will it be

(let's hope something else happens instead) and blogs will remain as a

marginal medium for specialised and limited circles, like Esperantists,

philatelists and ham radio bums.

Thus, for instance, videoblogs and podcasts have not had the same success

for personal blogging as plain written text, perhaps not so much because of

the difficulty of the technology, but rather because users prefer the

quickness of a visual overview, enabled by text but not so well by video or

54

audio (Note 33). Bruns concludes that perhaps "the greater impetus for the

continuing development of blogs in all their forms is driven by the

evolution of genres rather than technologies" (2006: 251). Still, genres also

invite to enclose oneself in the genre's conventions, which are a limitation,

not just an orientation. Even within the limits of the personal blog,

supposedly less "thematic" than other kinds, there are general practices

about what is acceptable or not acceptable, at least for mainstream

consumption. In this way, the blogosphere gradually finds its majority

practices, and its minority ones. No doubt every blogger will stick to those

which are most convenient or satisfactory at a given moment, whether

majority or minority ones—at the risk of ending up in a solitary

community, or a technological islet.

Fictionality and uselessness of the personal blog

When is a blog fictional? There is no easy answer to the question. There is

no clear line dividing fictional from non-fictional blogs. One should study

instead the various ways in which elements of fictionality may appear in a

blog. Or in any other text, as many of these issues are a matter of textual

communication in general, and only a few specific forms are proper to

blogs because of their medium or structure.

Let us begin with the difference between narrative and fiction, or

narrativity and fictionality, as it would apply to blogs. Definitional rigour is

not always kept. For instance, Angela Thomas defines the "fictional blog"

as "any form of narrative that is written and published through a blog,

Livejournal, or other similar online Web journal" (2006: 199)—a clearly

deficient conceptualization.

55

One should differentiate, first, spontaneous from deliberate (and, more

generally, explicit) fictionality. The former may be identified in principle,

as far as narratives are concerned, with their narrativity and the other

dimensions of the semiiotic articulation of a message. That is, because of

the mere fact that it has received a narrative form, an informational

distribution based on presuppositions, a point of view, etc., any text

presented as "factual" must be critically understood a version of the

supposedly factual reality it represents. To be sure, speakers or writers will

argue that their discourse is a faithful transcription of the events, and that is

why we may speak here of unintentional fictionality: it a third party's

viewpoint which points out the discrepancy between the facts and their

representation. Let us be granted the provisional use of the term

spontaneous fictionality in order to refer to this aspect of textuality—

although some will find that the use of the term 'fictionality' in this context

is not very accurate, especially after our plead for conceptual rigour.

The second type of fictionality, deliberate fictionality (usually explicit as

well) is at any rate a different kind of language game: it entails the

generation of characters and situations which are non-existent but

significant, and the invitation to the receiver to enter this alternative

universe. The fictional universe may establish a number of relationships vis

à vis the actual one, depending on the genres invoked and the specific

maneuvers in each text—but, in principle, we find here a poetic,

imaginative activity, which refers the sender and the receiver to a world of

reference which, by common agreement, is distinct from communicative

interaction about factual events.

56

Therefore, there may be in principle, in narrative blogs as in any other

narrative, a spontaneous fictionality (usually unintended) and a deliberate

fictionality (usually explicit). Some blogs fictionalize or narrativize the

blogger's own life story or experience, and others tell a completely fictional

story. There may also be blogs (experimental borderline cases, complex

"second-degree blogs") in which the very structure of the blog is

fictionalized (for instance with fake archives of old posts, pseudo-serious

links to other fictional blogs which are part of an aesthetic project designed

by the author, etc.).

Once these two poles are established, unconscious/unintended fictionality,

and deliberate/explicit fictionality... one must realize that the whole

intermediate area is also populated.

Angela Thomas (2006) presents the following typology of "blog fiction", a

basic opposition between

- the blog used as a mere instrument of publication

and

- the blog used as an instrument of writing, using the features proper to the

medium, which in turn subdivides into:

- a story contained in the blog itself or

- a story only partly contained in the blog itself.

—and here she distinguishes, a division which perhaps does not exhaust the

conceptual area, between blogs deriving from interactive role-playing

games, and characters' diaries, either based on a fictional or a real source.

(Thus, for instance, Julius Caesar's blog, Bloggus Caesari,

http://www.sankey.ca/caesar/, has a real source but is fictional as a blog.

57

There are many other examples of blogging based on classical diaries:

Pepys' diary, Swift's Journal to Stella, Josep Pla's Quadern Gris, etc.).

A separate section in Thomas's paper is devoted to fictional blogs used with

commercial purposes.

As an instrument of writing, the blog will use its characteristics of

hypertextuality, seriality, multimedia, and interactivity in order to create

artistic effects of its own. It is argued that the idealized reader (or "mock

reader", Gibson 1950), created by any writer of a text, acquires in blogs a

different character, since actual readers get to interact with the writer. This

should be qualified, since no actual reader coincides with the implied or

ideal reader of a text. Whoever has read a text, moreover, is only an

unrepresentative sample of those readers who may read it in the future.

Now, perhaps one may think at this point of another characteristic of blogs:

their evanescence. Not because they may eventually disappear from the

web, and many have done so, but because there is in blogs a living end, the

head which keeps growing, and a long tail of half-dead text which it trails

behind ("like a wounded snake")—dead time from the past, former posts

which are only living insofar as the head is still living—if it is living at all

(Note 35). Commentaries to older posts decrease exponentially when

compared to commentaries to recent articles, although this may vary

depending on the tools available on the blog (for instance, the vitality of

older posts is enhanced by the use of a front-page embedded frame

allowing the public follow-up of recent comments).

The blog Thomas uses as an instance of all these possibilities of blogging is

The Glass House—which has already disappeared from the web, with its

58

place taken by advertisements of fast loans and ringtones… Evanescence is

the worst enemy of blogs, and of humans. Be as it may, The Glass House

used, for instance, the commentary section in order to introduce

commentaries by the fictional friends of the fictional protagonist, "James

the Invisible Man". And the supposed blogger inserted, too, multimedia

elements which were themselves fictitious.

More common are blogs deriving from a previously existing fiction, such

as those in fan communities (of fictions such as Harry Potter or Buffy the

Vampire Slayer). The case of so-called fan fiction written by teenagers is

especially striking: according to Angela Thomas, referring to a study done

on a fan fiction community,

in addition to getting inside a character's head and creating a back story for fan

fiction writing, these particular online journals are also a means of exploring and

constructing the self, and the girls (…) were authoring versions of themselves as

they write in role. It was found that the narrative and fiction served as a safe

distancing mechanism to explore feelings and experiences of adolescence that

were either difficult or unexplored through their real selves. (Thomas 2006: 204)

Thus, the teenage authors of fan fiction create hybrid identities mixing their

own with that of the fictional characters, ascribing to them the memories,

taste or desires of the author herself:

Their characters are a rehearsal of who they want to become, and in role-playing

that ideal self, they can grow closer to becoming that ideal. It is the imaginative

possibilities of their fictional characters that empower the girls' ability to

imagine these same possibility for their real selves. (2006: 206)

59

This does not sound radically different from the projections established by

adult authors with their own characters: quite often, these come from

alternative sides of the authors' personality. But in the case of adults,

personality and its possibilities are more settled, so these are often

possibilities which have been rejected by the author or which have

disappeared, rather than projects for the development of the self. There is a

much more indirect relationship between character and author.

At any rate, there exists under the fictional coat a heavy dose of reality—

one of the reasons why it is not easy to trace the dividing line between

fiction and reality, in blogs or anywhere else. The same happens no doubt

the other way round: in blogs which present themselves as factual (and

believe themselves to be factual) there may be a heavy dose of invention or

falsity. One might question whether one should speak of fiction in this

case, fiction being quite a fuzzy concept. It is usually assumed that it refers

to a consensual game between sender and receiver, the game of fiction. But

still, one never knows the precise limits of the fictional consensus.

As noted by Steve Himmer, the mere projection of a networked identity

already entails the construction of a character or the selective filtering of

the self in order to turn it into a character:

The weblogger, in that sense, can be read as fictional, as a character, in precisely

the same ways that Andy Rooney or James Joyce can be—furthering the

collapse between factual and fictional, public and private, and distinct genres in

general. (Himmer 2004).

This is no doubt often the case. But, as Orwell's Napoleon might say, even

though we are all fictional characters, online or offline, some of us are

60

more fictional than others. There exist infinite gradations between the

blogger who signs with a real, personal identity which can be

geographically located, the blogger who uses a more or less stable alias for

his networked identity, and the evanescent identity created on the spot by

someone who writes anonymously with multiple personalities and many

signatures in a variety of sites. (Note 36)

Thomas devotes a special section to commercial blogs, in which fictional

characters also acquire the "real" dimension of interaction with real life

situations, for instance through the use of humour—which gives us more

mixed or fuzzy cases, within a generally fictional framework. Here as

elsewhere, the difference between fiction and reality is more complex,

permeable and dialectical than it might look at first sight.

According to David Gauntlett, "to interpret the choices we have made,

individuals construct a narrative of the self, which gives some order to our

complex lives" (Note 37). This narrative order imposed through selection

or omission is certainly a dimension of fictionality, but also of that

fictionality and narrativity that applies outside fictional texts, in order to

construct the social space in which we interact, in which we maintain the

fiction that we are always the same person—what we called above

unintentional fictionality.

Tim Wright forecasts that "as more and more people start blogging, the

lines will inevitably blur between author and reader, and between fact and

fiction" (quoted in Thomas 2006: 208). Thomas sees much artistic,

interactional and communicative potential in fictional blogs, and more

generally speaking in this indefinite ground between fiction and reality

which, it must be insisted, has not appeared at all with blogs.

61

And what may one say about the "uselessness" of fiction? In principle,

what we read as fiction lacks any other practical usefulness, insofar as it is

fiction, than being readable and interesting, to engross the reader in the

very process of reading. It is a different matter that a fictional narrative,

such as for instance Manolo's Shoe Blog (an example commented by

Thomas) may also serve additional purposes—that fiction should be here

instrumental, or subordinated, to the selling of shoes. If it is fiction at all, it

will have to be sustainable as fiction, as a useless pleasure.

"Useless" means here "not instrumental for immediate aims", or dissociated

from reality because of the use of unreal characters and situations as a

vehicle. It is true that fiction, like other useless arts, may perform many

cultural or cognitive fictions. (This much is admitted by Oscar Wilde in

"The Decay of Lying", which begins by declaring the uselessness of art to

go on to admit that art generates, or helps generate, the perceptual and

social world we inhabit). But art, insofar as it is a semiotic game, lacks any

practical reference: therefore, fiction is its natural territory. If the history of

Gibbon's The Decay and Fall of the Roman Empire is art in this sense, it is

not because of its historical value (although there does exist an art of

history as history) but because of the compositional, narrative, rhetorical,

characterological, imaginative values it shares with fictional texts.

What does this mean? In sum, that fiction is not opposed to the factual…

precisely because its proper space is where the factuality or nonfactuality of

an event or datum becomes irrelevant. It is this lack of determinacy, or this

opposition on a different plane, which often confuses theoretical

discussions on factuality and fictionality. We can conceive of fictional

communication as a language game different from the game of factual

62

reference. In a sense, one game never meets the other… except when one

person is playing one game, and another is playing a different one, and

they try to understand each other, or a conflict arises. In that case they will

probably never meet, either.

How are we to determine whether a text is fictional or not? The decisive

fact is that there is no decisive fact. There are only communicative contexts

in which an attribution of fictionality is ascribed, or fictional use is made of

the text. And it is quite possible that another context will favour another

use of the same. For instance, a book might be classified as fiction or

nonfiction according to convenience (as happened with Thomas

Kenneally's Schindler's List— see Vice 2000). In the practice of discourse

there are no courts of last appeal (excepting those cases which are

effectively taken to court) and any new context involves a reelaboration

and recycling of the text in order to give it a new use.

There are of course many blogs which present themselves as offering

specialized, factual information, and insofar as they are informative

publications they should not be any more problematic or counterfactual

than a printed journal or magazine. Although the electronic medium lends

itself, as argued above, to the blurring of contours in the direction of the

personal blog, because of the ease of publication, gratuitousness (which

gives rise to virtuality) and the tendency to pseudonymy.

In the case of personal blogs, the blogger's acquaintances may read his

diary or reflections as factual information leading to other kinds of

interaction; they may also provide the keys for private or secret meanings.

But most readers are reading the blog for pleasure or entertainment, an

activity in which the factuality of what is said becomes suspended, gets

63

mixed with invention or lies in ways which cannot be checked, and the

whole is even more fictionalized because of the frequent use of

pseudonyms, which help separate what happens in the blog from other

"factual" contexts in which the blogger interacts. The pseudonym or avatar

is one of the main guarantees for the virtualization of online experience,

since the use of one's own name lends itself to undesirable interferences of

diverse aspects of identity, given the Net's informational power.

But it can easily be seen that under such circumstances (variability of

contexts, variability of usages, greater or lesser contrastable referentiality

of the narrated events…) a great number of personal blogs move freely in

an elastic space of indeterminacy, between a virtual fictional world, and the

real world into which they crash sometimes without prior warning, or

where they create interferences and waves of unreality—as though beings

coming from another coexisting but immaterial world intruded into our

own world through an inter-dimensional portal.

Inscribed history

The above discussion refers mostly to personal blogs or amateur thematic

blogs. A different perspective might emerge if we consider corporate blogs.

There is of course some common ground as regards personal emphasis.

Some time ago I attended a convention on corporate blogs (First Meeting

on Aragonese and Corporate Blogs) where business people were

encouraged to show an identifiable, personal and direct image of

themselves or their business through the blog: "include a photograph, do

not anonymize, show your face to the audience". These cybertheorists were

not in the least afraid of opening up public commentaries in the blog—a

64

blog without commentaries may not be a blog in some sense, although it

may still be an excellent advertising tool. Contrary to this optimism among

advocates of the corporate blog, many business people seem to think, and

not without cause, that the influence of negative and/or malignant

commentaries is not to be underestimated in the business world. The same

thing happens in public institutions. As far as my experience is concerned,

the University does not intend to promote the creation of institutional blogs

for its schools, departments, degrees or products, and all the less so if they

are to be open to the comments of a general audience.

A danger inherent in the blogging politics of "giving your face to your

business" is that one's own face becomes one's own business—that is, the

publicly identifiable face of the blogging subject must acquire a given

editorial line, something not quite in keeping with European customs, but

quite American instead—and there the future lies no doubt. The corporate

blogger will have to use his real identity for the corporate blog, and

subordinate to that corporate identity all kinds of online expression. Those

opinions which are diverse, varied, political, politically incorrect,

problematic, contradictory, if they are to find an expression, will have to do

so in anonymous forums or in a pseudonymous blog, as if that personal

expression were the unconscious of the corporate blogger. The photograph

shown to the audience must be smiling and unproblematic—otherwise it is

not a good marketing strategy.

Some of the speakers in the meeting on corporate blogs spoke of their

blog's history—what led them to blog in the first place, how their blog

developed, deriving into new functions, interacting with the activities it

was created to support, finding its audience, etc. Such moments of

reflection and revaluation on hindsight are also frequent on other occasions

65

such as posts written on the blog's anniversaries or birthday celebrations.

Blogs tell then a story which is already recorded in the substance of the

blog itself, an already inscribed history.

A blog is the record of a trajectory through the web, and through the media

or products commented in it: a series of encounters and events which have

taken place and have left a unified textual imprint, developing in public

view. The result oscillates between narrative and living drama, showing

that inherent narrativity which consists in constantly looking back to

evaluate the result of one's own expectations and actions. That is, while

moving forward, the blogger reviews a history which is already told in part,

but which needs to be constantly retold, thus enhancing the blog's narrative

dimension. Retelling what is told. Which is what we always do part of the

time at least, both within and without blogs—the interesting thing about

this dimension of blogs is that precisely the same thing happens with

people's ordinary experience. We carry our history inscribed, in part at

least, on our (non-corporate) bodies, and we move through the public

domain's knowledge about us. But that does not prevent us to tell our story

once again as it keeps changing—adapting it and transforming it through

the very telling. This is an additional dimension of blogs as a virtual or

alternative body, the semiotic corpus of beings shaped by time and marked

by the visible and legible inscriptions it leaves on us, and those we leave on

it.

Coda: precarious literature: Peri Bloghous and Collected Writhings

The emergence of a new age of the written word on the Internet, and

especially on the web generated by users or Web 2.0 has meant a paradigm

66

break in writing. A new technology leads to new modes of communication

and disrupts the established dynamics of edition, printing and distribution.

The shock of the new technologies of the word may be compared to the

impact produced by the proliferation of books in the first age of mass

printing, as described by Marshall McLuhan. At the end of the 17th

century, there was much alarm and revulsion at the increasing numbers of

printed books. Early hopes about a great reformation of mankind by means

of the book had become frustrated, and in 1680 Leibniz believed that

disorder would eventually become insuperable (McLuhan 1998: 382). It

was the age of Swift's Battle of the Books, and of the debate between the

Ancients and the Moderns. Soon Pope will follow suit with Peri Bathous

and The Dunciad, satires against the novel proliferation of public

scribblers. The text McLuhan refers to, a preface to a minor work by

Leibniz, might be modified to apply it by analogy to the present-day

proliferation of evanescent, despicable and despised electronic

publications:

I am afraid we are going to continue for a long time in our present state of

confusion and misery, and the fault is ours. I fear, moreover, that once we have

vainly exhausted our curiosity without obtaining from our research any

appreciable advancement in our happiness, people may come to experience

disgust toward the sciences, and that a fatal despair may cause the return of

barbarity. To this result, the terrible mass of blogs, which keeps growing, may

well contribute: because, in the end, disorder will become almost unberable; the

infinite multitude of writers will soon expose them to the danger of universal

oblivion; the thirst for glory that drives many towards study will suddenly

cease; perhaps being a writer will become something as dishonourable as it used

to be honourable. At best, we may be able to entertain ourselves with small

fashionable blogs, which may last a few years, and which may save readers from

boredom for some minutes, but which will have been written without any

67

purpose of enriching our knowledge or of deserving the appreaciation of

posterity. I may be answered that, since those who write are so many, it is

impossible for all their works to be preserved. I freely admit this, and I do not

wholly disapprove of these small fashionable blogs, which are like the flowers of

a spring, or the fruits of an autumn, barely lasting for one year. If they are well

done, they give the impression of a useful conversation, not merely pleasant, one

which keeps idle minds away from blameful doings, improving their spirit and

their language. Often enough, their purpose is to induce men of our times to

some good, and that is the aim I pursue in publishing this little work. (Note 38)

A similar but more acute fear is diagnosed by McLuhan in Pope's Dunciad,

with its apocalyptic conclusion.

By means of the agglomerate action of many such victims of applied

knowledge—that is, self-opinionated authors endowed with Industry and

Plodding—there is now the restoration of the reign of Chaos and old Night and

the removal of the imperial seat of Dulness their daughter from the City to the

polite world. (McLuhan 1998: 385)

Such is the alarm raised by the proliferation of Text in the age of

Mechanical Reproduction, now or three hundred years ago.

As a matter of fact, the texts of the first wave of electronic "writing" (the

radio, film and television) were even more evanescent than blogs, and has

only partly been rescued by film and sound archives, and by YouTube. As

to the printing presses, they are more active than ever before and bestsellers

keep pouring out of them. The audience for this flood of books and blogs

follows the aforementioned logic of the Long Tail: almost everyone will

have read some of the items at the head of the graph, but on the other hand

the infinite long tail of less-requested items has only one reader and visitor:

the author himself. (Some well-meaning people will argue that the items in

68

the long tail are "just as dignified and valuable as those at the head"—if so,

one must admit it is proportionally).

In sum, the Web, and specifically blogs and other tools of self-publication,

seem to enhance the effects of the printing press, which in turn enhanced

those of literacy, as described by McLuhan. (Note 39). The blogosphere is

the Gutenberg Galaxy going nova—not at all its disappeance—and the

dynamics of the Dark Side of the printing press, exponentially developed,

also applies to it. McLuhan argues that print, due to its uniformity, its

repetitive abilities, and its unlimited extension, managed to give a new life

and fame to anything—a kind of langorous life that stupid minds infuse to

stupid subjects, and which eventually shapes all existence from the inside.

Readers imitate authors in their vanity, and demand still greater efforts and

exercises in stupidity—McLuhan saw journals with a "human interest" as

the latest development in this trend (1998: 389), but then he did not live to

see the heyday of trash TV, or teenage social networking, or the onset of

personal blogs as human interest periodicals, self-edited by the audience

itself (hypocrite lecteur, mon semblable, mon frère).

A more favourable perspective may also be taken, of course. In literature

we enjoy well-finished and well-executed works, conceived in advance

and planned beforehand (for instance with a complex plot), but we always

enjoy, sometimes even more so, unpretentious texts written in an

improvised way, in which the writer's obsessions and spontaneous

tendencies are clearly manifest and return again and again. Quite often,

such writings are not meant to be published—they are private diaries,

notebooks— or have been written as disposable pieces, not meant to be

bound in a volume—newspaper columns and reviews, for instance. It is

true that many personal diaries, most of the literary ones at any rate, are

69

like blogs, born to be published avant la lettre. But some generic

spontaneity is still attached to them, and, conversely, ephemeral genres

may enjoy some persistence if ony because of the fact that written words

may remain. Sometimes.

On the enjoyable side, I read Bardadrac, by Gérard Genette, a book which

although it is organized as a supposed dictionary, is actually a jumble of

ideas, memories, digressions, random thoughts, notes and anecdotes—a

heterogenous accumulation, which is more or less the meaning of the title.

And I have also been reading what I almost take to be Carmen Martín

Gaite's blog, Tirando del hilo (artículos 1949-2000)—reviews of the

author's current reading, written in an improvided way, "a vuelapluma" as

one used to say in Spanish—today I guess one should say "a vuelateclado".

Thus, many writers keep their own blog or their own uncollected and

disposable writings which have nonetheless been preserved: Coleridge's

notebook commented in detail by John Livingston Lowes in The Road to

Xanadu, Sei Shonagon's Pillow Book, Montaigne's Essays… One may write

a paper, or a blog post, on the new life afforded to essay-writing on the web

and on blogs (Note 40), or on the essay as the model for this precarious

form of writing, open and somewhat "gypsy-style"—"a lo gitano" as

Martín Gaite says. Commenting on a book by Fernando Savater, she argues

that there are two kinds of essays, "a lo payo" and "a lo gitano":

The former, although they do teach us things, put them forth as results; every

teaching is neatly packed with its label; they do not invite us to join the

conversation, because of their very frame. The others, in contrast, are their own

becoming, they pull us into the journey they are engaged in, they surprise and

provoke us. Well, then, La infancia recuperada (Childhood Recovered) is an

70

excellent instance of gypsy-like essay. It is also a memoir. And a tale. And a

riddle. And a travel book. All of this and none of this. (2006: 91, my translation).

A more exuberant and more precarious kind of unstable essay is

commented by Martín Gaite in "La impotencia como pesquisa. Notas a El

testamento de Rilke"—a commentary on the fragmentary, digressive or

tentative forms that emerge as a response to a crisis, the crisis which comes

from realizing that one's work, or one's life, cannot be encompassed:

When the intensity of life is at the same time a deadline which impedes work

and an incentive which multiplies our eagerness to engage with it. The challenge

of what cannot be encompassed increases the tension the more it reveals the

obstacle, and thus, the conflict derives into the exasperation to find a formula

able to express it.

Such is the origin of those notebooks (which are sometimes destroyed and

sometimes are not) in which the writer, unable to accomplish anything else,

bears witness to this inability and thus turns it into a subplot of his labour.

Marginal rough drafts which oscillate between order and chaos, between being

and pretending to be, babbling texts, restless texts. (…)

This text of Rilke's is contradictory and truncated, the pure ferment of its own

elaboration, alternating incoherence with lucidity.

Without meaning now to answer the question whether this "literature of

restlessness" is sufficiently significant to be edited as a book, I do contend that

one must face it with a reading attitude different from the ordinary one, and not

demand from it any rootedness, conclusions and least of all consolation. To my

mind they are absolutely minority texts. And they will only be able to sting those

who have been stumbling though similar wastelands of uncertainty, where there

nothing to be done but grab one's impotence—a precarious last hope—and turn

it into the material for investigation. (2006: 101-2, my translation)

71

Because of the interest, the liminality and the exploratory nature of these

investigations, such unpublishable textual writhings often become the last

volume, W/Z—Writhings to Zymosis—of the author's Collected Words.

Yet another perspective on the textualization of everyday anxieties is

provided by Martín Gaite in "Cosa por cosa", where she compares the

labour of weaving a text to that of unraveling what has become entangled,

and patiently stitching together the chaos of memory and affections, this

time with a design in mind; as a matter of fact, the very activity of

unraveling the thread in order to weave it into a text (even if it is one of

those previously mentioned texts for nothing) is itself a way of creating

some kind of order, simply through the linguistic untangling of a mental

tangle:

Sewing is going one after stitch, be they hemstitches or memories, and the

solidity of the text (and it is not for nothing that 'texto' and 'tejido', text and cloth,

have the same root) depends on our not leaving unstitched whatever it is that we

gradually keep and archive in that garret where everything tends to heap up

without any rhyme or reason, things seen, imagined or learned. Just like the

threads in a sewing basket into which all things are carelessly thrown, the

threads tangle up and then we despair when we try to find something.

As a matter of fact, as we grow older and as Cervantes would say "anxiety

grows and hope diminishes", there is a lesser incentive to fight that tangle in

which things lie lessens, pulling carefully the various threads of the needlework,

each leading to its own ball, so that they will not break or get mixed up. Sifting

earlier things from later things means, finally, to recover the thread of memory.

And that of the discourse which investigates it. The thread which keeps us alive,

because it stitches our origins to our fluid and variable identity, prodding us to

overcome the ephemeral nature of the piece of time which has been allotted to

us. Day after day. One thing after another. (2006: 482).

72

These labours associated to everyday writing are intensified by the real-

time communicative interaction provided by blogs. One might point out,

though, that when we write we do not merely untangle, classify and isolate;

we also combine in an organized way, we create patterns and shapes, we

associate, organize. We link. To organize more, or less, that is the question:

highly organized works add many things and suppress many others; other

works are happenstance, perhaps more respetful with the randomness of the

experience which has associated things, or the random course of life, or the

strange combinations which are suggested by improvisation and intuition.

There are many possible patterns and combinations. Admittedly, some

encourage inane chatter, or worse, worse worse… Of much writing there is

no end, and life is shorter than that. It is advisable, therefore, to choose the

company we keep, in life and books, and perhaps all the more so in the case

of these new speaking, living, growing and conversant books—blogs,

where the author is sometimes strikingly near, the text becomes a person,

and the person becomes an ongoing story which often gets entangled with

our own, sometimes disturbingly so. Public writing and its readership have

never been more involved with personal experience and with the present

vicissitudes of the self.

73

Notes

Note 1. On the interplay of plans and narrativity, see my note "La historia del fracaso

del plan".

Note 2. The notion of realistic motivation comes from Russian formalism. See

Tomashevsky's discussion (1982).

Note 3. On brain activity as it relates to different kinds of memory, see Tulving (2002)

or Peigneux et al. (2006). Memory is arguably more narrative than perception—to begin

with, it is already retrospective, or perhaps it is more accurate to say, more intensely

retrospective. On perception as it feeds back with memory systems, see also my 2006

paper "Especulaciones neuronales".

Note 4. A consideration of this issue must necessarily take into account the work of G.

H. Mead (2002).

Note 5. This conception of language as technology can be held to derive as a logical

conclusion from McLuhan's and Ong's reflections on writing as technology. See my

note "El lenguaje como tecnología interiorizada" (2005).

Note 6. A panormic view of narrative theory, with special attention to literary analysis,

can be found in my book Acción, Relato, Discurso (1998).

Note 7. Let us mention only two, by means of example: 1) narrative sequentiality rests

spontaneously or iconically on the sequentiality of the spoken chain (but stops short of

identifying with it); 2) we may recall the analogies established by structuralist

narratologist between narrative and the sententence structure, or between narrative and

the verb (see for instance Culler 1975).

74

Note 8. On the interpenetration of orality and gesture at the origin of langauge, see

Arbib (1999). See also my commentary in García Landa (2007) "Interacción

internalizada".

Note 9. We simplify here in alluding to "the permanence of writing", referring to some

uses of writing which are so central as to make us believe that they are inhererent to it.

See my note "Scripta nonnumquam manent". The study of a medium's symbolic

characteristics cannot be limited to its representational potential; it must be specified

with precise descriptions of its effective use in concrete communicative situations.

Note 10. See my note on iconographic synthesis (2007).

Note 11. On the perception of motion in the cinema, see Anderson & Anderson (1980).

The narrativization of experience by means of visual technology is quite graphically

exemplified in the humourous clip in Vanity Fea 2006, "We're at Now-Now".

Note 12. See my paper on the funereal and monumental nature of writing in the Poem of

Gilgamesh ("Gilgamesh y la escritura").

Note 13. See my note "Nostalgia por el futuro".

Note 14. See an instance in my note "El efecto directo".

Note 15. I have been devoting much attention to phenomena related to hindsight bias,

particularly in the field of literary criticism. Some papers dealing with this issue may be

accessed through the note "En el retrovisor" (2005).

Note 16. See more on the interactional impact of the telephone in my note "Las

Vírgenes Vigilantes."

Note 17. Consider, for instance, the changing echo of different ways of blogging

perceptible in my 2005 note "The Cutting Edge of the Present."

75

Note 18. I am referring to Lyotard's critique (1979) of "grand narratives" which

supposedly no longer underpin discourse in the West. It is my contention that some

great narratives may well lose power, but others are reinforced by such phenomena as

globalization and scientific progress.

Note 19. On Hawking's Brief History of Time, see my note in Vanity Fea.

Note 20. This is the approach taken by works such as Terrence Deacon's (1997).

Note 21. Thus the critical current (itself emergent) of so-called cultural evolutionism,

exemplified by the works of Barkow, Cosmides and Tooby (1992), Carroll (1995), or

Gottschall and Wilson (2005); perhaps the best know is Pinker (2007).

But it is Hegel who, in spite of his idealistic approach, expounded the basic principles of

human culture as an emergent process in whose transmission and reproduction

ontogenesis recapitulates phylogenesis, so to speak:

The single individual must also pass through the formative stages of universal Spirit so

far as their content is concerned, but as shapes which spirit has already left behind, as

stages on a way that has been made level with toil. Thus, as far as factual information is

concerned, we find that what in former ages engaged the attention of men of mature

mind, has been reduced to the level of facts, exercises, and even games for children;

and, in the child's progress through school, we shall recognize the history of the cultural

development of the world traced, as it were, in a silhouette. (1977: 16)

Note 22. And thus we find narratological theories which focus on beginnings,

developments or endings, beyond the initial observations by Aristotle in the Poetics.

See for instance Herrnstein Smith (1968) or Nuttall (1991).

Note 23. On narrativity, see above all Sturgess (1992) and Pier and García Landa

(2008). On the emergent aspect of narrativity my paper "Emergent Narrativity" (2006)

provided the basis for a section of this paper.

Note 24. On these models see for instance Genette (1972), Tomashevski (1982), Bal

(1985), García Landa (1998).

76

Note 25. Shakespeare, in Twelfth Night (II.5): "Some are born great, some achieve

greatness, and some have greatness thrust upon them".

Note 26. Rimmon-Kenan (2006).

We may suggest in passing that a three-tier analytic level, based on (1) action, (2) story

and (3) narrative discourse (García Landa 1998) is more clarifying, since it clearly

shows the chronological peculiarities of each level:

- The chronology of action, that is, the narrated events, not as they are narrated, but as

they are supposed to have occurred.

- The chronology of story, that is, the narrated events presented with the order,

perspective, modal selectivity, etc., articulated by the narrative.

- The chronology of narrative discourse as discourse: including not just the story but the

narrating of the story, or the production of narrative discourse as a speech act, including

digressions, discursive interaction with the receiver, etc.

(Note 27). Mead (2002); Blumer (1986). Further reflections on the role of self-

communication and reflexivity in the generation of consciousness are to be found in my

paper "Más consciencia".

(Note 28). This narrativizing function of interpretation can be found in other literary

contexts. See for instance my note "Indicios", or my paper "Retroactive Thematization,

Interaction, and Interpretation: The Hermeneutic Spiral from Schleiermacher to

Goffman" (2004).

(Note 29). See my review of Serfaty's book in Atlantis (2005).

(Note 30). On several aspects of the alluded novelty in self-representation, see my note

"El obsceno blog", as well as Serfaty's book (2003) and the papers by van Dijck (2005)

and Vershbow (2007). Paz Soldán (2008) sees in blogs the literary genre proper to the

21st century.

(Note 31). See also Neri (2007).

77

(Note 32). See my note "Steve Vincent: The End" (2005).

(Note 33). We leave aside other massively successful phenomena such as multimedia

social networks like Facebook (http://www.facebook.com) or sites which share some

characteristics with them, such as the online video platform or "personal TV" YouTube

(http://youtube.com) —although it is clear that there is a transition and intersection

between these communicative practices and text-based blogging.

(Note 35). On the "long tail" as it bears on reading, see my note "The Long Tale".

(Note 36). They may be, too, the same person. See also my note "Anonimato, veronimia

y pseudonimia" (2007).

(Note 37). Gauntlett, 2002: 113 quoted in Thomas 2006: 208.

(Note 38). A variation on the text McLuhan quotes from Selections from Leibniz, ed.

Philip P. Wiener (Nueva York: Scribners, 1951), 29-30; McLuhan (1998: 382).

(Note 39). A detailed review of McLuhan can be found in my paper "Por la Galaxia

Gutenberg" (2007). There are other self-publishing tools we will not consider here, such

as wikis (also managed from such online sites as Wikilearning

http://www.wikilearning.com) and websites where users can host articles or files for

public view following certain protocols of use, such as the Social Science Research

Network (http://ssrn.com/)

(Note 40). See my paper "Essaying the Blog - Your Post's Contribution / Ensayando el

Blog - Qué aporta tu post" (2007).

78

References

Arbib, M. A. (2001): "Co-Evolution of Human Consciousness and Language." In Cajal

and Consciousness: Scientific Approaches to Consciousness on the Centennial of

Ramón y Cajal's TEXTURA. Ed. Pedro C. Marijuán. New York: New York Academy of

Sciences. 195-220.

Anderson, J., and B. Anderson. (1980): "Motion Perception in Motion Pictures." In The

Cinematic Apparatus. Ed. Teresa de Lauretis y Stephen Heath. Nueva York: St

Martin's.

Bakhtin, Mikhail. (1981): The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays. Ed. Michael

Holquist. Austin: University of Texas P, 1981.

Bal, Mieke (1985): Narratology: Introduction to the Theory of Narrative. Trans.

Christine van Boheemen. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.

Barkow, J. H., L. Cosmides and J. Tooby, eds. (1992): The Adapted Mind: Evolutionary

Psychology and the Generation of Culture. New York: Oxford UP, 1992.

Blumer, H. (1986): Symbolic Interactionism: Perspective and Method. Berkeley:

University of California Press.

Bruner, J. (1986): Actual Minds, Possible Worlds. Cambridge (MA): Harvard

University Press, 1986.

Bruns, A. (2006): "What's Next for Blogging?" In Uses of Blogs. Ed. Axel Bruns y

Joanne Jacobs. New York: Peter Lang. 249-54.

Carroll, J. (1995): Evolution and Literary Theory. Columbia: U of Missouri P.

Culler, J. (1975): Structuralist Poetics: Structuralism, Linguistics, and the Study of

Literature. London: Routledge.

79

Deacon, T. (1997): The Symbolic Species: The Co-Evolution of Language and the

Brain. New York: Norton.

Dennett, D. C. (1992): Consciousness Explained. London: Allen Lane.

Ferri Benedetti, F. (2003): "Ciber-muerte." La Cosa Húmeda 8 Jun.

http://fbenedetti.blogalia.com/historias/8740

2008

Fludernik, M. (1996): Towards a 'Natural' Narratology. London: Routledge, 1996.

Gauntlett, David. (2002). Media, Gender and Identity. London: Routledge.

García Landa, J. A. (1992): Samuel Beckett y la narración reflexiva. (Humanidades,

19). Zaragoza: Prensas Universitarias de Zaragoza.

–––––. (1998): Acción, Relato, Discurso: Estructura de la ficción narrativa. (Acta

Salmanticensia, Estudios Filológicos, 269). Salamanca: Ediciones Universidad de

Salamanca.

http://www3.usal.es/~eus/cat/col/ef/ef-269.htm

2004-11-20

–––––. (2004): "Retroactive Thematization, Interaction, and Interpretation: The

Hermeneutic Spiral from Schleiermacher to Goffman." BELL (Belgian English

Language and Literature) ns 2: 155-66. (Special issue, "The Language/Literature

Interface).

http://www.baahe.be/BELL2004.html

–––––. (2005): "The Cutting Edge of the Present." In García Landa, Vanity Fea 14

April.

http://garciala.blogia.com/2005/041403-the-cutting-edge-of-the-present.php

2008

_____. (2005): Rev. of The Mirror and the Veil: An Overview of American Online

Diaries and Blogs, by Viviane Serfaty. Atlantis 27.1 (June): 117-22.

http://www.atlantisjournal.org/HTML%20Files/Tables%20of%20contents/27.1%20(20

05).htm

80

–––––. (2005): "El lenguaje como tecnología interiorizada." In García Landa, Vanity

Fea 5 July 2005.

http://garciala.blogia.com/2005/070502-el-lenguaje-como-tecnologia-interiorizada.php

2008

–––––. (2005): "Steve Vincent: The End." In García Landa, Vanity Fea 4 Aug.

http://garciala.blogia.com/2005/080402-steve-vincent-the-end.php

–––––. (2005): "En el retrovisor." Introd. to Objects in the Rear View Mirror May

Appear Firmer Than They Are. In García Landa, Vanity Fea 22 oct.

http://garciala.blogia.com/2005/102201-en-el-retrovisor.php

2005-10-31

–––––. (2005): "Time Out of Joint." In García Landa, Vanity Fea 24 Oct.

http://garciala.blogia.com/2005/102401-time-out-of-joint.php

2005-10-31

–––––. (2006): "Indicios." In García Landa, Vanity Fea 18 Jan.

http://garciala.blogia.com/2006/011801-indicios.php

2006-01-30

–––––. (2006): "El obsceno blog." In García Landa, Vanity Fea 27 May.

http://garciala.blogia.com/2006/052702-el-obsceno-blog.php

2006-05-31

–––––. (2006): "Scripta nonnunquam manent." In García Landa, Vanity Fea 15 June.

http://garciala.blogia.com/2006/061501-scripta-nonnunquam-manent.php

2006-07-02

–––––. (2006): "Las Vírgenes Vigilantes." In García Landa, Vanity Fea 16 July.

http://garciala.blogia.com/2006/071602-las-virgenes-vigilantes.php

2006-07-28

–––––. (2006): "Emergent narrativity." In García Landa, Vanity Fea 15 Oct. 2006.

http://garciala.blogia.com/2006/101501-emergent-narrativity.php

2006-11-01

–––––. (2006): "Especulaciones neuronales." In García Landa, Vanity Fea 2 Nov.

http://garciala.blogia.com/2006/110201-especulaciones-neuronales.php

2006-11-29

–––––. (2006): "La historia del fracaso del plan." In García Landa, Vanity Fea 10 Jan.

http://garciala.blogia.com/2006/011002-la-historia-del-fracaso-del-plan.php

2008

81

–––––. (2006): "Nostalgia por el futuro." In García Landa, Vanity Fea 15 March.

http://garciala.blogia.com/2006/031504-nostalgia-por-el-futuro.php

2006-04-07

–––––. (2006): "El efecto directo." In García Landa, Vanity Fea 16 Dec.

http://garciala.blogia.com/2006/121601-el-efecto-directo.php

2007-01-05

–––––. (2007): "Más consciencia." In García Landa, Vanity Fea 1 Jan.

http://garciala.blogia.com/2007/010101-mas-consciencia.php

2007-01-31

–––––. (2007): "Anonimato, veronimia y pseudonimia." In García Landa, Vanity Fea 17

Feb.

http://garciala.blogia.com/2007/021701-anonimato-veronimia-y-pseudonimia.php

2008

–––––. (2007): "Síntesis iconográfica." In García Landa, Vanity Fea 18 March.

http://garciala.blogia.com/2007/031801-sintesis-iconografica.php

2007-04-01

–––––. (2007): "The Long Tale." In García Landa, Vanity Fea 31 Aug.

http://garciala.blogia.com/2007/083101-the-long-tale.php

2007

–––––. (2007): "Por la Galaxia Gutenberg." In García Landa, Vanity Fea 10 Sept. 2007.

Rev. of Marshall McLuhan, The Gutenberg Galaxy.

http://garciala.blogia.com/2007/091001-por-la-galaxia-gutenberg.php

2007

–––––. (2007): "Historia del tiempo." In García Landa, Vanity Fea 14 Oct. Rev. of

Stephen Hawking's book.

http://garciala.blogia.com/2007/101401-historia-del-tiempo.php

2007

–––––. (2007): "Internalized Interaction: The Specular Development of Language and

the Symbolic Order / Interacción internalizada: el desarrollo especular del lenguaje y el

orden simbólico." Social Science Research Network (Dic.):

http://ssrn.com/abstract=1073782

2007

–––––. (2008): "Essaying the Blog - Your Post's Contribution / Ensayando el blog –

Qué aporta tu post." Social Science Research Network (Jan.):

82

http://ssrn.com/abstract=1080599

2008

–––––. (2008): "Narrating Narrating: Twisting the Twice-Told Tale." In Theorizing

Narrativity. Ed. John Pier and José Ángel García Landa. (Narratologia, 12). Berlin and

New York: Walter de Gruyter, 2008. 419-51.*

http://www.degruyter.com/cont/fb/li/detailEn.cfm?id=IS-9783110202441-1

2007

–––––. (2008): "Gilgamesh y la escritura." Narrativas 9.

http://www.narrativas.com

2008

Genette, G. (1992): The Architext: An Introduction. Trans. Jane E. Lewin. Introd.

Robert Scholes. Berkeley: U of California P.

–––––. (2006): Bardadrac. (Fiction & Cie). Paris: Seuil.

Georgakopoulou, A. (2005): "Text-Type Approach to Narrative." Routledge

Encyclopedia of Narrative Theory. Ed. David Herman, Manfred Jahn and Marie-Laure

Ryan. Abingdon and Nueva York: Routledge. 594-96.

Gibson, W. (1980): "Authors, Speakers, Readers, and Mock Readers." 1950. In

Reader-Response Criticism. Ed. Jane P. Tompkins. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins

University Press. 1-6.

Goffman, E. (1981): Forms of Talk. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.

Gottschall, J, y D. S. Wilson, eds. (2005): The Literary Animal: Evolution and the

Nature of Narrative. Evanston: Northwestern UP.

Gould, Stephen J. (1990). "What, If Anything, Is a Zebra?" In Gould, In Gould, Hen's

Teeth and Horse's Toes. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1990. 355-65.

Gusdorf, G. (1991): Lignes de vie: 1. Les écritures du moi. 2. Auto-bio-graphie. 2 vols.

Paris: Odile Jacob.

83

Hawking, S. W. (2005): Historia del tiempo: Del big bang a los agujeros negros.

Madrid: Alianza Editorial.

Hegel, G. W. F. (2004): Phenomenology of Spirit. Trans. A. V. Miller. Ed. J. N.

Findlay. New York: Oxford UP; Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1977.

Herman, David, Manfred Jahn and Marie-Laure Ryan, eds. (2005): Routledge

Encyclopedia of Narrative Theory. Abingdon and New York: Routledge.

Himmer, S. (2004): "The Labyrinth Unbound: Weblogs as Literature." In Into the

Blogosphere. Ed. L. Gurak, S. Antonijevic, L. Johnson, C. Ratliff and J. Reyman.

Minneapolis: University of Minnesota.

http://blog.lib.umn.edu/blogosphere/labyrinth_unbound.html

Kearns, M. (2005): "Genre Theory in Narrative Studies." Routledge Encyclopedia of

Narrative Theory. Ed. David Herman, Manfred Jahn and Marie-Laure Ryan. Abingdon

and Nueva York: Routledge. 201-5.

Lejeune, P. (2000): 'Cher écran': Journal personnel, ordinateur, Internet. Paris: Seuil.

Lovink, G. (2007): "Blogging: The Nihilist Impulse." Eurozine 2 Jan. 2007.

http://www.eurozine.com/articles/2007-01-02-lovink-en.html

2007

Lowes, J. L. (1978): The Road to Xanadu: A Study in the Ways of the Imagination.

1927. London: Pan Books-Picador.

Lyotard, J.-F. (1979): La condition postmoderne: rapport sur le savoir. París: Minuit.

Martín Gaite, C. (2006): Tirando del hilo (artículos 1949-2000). Ed. José Teruel.

(Libros del Tiempo, 225). Madrid: Siruela.

McLuhan, Marshall. (1998): La galaxia Gutenberg. 1962. Trans. Juan Novella. Introd.

Javier Echeverría. Barcelona: Círculo de Lectores.

84

Mead, G. H. (2002): The Philosophy of the Present. Amherst (NY): Prometheus Books.

–––––. (2006): "George Herbert Mead: La filosofía del presente." Trans. of José Ángel

García Landa. In José Ángel García Landa, Vanity Fea 21 Aug. 2006.

http://garciala.blogia.com/2006/082103-george-herbert-mead-la-filosofia-del-

presente.php

2006-09-02

Neri, C. (2007): "Apuntes sobre la estructura narrativa de los blogs (para conversar)." In

Neri, Moebius 2 Dec. 2007.

http://lodigital.com.ar/moebius/?p=905

2008-01-15

"Neurocritic" (2007): "Mental Time Travel." The Neurocritic 7 Feb. 2007.

http://neurocritic.blogspot.com/2007/02/mental-time-travel.html

2007-04-12

Nünning, A., y R. Sommer. (2008): "Diegetic and Mimetic Narrativity: Some Further

Steps towards a Narratology of Drama." In Theorizing Narrativity. Ed. John Pier and

José Ángel García Landa. Berlin and New York: Walter de Gruyter. 331-54.

Nuttall, A. D. (1991): Openings. Oxford: Oxford UP.

Paz Soldán, E. (2008): "El 'blog' y la literatura del siglo XXI." El País.com (Babelia) 15

March.

http://www.elpais.com/articulo/semana/blog/literatura/siglo/XXI/elpepuculbab/2008031

5elpbabese_4/Tes/

2008

Peigneux, P., P. Orban, E. Balteau, C. Degueldre, A. Luxen, S. Laureys, and P. Maquet.

(2006): "Offline Persistence of Memory-related Cerebral Activity during Active

Wakefulness." PLoS Biology 4: e100.

http://biology.plosjournals.org/perlserv/?request=get-

document&doi=10.1371/journal.pbio.0040100&ct=1

85

2008

Penas, B. (2008): "A Pragma-stylistic Contribution to the Study of Narrativity: Standard

and Non-standard Narrativities." In Theorizing Narrativity. Ed. John Pier and José

Ángel García Landa. Berlín and Nueva York: Walter de Gruyter. 211-51.

Phelan, J., y P. J. Rabinowitz, eds. (2005): A Companion to Narrative Theory.

(Blackwell Companions to Literature and Culture). Oxford: Blackwell.

Pier, J., y J. A. García Landa, eds. (2008): Theorizing Narrativity. (Narratologia, 12).

Berlin and Nueva York: Walter de Gruyter, 2008.

http://www.degruyter.com/cont/fb/li/detailEn.cfm?id=IS-9783110202441-1

2008

Pinker, S. (2007): The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window into Human Nature.

Nueva York: Viking.

Prince, G. (2006): "Narratologie classique et narratologie post-classique." In Vox

Poetica 6 March 2006.

http://www.vox-poetica.com/t/prince06.html

2006-09-16

–––––. (2008): "Narrativehood, Narrativeness, Narrativity, Narratability." In Theorizing

Narrativity. Ed. John Pier and José Ángel García Landa. Berlin and Nueva York:

Walter de Gruyter. 19-27.

Ricœur, P. (1991): Temps et récit Tome I: L'intrigue et le récit historique. Tome II: La

configuration dans le récit de fiction. Tome III: Le temps raconté. (Points; Essais, 227,

228, 229). Paris: Éditions du Seuil.

Rimmon-Kenan, S. (2006): "Concepts of Narrative." In The Travelling Concept of

Narrative. Ed. Matti Hyvärinen, Anu Korhonen, and Juri Mykkänen. Collegium (2006).

http://www.helsinki.fi/collegium/e-series/volumes/index.htm

86

Rudrum, D. (2008): "Narrativity and Performativity: From Cervantes to Star Trek." In

Theorizing Narrativity. Ed. John Pier and José Ángel García Landa. Berlin and Nueva

York: Walter de Gruyter. 253-76.

Ryan, M.-L. (2008): "Transfictionality Across Media." In Theorizing Narrativity. Ed.

John Pier and José Ángel García Landa. Berlin and New York: Walter de Gruyter. 385-

417.

Savater, F. (1994): La infancia recuperada. 1983. Madrid: Alianza / Ediciones del

Prado.

Sei Shônagon. (1999). Makura no Shôshi. ("El cuaderno de almohada", s. XI). Select.

in Antología de la literatura japonesa. Ed. Michel Revon. Barcelona: Círculo de

Lectores. 256-90.

Serfaty, V. (2003): The Mirror and the Veil: An Overview of American Online Diaries

and Blogs. (Amsterdam Monographs in American Studies, 11). Amsterdam and Nueva

York: Rodopi.

Smith, B. H. (1968): Poetic Closure: A Study of How Poems End. Chicago: University

of Chicago Press.

Sternberg, M. (2008): "If-Plots: Narrativity and the Law-Code." In Theorizing

Narrativity. Ed. John Pier and José Ángel García Landa. Berlin and Nueva York:

Walter de Gruyter. 29-107.

Sturgess, P. J. M. (1992): Narrativity: Theory and Practice. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

Swales, J. Genre Analysis: English in Academic and Research Settings. (Cambridge

Applied Linguistics). Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1990.

Thomas, A. (2006): "Fictional Blogs." In Uses of Blogs. Ed. Axel Bruns and Joanne

Jacobs. New York: Peter Lang. 199-210.

87

Tomashevski, B. (1982): Teoría de la literatura. Madrid: Akal.

Tulving, E. (2002): "Episodic Memory: From Mind to Brain." Annual Review of

Psychology 53 (Feb.): 1-25.

http://arjournals.annualreviews.org/doi/abs/10.1146%2Fannurev.psych.53.100901.1351

14

2007-04-12

Turner, Victor. (1974): Dramas, Fields, and Metaphors: Symbolic Action in Human

Society. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.

van Dijck, J. (2005): "From Shoebox to Performative Agent: The Computer as Personal

Memory Machine." New Media and Society 7.3 (2005).

http://www.new-media-and-society.com/NM&S%20website/Contents/2005%20-

%203.htm

2006-02-11

Vershbow, B. (2007): "Blogging Restructures Consciousness?" IfBook 8 enero

http://www.futureofthebook.org/blog/archives/2007/01/blogging_restructures_consciou.

html

2007-01-19

Vice, S. (2000): Holocaust Fiction. Londres: Routledge.

Virtanen, T. (1992): "Issues of Text-Typology: Narrative—a 'Basic' Type of Text?" Text

12: 293-310.

Walker, J. (2005): "Blog (Weblog)." Routledge Encyclopedia of Narrative Theory. Ed.

David Herman, Manfred Jahn and Marie-Laure Ryan. Abingdon y Nueva York:

Routledge. 45.

White, H. (1987): The Content of the Form: Narrative Discourse and Historical

Representation. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. 1-25.

88

Wilde, O. (1971): "The Decay of Lying." 1889. In Critical Theory since Plato. Ed.

Hazard Adams. San Diego: Harcourt. 673-686.

Zimmer, C. (2007): "Animal Time Travelers." The Loom 2 April.

http://scienceblogs.com/loom/2007/04/02/animal_time_travelers.php

2007-04-12

Blogs and the Narrativity of Experience

Abstract

Recommended publications

STILISTIKA DISKURSA KAO KONTEKSTUALIZIRANA STILISTIKA

The Use of the English Progressive Form in Discourse: An Analysis of a Corpus of Interview Data

Historiographic Discourse and Narratology: A Footnote to Fludernik’s Work on Factual Narrative: Cogn...

Discourse anaphora: Four theoretical models