2002 “Screen Texts—A Polemic.” Politics and Culture 2, no. 1 < http://aspen.conncoll.edu/politicsandculture/page.cfm?key=146>.

method of literary and library historian Roger Chartier inlocating the meaning of screen texts: a) a reconstruction of`the diversity of older readings from their sparse andmultiple traces'; b) a focus on `the text itself, the objectthat conveys it, and the act that grasps it'; and c) anidentification of `the strategies by which authors andpublishers tried to impose an orthodoxy or a prescribedreading on the text' (157, 161-63, 66). This grid from thenew cultural history turns away from reflectionism, whichargues that a text's key meaning lies in its overt or covertcapacity to capture the Zeitgeist. It also rejects formalism'sclaim that a close reading of sound and image cues cansecure a definitive meaning, and eschews the use ofamateur-hour humanities psychoanalysis or rat-catchingsadism (a.k.a. psychology) to unlock what is inside people'sheads. Instead, a man happy in his lack of interiority, I lookat the passage of texts through space and time, noting howthey accrete and attenuate meanings on their travels asthey rub up against, trope, and are themselves troped byother fictional and social texts.

To do less is to be neat and tidy, to keep our bottoms aswell-wiped as graduate school or tenure or discipleshipdemand. But that runs the risk of missing the meaningsthat accrue to screen texts as they move through time andspace. After all, at the end of the day, we are trying tocomprehend the Web, film, television, and games-how andwhy they are made and received-not to trot out orthodoxiespracticed by the self-anointed of visual culture, film theory,art history, and other pleasurable cordons sanitaires of thehumanities.

WORK CITED

Chartier, Roger. "Texts, Printing, Readings." The NewCultural History. Ed. Lynn Hunt. Berkeley: U of California P,1989. 154-175.

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