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Comparative Literature and Internet Studies
Anke Finger
Introduction
The discipline of comparative literature is undergoing challenges: not
only is literature across the world to be studied, that is, cultural traditions
and productions in comparison with each other instead of a nation-based
approach, but the added task presents itself in the search for a
comparative history of the arts, within which literature is one. In 1949
René Wellek proposed the following: “It might sound distressingly vague
and abstract, if I should suggest that the approximation among the arts
which would lead to concrete possibilities of comparison might be sought
in an attempt to reduce all the arts to branches of semiology, or to so
many systems of signs. These systems of signs might be conceived as
enforcing certain systems of norms which imply groups of values. In such
terms as signs, norms, and values I would look for a description of the
common basis of the arts” (65).
Wellek’s guarded intimation that the complex endeavor of composing
a history of the interrelationships of literature with other arts within
comparative parameters necessitates some kind of method points to
arduous work in order to determine a meta-lexicon or, indeed, a
semiology for all the arts. Over the following decades and into the
twenty-first century, scholars and artists took up his suggestion, within
and beyond semiotics. In “Painting into Poetry” Claus Clüver discusses
ekphrasis in the work of Rainer Maria Rilke, John Keats, Anne Sexton,
X.J. Kennedy, Stéphane Mallarmé, Gertrude Stein, and Haroldo de
Campos in order to reveal their divergent texts’ illumination of painting
and poetry. In “On Intersemiotic Transposition” Clüver explicates his
application of semiotic principles. By relying on Roman Jakobson and by
invoking Nelson Goodman’s and Wendy Steiner’s work, he postulates the
following: “Literature as a semiotic system is as weakly or strongly
determined as painting, and as subject to fluctuations. The meaning of a
poem is no more self-evident and unambiguous than that of a pictorial
text … If we accept the idea that an English poem can be re-created as a
Spanish poem, then we should also be able to accept that a painting can
be translated into a poem. Finding equivalents in a different semiotic
system may be more difficult, and the sacrifices must be greater (and
sometimes the gains more spectacular), but a successful intersemiotic
transposition should not be considered less possible that a successful
interlingual translation of a poem” (61–62). Arguing from a theoretical
position informed by new criticism, structuralism, and semiotics, Clüver
is among the voices that offer the kind of theoretical glossary or
interpretive system within which comparative literature scholars are able
to approach creative works that travel between the arts (on recent work
about the other arts and literature, see, e.g., Grigorian, Baldwin, Rigaud-
Drayton; Joret and Remael.
In the twentieth century a great number of studies were published
about the interpretation of literature and/with that of other arts,
acknowledging the fact that the practice of translation or transposition
and of comparison began in antiquity, but that the critical analysis of
same is fairly new. While the Renaissance did point to convergences
between disciplines, not until the eighteenth century—with the beginning
of the study of aesthetics representing the numerous debates during the
Enlightenment and after on the comparability of the arts and their
significance for human experience and expression—did theoretical
discussions emerge from examining interart creations.
This systematization of the arts ran parallel to their increasing
hierarchization and the following centuries are marked by competing
views of pro- or against the unification of the arts and the individual arts’
relative merits or ranking. For the comparative literature scholar, the
debates—in conjunction with the object(s) of their study—offer a range
of (inter)disciplinary approaches to principles of aesthetics, philosophy of
perception, or the psychology of synesthesia. Overall, the area of
literature and other arts within comparative literary and cultural studies
appears to be experiencing a shift from traditional viewpoints to
interdisciplinary approaches which include parameters from
(inter)mediality studies, postcolonial theory, and cognitive studies, to
name but a few.
In 1993, Claudio Guillén posed two questions that seem relevant still
today: “does interartistic investigation lead to criticism and to the history
of literature as well? To put it another way, does the study of relations
between literature and the other arts lead to and become integrated with
literary comparativism proper … Does the comparison of the arts or of
works of art with one another constitute a field of special investigation?”
(98). In answering his first question, Guillén points to the polygeneity of
the arts that appears to de-center literature and places the other arts with
equal aesthetic rights and responsibilities. I would argue, too, that the
cornucopia of literary theories has led other disciplines to adopt the
critical languages of literary studies, resulting in art or music historians to
learn and adopt the vernacular of poststructuralism or semiotics. Many art
disciplines hence “speak” the language of literary criticism, leaving
literary critics wondering whether to embark on the search for a fresh
taxonomy and new theoretical frameworks for dialogue and discourse.
Guillén’s second question, of course, is an existential one, and points to
aesthetics as a possible answer, namely that a great deal of scholarship in
aesthetics concentrates on internet studies and on analyzing parallels or
convergences in the arts. As the study of aesthetics appears to be making
a comeback in the humanities, this facilitates the study of literature with
the other arts and thus produces work in the contextual study of literature.
This does not mean a revival of “universalism”; however I consider it
essential that comparative literature and comparative cultural studies need
to (re)integrate the study of aesthetics and thesis with a specific focus on
internet studies, and this in a global context.
The dialogic principle in the study of literature and the other arts
The dialogic principle invokes Mikhail Bakhtin’s heteroglossic approach
to literature and philosophy, specifically his theory of the novel. It hints at
Martin Buber’s 1922 Ich und Du (I and Thou, trans. Ronald Gregor
Smith, 1937) and is echoed in Bakhtin’s early essay entitled “Art and
Answerability.” According to Eduardo Kac, in the visual arts, dialogism
it refers to “interrelationship and connectivity”: “The dialogic principle
changes our conception of art; it offers a new way of thinking that
requires the use of bidirectional or multidirectional media and the
creation of situations that can actually promote inter subjective
experiences that engage two or more individuals in real dialogic
exchanges . . . that I call ‘multilogic interactions’” (205; on visual culture
studies, see, e.g., Mirzoeff). The ubiquity of the term and its approximate
equivalents—dialogicity, polyphony, intersubjectivity, connectivity—
signify a shift in Western aesthetic, philosophical, sociopolitical, and
ethical stances that helped bring about new fields, including
postcolonialism.
As Jeffrey T. Nealon points out, “dialogic intersubjectivity, understood
in terms of an impassioned play of voices, has displaced the dominant
modernist and existentialist metaphor of the monadic subject and its
plaintive demand for social recognition and submission from the other”
(33).
This play of voices comes to bear on the critiques and discussions in
internet studies because as a dialogic entity it inevitably invites dialogue
and exchange. By suggesting the model of dialogicity or dialogic inter
subjectivity for this consideration of internet studies, my aim is to further
liberate internet studies from a reading following structuralist thinking.
Most twentieth-century artists— in collaboration or as single “authors”—
invested in the translation of art and chose to consider individual arts in
interaction, building relationships of varying forms, and with diverse
contents. I prefer a reading of internet works or objects as an
intersubjective project, one that invites Kac’s “multilogic interactions.” In
the dialogic artwork, the arts build relationships and interact and they fuse
and separate without adhering to a particular or solidified formation.
They correspond, they dialogue, they network in ways that may be
bidirectional or multidirectional.
Furthermore, the dialogic work is reflected in the fluid and
unfinalizable reception within its audience or readership (see also
Mitchell on Blake and “the infinity of globalization”). The dialogue
within the work, in whatever way it constitutes itself, may find its
resonance among the spectators. At the same time, each member of the
audience or readership may piece together the fragments, impressions,
and sensory experience derived from the artwork individually, thereby
dialoguing with the artwork through channels all on her/his own while
not cutting herself/ himself off entirely from a communal conversation or
interpretation.
Bakhtinian dialogism as defined by Michael Holquist gains in
importance at this point of the discussion since the center (of the artist, of
the self, of the artwork, of the community) loses prominence: “in
dialogism consciousness is otherness. More accurately, it is the
differential relation between a center and all that is not the center” (18).
The monadic subject finds its end, things fall apart, the center loses itself.
Is all relative? Not precisely, since both phenomenology and Bakthin’s
philosophy teach us to take the “object” as something “other” to which
we, too, are “other” and with which we engage mutually. “Authority” as
a paradigm for either artist or artwork has vanished. One dialogue—and I
am merely suggesting that it is an example of “multilogic interaction”—is
played out in a fable authored by philosopher Vilém Flusser and artist and
self-described zoo systematician Louis Bec. Vampyrotheutis Infernalis
(“vampire squid from hell”), a (theoretical) fable published by Flusser
and Bec in 1987, juxtaposes humans and a type of octopus in order to
answer some fundamental questions about dialogic inter subjectivity in
light of humans’ anthropocentric positionality.
Flusser’s and Bec’s guiding question, as related in a 1988 interview
with Florian Rötzer, focuses on the issue of otherness: “would it be
possible to position oneself as an animal vis-à-vis humans and to remain
within that position, that is, to see us with the eyes of an animal?”
(Flusser, “Zwiegespräche” 42). Flusser chose the octopus because the
cephalopod has a nervous system that is proximate to that of humans,
among other similarities, and he collaborated with Bec on a synthesis of
“languaging” and imaging this animal, which, despite its verisimilitude to
nature, suggests a literary and visual projection for both. According to
Flusser, their bridging words and images yielded stunning results that
went against the negative dialectics of the mutual exclusion or erasure of
the two art forms, the literary and the visual: “In this collaboration with
Louis Bec we created an unexpected synthesis because my texts do not
explain Bec’s images and his images to not illustrate my texts, but, rather,
the brute, the octopus, indeed only came into being as a result of this
68
synthesis of Bec’s images and my texts. … This is a new way to
philosophize. The new thing is not the brute, and neither is it the method;
it is the experience of a possible collaboration between discursive and
imaginary reason, from which emerges something new (“Zwiegespräche”
45; for examples of Bec’s images see flusserstudies.net).
Intersubjective dialogue and “multilogic interaction” takes place on
two levels:

1. within the book where Vampyrotheutis infernalis is positioned as an
   othering of humans and 2) without the book between two collaborators
   who move beyond their individual arts, the textual and the visual, but not
   to describe the images via language or to undermine the text by covering
   it or expressing it with an image; rather, the two artistic modes
   complement each other to such a degree that that which is to be presented
   can only find creation through both arts together. Thisconstitutes either a
   process of birthing or the aesthetic expression of a Hegelian synthesis:
   Bec has created a plethora of images of types of octopus that also turn up
   in different media: the images shown at flusserstudies.net are digital and
   in 2007, in a retrospective of Bec’s work in Prague, show fictitious
   genealogies of cephalopods and their various imagined biological data on
   the kind of hanging maps formerly in use in chemistry, physics, and
   biology classes (see Bec). They are worked in relief, with elements
   hanging down and sticking out, hinting at unfinished three-
   dimensionality. The exhibition served, for Bec, as a means of continuing
   “our interrupted dialogue,” broken off by Flusser’s untimely death in
   1991 (see Bec 1). In this sense, the fictitious world of the animal—
   brought about by conjoining two artistic expressions and different media
   to confront the fictitiousness of humans’ spatiality and virtuality, or as
   Bec puts it, their parallel zoologies—is complemented by the
   unfinalizability of the artists’ dialogue with each other, with their
   creature, and with their audiences (on the philosophy of the animal, see
   Calarco).
   Another example emerges from conceptual art and precedes Dick
   Higgins’s 1969 concept of intermedia based on La Monte Young’s 1963
   edited volume An Anthology (the volume is without page numbers).
   Young, as a Cage and Stockhausen influenced minimalist composer
   interested in conceptualism, assembled in this art book (published several
   years before the official onset of the conceptual art movement) pieces
   that, like Henry Flynt’s influential essay on concept art that was
   published in it, simultaneously called attention to conceptualism while
   including elements of dialogism and unfinalizability. Indeed, according to
   David Farneth, the anthology ranges “among the most influential
   collections of music and performance art of the 1960s … represent[ing]
   an unprecedented breaking down of barriers between artistic media”
   (Farneth qtd. in Potter 56).
   Given the numerous attempts to break down barriers between the arts,
   one ought to challenge Farneth on the assessment of “unprecedented.”
   And yet, as an “anthology,” it moves beyond Dadaist or futurist or any
   other kind of pre-World War II avant-garde interest in artistic intermixing
   by coming together not on the stage or in a workshop but simply, and
   unassumingly, as a book full of ideas. Curiously, the anthology has failed
   to attract in-depth studies, and this short discussion, too, will hardly give
   the contents and the book’s significance its due (see Kotz, “Post-Cagean”
   60). It is to be stressed, nonetheless, that internet translation and
   conceptualism intersect dynamically in this slim volume and that the
   design by Fluxus artist George Maciunas mirrors the simultaneous
   diversity and unity of the artists and their “products” therein. The front
   and back covers, in red, feature five rows each of the title, An Anthology,
   printed thirty-six times from top to bottom in a simple black print,
   creating a dizzying effect of wallpaper or wrapping. The following pages
   repeat the title in a different and much larger font and in black and blue,
   and eventually one comes to a complete list of the contents of the
   collection: “an anthology of chance operations concept art meaningless
   work natural disasters indeterminacy anti-art plans of action
   improvisation stories diagrams poetry essays dance constructions
   compositions mathematics music.”
   Listed thereafter are Young’s colleagues, friends, and collaborators,
   and stringent copyright restrictions. The volume opens with a
   performance instruction piece by George Brecht, “Motor Vehicle
   Sundown (Event)” dedicated to John Cage, in which “any number of
   motor vehicles are arranged outdoors” and form and enact a complex
   canon with respective lights, radios, horns, opening and closing
   hoods/windows/doors, triggered by instruction cards and engines running.
   Two more card pieces follow. Claus Bremer’s concrete (erotic) poetry in
   German follows the card pieces. Next are Earle Brown’s “Music Essays,”
   instructions for a piece for multiple pianos with multiple possible ways of
   executing it. Joseph Byrd then contributes “Music Poetry” which includes
   a short reflection on Nam June Paik, time, and Gertrude Stein, a “Ballet
   for Woodwinds,” and instructions for a poem “Homage to Jackson Mac
   Low” (who helped edit the volume).
   Inserted is a loose sheet of music. John Cage’s “Excerpt from 45’
   FOR A SPEAKER”— Young was introduced to Cage via Stockhausen in
   Darmstadt—precedes Walter De Maria’s “compositions essays
   meaningless work natural disasters” which features a call for an “art
   yard” (a big hole, together with “sounds, words, music, poetry”) and
   “meaningless work” (cannot be sold or exhibited), among other
   conceptions of (artistic) action. Subsequently, Flynt elaborates on
   “concept art” (“since “concepts” are closely bound up with language,
   concept art is a kind of art of which the material is language”), and Yoko
   Ono, in whose studio Young initiated the New York loft concert series,
   pursues a “small bright light” in her poetry “INNPERSEEQS
   DIAGRAM.” Higgins, with his “dance mathematics compositions”
   leaves inversely printed instructions for “five performers” and for
   “Telephone Music” and Toshi Ichiyanagi (Yoko Ono’s husband at the
   time) explains the differences between the painted curves that indicate
   “Music-forelectric- metronome.”
   Next are Terry Jennings with “Music” for piano and string quartet
   (instructed), Dennis Johnson with the copy of a letter and an envelope
   glued into the book itself containing a letter covered with blue script
   (questions, sayings, haphazard thoughts), and more “music” in the form
   of two words arranged exactly like the title of the anthology on the
   covers: “ding dong.” More poetry follows, this time by Ray Johnson and
   James Waring, consisting of repeated “ha’s” (a so-called laughter poem),
   and Jackson Mac Low provides a lengthy text called “A Greater Sorrow,”
   as well as “Methods for Reading and Performing Asymmetries.”
   Finally, Low proposes a text for use in “solo or group readings,
   musical or dramatic performances, looking, smelling, anything else &/or
   nothing at all.” The text depicts a chaos of letters and signs on a piece of
   paper randomly and inconsistently covered with letters from a typewriter.
   Concluding the volume are Richard Maxfield’s “a simultaneity for
   people,” instructions for a conceptualist, Dada-infused simultaneous
   poem, and his essays, Paik’s reminiscences of an encounter with
   Stockhausen and thoughts on unfixed form, Terry Riley’s “Music”
   including instructions for Young to crawl inside a grand piano, roll
   around in it, and kick it, Diter Rot’s “white page with holes” (literally a
   loose white page with holes of varying sizes), Emmet Williams’s
   “poetry” including his “Cellar Song for Five Voices,” Christian Wolff’s
   “Duet I (Piano four Hands, I is at right, II left),” and last Young’s famous
   Composition 1960. The art book expresses and compiles ideas. It does not
   contain—as it might today—materials for your iPad such as
   performances enacted and recorded, music practiced and performed,
   poems read or sung, chance operations teased out, or dances danced.
   Other than the varied usage of fonts, colors, paper types, doodling, music
   notes, and drawings, the collection does not contain any imagery or any
   ancillary auditory material whatsoever. The contents consist of code, that
   is, language, notes, and drawing. Plans of action remain instructed rather
   than taken: they hover over the page, uninitiated, as constructs of/for the
   mind only.
   The art, for now, stays fragmentary and on paper only. And yet it
   already emerges, potentially whole and complete, in the mind, in
   whichever form, depending on impulses, individuals, time and whether or
   not any of it ever finds a beginning. All the while, however, the ideas, the
   arts, and their products imagined intersect and they come together in this
   imagined form in the book. As a collection they interact, they dialogue,
   and they bring effectively the reader—to the extent that the act of
   decoding the disparate elements of the book can be called “reading”—
   into the realm, into the spatiality of all this music, poetry, performance,
   literature, and art imagined. Young himself puts the arts into dialogue in
   his works in that he cannot, or will not, place them within one discipline
   and remains deliberately unsure whether he makes music or theater,
   whether his music is vision or vision is music. Talking about
   Compositions 1960, of which numbers 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, and 9 are contained in
   the anthology, he stresses that both categories of theater and music apply:
   “I divide my works into music pieces, and musical-theatrical pieces.
   During the last decades, in the art scene, two tendencies are to be
   observed: on the one hand a still growing tendency towards an
   annulment, a dissolution of the boundaries between different art forms, as
   brought about by performativity, hybridization, multimedia; on the other
   hand, we have observed an anesthetization and theatricalization of other
   cultural fields, including politics, economy, the media, sports, everyday
   life, that tends to abolish the boundary between art and non-art. Both
   tendencies are a challenge to the arts disciplines. For those have preferred
   a kind of monadic existence for a long time. Art history, theatre studies,
   musicology, film studies, comparative literature or national literature
   studies, each arts discipline has understood itself as defined and clearly
   delimited from the others by its very specific objects, as well as by a
   methodology and theoretical approaches that referred expressly to them
   alone. The new situation that has emerged over approximately the last
   fifty years, radically questions this self-understanding. It disorientates the
   arts disciplines in terms of their special objects, i.e. in terms of just that
   momentum that seemed to guarantee the self-definition and delineation of
   the other arts disciplines in each case and, as a result, in terms of their
   methodologies and theoretical approaches. (“Conception,”
   eurodocsem.net).
   One such boundary presents itself when considering the study of
   electronic/digital literature (net literature or electronic literature).
   Flusser’s and Bec’s philosophizing in a dialog, that is, “(inter)mediality,”
   is a field of study now widely accepted in media, literary, and cultural
   studies (see, e.g., Golumbia; Manovich; Schmidt and Valk; Tinckom;
   Wolf), and it is a constituent part of comparative cultural studies (see
   Tötösy de Zepetnek, Digital Humanities). An example of the definition of
   intermediality is as follows:
   Intermediality refers to the interconnectedness of modern media of
   communication. As means of expression and exchange, the different
   media depend on and refer to each other, both explicitly and implicitly;
   they interact as elements of particular communicative strategies; and they
   are constituents of a wider cultural environment. Three conceptions of
   intermediality may be identified in communication research, deriving
   from three notions of what is a medium (→ Media). First, intermediality
   is the combination and adaptation of separate material vehicles of
   representation and reproduction, sometimes called multimedia. Second,
   the term denotes communication through several sensory modalities at
   once, for instance, music and moving images. Third, intermediality
   concerns the interrelations between media as institutions in society, as
   addressed in technological and economic terms such as convergence and
   conglomeration. As a term and an explicit theoretical concept,
   intermediality has perhaps been most widely used in reference to multiple
   modalities of experience (→ Modality and Multimodality), as examined
   in aesthetic and other humanistic traditions of communication research
   (→ Aesthetics) (Jensen 2385).
   What kind of fiction would Vampyroteuthis Infernalis be had it been
   conceived in the electronic realm? Following Katherine N. Hayles,
   Vampyroteuthis Infernalisin the digital realm could be delivered in a
   number of genres and formats: it could be written in Storyspace
   , a hypertext authoring program
   that favors linked structures; it could use the multimodality of the world
   wide web with “a wide variety of navigation schemes and interface
   metaphors” including “sound, spoken text, animated text, graphics, and
   other functionalities in a networked linking structure” written as
   interactive fiction with “game elements” (7–8), engaging the user/reader
   by requiring her/his input and, in turn, requiring from the critic or scholar

an entirely new take on reader-response criticism. It could also appear
within space as a type of electronic literature moving “from the screen to
immersion in actual three-dimensional spaces” (Hayles 11), that is, onto
cell phones, GPS technology (“locative narratives” ) to combine real-
world locations with imagined narratives, characters, and plots. In
essence, if rendered digitally, would Vampyroteuthis Infernalis be a
game, a website, a hypertext, digital art or video, or an interactive drama?
(see also Heibach; Simanowski). The actual writing, as in writing for
programs, differs greatly from the latest expressions of literature in
electronic form, as evidenced by works in ASCII code in contrast to what
verges on what one might refer to as literary video.