About

- Post Structuralist Literary Theory

- Metonomy

- Travel Theory

- Thacker

- Biopolitics (Sianne Ngai and Foucault)

- Cryptobibliographic references

Form

This piece comes to you in the form of a network of pages, held together by a series of weblinks. It is a piece of writing that throws you in at the Beach but then defines no strict timeline for you to follow. The site has become an exploration, something to be curious about, where through the clicks of a mouse more and more is uncovered. It lies about itself, setting itself up as a piece of writing made by a network of people, users, when in fact they are all personas, pseudonyms belonging to one writer (a fact that can be discovered by looking no further than the "about" page).

I am trying to define here, in this writing, a "writerly text". A text that "is ourselves writing, before the infinite play of the world is traversed, intersected, stopped". This is an idea most explored in "S/Z", which follows his most well known essay, "The Death of the Author", arguing that the authorial authrity exists only to provide ultimate meaning to a text, an excercise which is futile. "S/Z" says that without the author to provide textual meaning, it is up to the reader to divine significance through textual interpretation. I have obfuscated the author, I have shattered my form, I have set up walls between the reader and the object by never explicitly stating the form of the subject. I have, in these senses, allowed the writing to be investigated.

I run the risk of appearing vapid, some have argued that post-modernist literary theory has been left in the 20th century. Some even reference this form, describing how it has taken previous lofty ideals and turned them into "the drivel found... on some wikipedia pages". Alan Kirby told me that now is an age of web surfing, "ignorance, fanatacism and anxiety". I have always loved Wikipedia pages, fandom sites, Fextralife; to argue that these offer no aesthetic value is obdurate, a point hammered home by the large net of contempt cast by Kirby around varied examples of seemingly no correlation.

Within this piece are two complementary personas, so to speak. There is the wikipedia writing (an analytical mind) and there is the user page (an interpretive mind). They battle it out in the footnotes of the page, or shake hands in a paragraph cited from the other. The user, User:Altair, wrote a piece of writing called "Walkthough", a interpretive summary of the wikipedia text. This writing serves to widen the horizon of the work and by doing so, confuse the reader as to the scope of the writing and the subject.

Altair's writing is inspired by a piece of travel writing, specifically the The Bordeaux Pilgrim written by an anonymous author in the late Roman/early Christian period. It gives an account of a pilgrimage from Bordeaux to Jerusalem, then a route through the continent, ending in Milan. The beginning of the text is a list of places to change at or bridges to cross, punctuated only by the occasional reference to a biblical event ("there Elijah went up to the widow and sought food from her"). This increases in frequency as the writer nears the Holy Land, at which point it turns into full biblical digression.

As commented on in "Time and Temporality in Travel Accounts from the Fourteenth to Sixteenth Centuries", the