What constitutes a text? How do shared assumptions emerge about what texts are and how they function in the world? How are authorship and authority connected to these historically contingent “text ideologies”? This symposium takes the advent of digital technologies as a timely opportunity to challenge the dominant text ideologies of modernity. Bound up with the establishment of literacy as essential to cultural competence, and with the legitimacy structures of post-Enlightenment polities, these dominant text ideologies affected who produced public texts – literary, legal, popular and more – and how. Historically oriented research has wrestled with these dominant ideologies for decades, seeing them as ill-suited to non-modernized milieux; it is only recently, however, that such critiques have become augmented by ideologies and practices associated with digital media. For many researchers today, these changes are still only vaguely sensed and appreciated: the symposium will illuminate and interrogate them through discussions between scholars investigating diverse cultural contexts and historical periods, from oral and scribal cultures through modern “mass” media to contemporary digital technologies. Bringing into dialogue perspectives from different phenomena and disciplines, the symposium aims to forge new theoretical frameworks for texts and textuality, opening paths for future scholarship at a potentially transformative moment in history.

Organized by HCAS Fellows Frog, Paul Frosh, and Katja Kujanpää.