Jak czytać stronę. Modernizm i materialność tekstu

This article is a translation of the first chapter of George Bornstein’s book entitled Material Modernism. The Politics of the Page (2001). The first, theoretical section of the article discusses the notion of the “bibliographic code” (all material aspects of the text) as offering important supplements to the “linguistic code” (the words of the text). The article offers analogies to Walter Benjamin’s notion of the “aura” and to the concept of the “utterance,” coined by the speech-act theorists. Just as Benjamin argues that the “aura” locates the work of art in time and space and the speech-act theorists contend that the “utterance” (gesture, tone etc.) functions as an important carrier of meaning, so the author sees the “bibliographic code” as an important constituent of meaning. The remaining part of the article presents exemplary readings of four sonnets, written by John Keats, Emma Lazarus, William Butler Yeats and Gwendolyn Brooks.