It’s You, Xanadu

I am really showing my age (and the fact that I wasn’t even cool when I was young) with these last two titles.

From Yancey: “The new, then, repeats what came before, while at the same time remaking that which it models” (314) As in Ulmer’s remake of Kublai Khan. Not a restating, Ulmer says, drawing on the history of composing, but an asking again of the original question and an answering anew in a new medium, the generation of a new delivery. Striking is the loss embedded into both Coleridge’s poem and into the Benjamin tale, by the way, the loss, the interruption, the need to start again, writing of course being a separation from a real or imagined original, ideal, a pining for the aura, which is embedded in the image, not the word. Do Internet delivery systems and visual argument allow better for representation of the loss, the gap, make visible their seams and interruptions than the traditional essay can?

Or is it simply that the form of delivery shapes the product, as Yancey says, requires a transformation, some things to be left out, others to change, and produces a different kind of involvement, a necessary engagement (involvement) with not only the content but the form and the methods of production and delivery? Is it really just that?

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