Grammalepsy

Front matter

ESSAYS ON DIGITAL LANGUAGE ART

GRAMMALEPSY

JOHN CAYLEY

Contents

List of Figures vi

Preface ix

Acknowledgments xi

Preface

Grammalepsy brings together, for the first time, my selected essays, a number of which are considered formative for the theory and practice of electronic literature. I prefer to reread them within a larger domain of theory and practice: digital language art. Hence the subtitle.

I am a pioneering practitioner of digital language art, poetic in particular, with a research-based practice dating back to the late 1970s. My first forpublication work of digital language art, wine flying, was issued on 3.5" floppy disk by my own Wellsweep Press in 1989-90 as well as being installed and exhibited at various venues in the United Kingdom. The same processes of dissemination applied, for example, to Book Unbound, 1995. The earliest essay in this collection, “Beyond Codexspace,” dates from 1996, and the latest from 2017.

This book is provided with an original introduction that offers its readers what amounts to a theory of aesthetic linguistic practice and also, to an extent, a theory of language itself, one that is intended to be particularly appropriate for the making and critical appreciation of language art in digital media. These collected essays have been gently edited in order to enhance the coherence of the whole. The notes and citations associated with the essays have been more extensively edited, to bring them a little more up-to-date and to ensure that they are as readable and as useable as possible.

The introduction eschews the tendency of literary critics and writers, including theorists and critics of electronic literature, to reduce aesthetic linguistic making—even when it has multimedia affordances—to “writing.” Many of the essays collected here were content with this conventional and theoretical catastrophe. I argue that language is media-agnostic, and I take an approach to the philosophy and, indeed, the ontology of language that follows Jacques Derrida in this regard. Language animals, on the other hand, have evolved or learned to make language in only two support media: aurality and grammatological visuality. Our prejudice with regard to literature—that typographic embodiments of language house its uniquely high art—is merely learned, a function of civilization. The art of language, heedless of civilization, is always also embodied in artifacts that exist as aurality, because aural expression correlates with the predisposition of the only language animals of which we are aware: ourselves.

x PREFACE

The collection of essays in Grammalepsy brings its author and its readers to certain horizons of this thought, a way of thinking that has become possible, historically, due to the rise of digital mediation. Electronic literature or, as I prefer, digital language art allowed aesthetically inclined language makers to embrace a compositional practice that is inextricably involved with digital media, including the computational modulation and generation of text. The making of certain linguistic artifacts, not only their presentation, not only their reading, cannot be achieved without digital media and digital affordances. This is clearly demonstrable for a number of important works, including works by myself. Digital textuality cannot be reduced to print-dependent textuality.

Digital mediation will, however, have even greater effects on language and language art. The grammatization of linguistic aurality—enabling indexed access and archive—will, for example, offer our cultures the potential to shift the central focus of its most significant and affective linguistic practice from literature to aurature, not “back” but “forward” to the support medium for language to which human animals are genetically predisposed. The author discovers the process by which this grammatization occurs to be at the heart of linguistic ontology: as grammalepsis. We all are in the grip of Grammalepsy and we always have been.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Despite our inevitable discontents and the constant vigilance that is required in the struggle to maintain justice and care, institutions sustain us and allow us to do what we do. There are a number of institutions, within which I have worked, that have supported me in this way, first and foremost the institution of the university, in its general form, which I fear is unjustly under threat these days. My studies at the University of Durham, in Chinese language and civilization, were publicly funded. I can acknowledge with some pleasure both this university and the state that allowed me to discover linguistic computation early on in my career, and particularly the late Archie Barnes, my teacher. Then, there is the British Library, where I worked for a time; and Hanshan Tang Books in London, a tiny institution. Its founder-owner Christer von der Burg took a special interest in the culture of computation and I couldn’t have done some of what I have without my colleagues at the Tang and Christer’s support. Special thanks are also due to Jerome Rothenberg and Pierre Joris who, close to the beginning of it all, included poetic extracts of “Reveal Code” in their “institutional” Poems for the Millennium, 2. Most importantly, however, Brown University and what is now its Department of Literary Arts continue to employ me and have sustained this work full-time since 2007. Robert Coover made it all possible, “as the world knows Bob period.”

I am daunted at the prospect of making a list of all those other individuals who have helped me with my work or helped me to understand it better. In large measure I’m going to let the alphabet excuse me from the burden of invidious fine distinctions, and use it to make two lists: one for those people who, I somehow feel, have been more directly concerned with what appears in this book, and a second list for those with whom I have enjoyed sharing the broader endeavor that is represented by this book and related work. So, in the first place, my acknowledgments and thanks go out to: Espen Aarseth, Sandy Baldwin, Philippe Bootz, Douglas Cape, cris cheek, Florian Cramer, Johanna Drucker, Markku Eskelinen, Aden Evens, Penny Florence, Chris Funkhouser, Loss Pequefio Glazier, N. Katherine Hayles, Daniel C. Howe, David Jhave Johnston, Nick Montfort, Judd Morrissey, Giles Perring, Soren Pold, Manuel Portela, Rita Raley, Joan Retallack, Scott Rettberg, Francisco J. Ricardo, Andrew Michael Roberts, Jim Rosenberg, Roberto Simanowski, Brian Kim Stefans, Stephanie Strickland, Joseph Tabbi, Eugenio Tisselli, xii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Clement Valla, Noah Wardrip-Fruin. And also to: Mark Amerika, Caroline Bergvall, Charles Bernstein, Tim Bewes, Friedrich Block, Stephanie Boluk, Mauro Carassai, Wendy Chun, Maria Damon, Lori Emerson, Maria Engberg, Jerome Fletcher, Luciana Gattass, Harry Gilonis, Simon Gunn, Terry Harpold, Robert E. Harrist Jr., Ian Hatcher, Will Hicks, Romana Huk, Elizabeth James, Michael Joyce, Eduardo Kac, Andrew Klobucar, Raine Koskimaa, Mark Leahy, Patrick LeMieux, Alan Liu, Talan Memmott, Maria Mencia, Adalaide Morris, Stuart Moulthrop, Robert Mosley, Elli Mylonas, Chris Novello, Eric Dean Rasmussen, Denise Riley, Massimo Riva, Will Rowe, Jorgen Schaefer, Bill Seaman, Alvaro Seica Neves, Ana Marques da Silva, Hazel Smith, Braxton Soderman, Alan Sondheim, Ben Swanson, Thomas Swiss, Illya Szilak, Lori Talley, Steve Tomasula, Patricia Tomaszek, Greg Ulmer, John Welch, Yang Lian. I should say that a number of these people have been my students but that, in addition, I owe a great debt of gratitude to all my students, all of whom have helped me think and make.

With regard to this publication and its production, it is a pleasure to thank my instantly helpful and responsive initial editor at Bloomsbury Academic, Mary Al-Sayed, and also Katie Gallof and Erin Duffy who took charge of the book in its final stages.

Finally, to Joanna Howard, for everything, and in particular for believing that, after all this, I might still finish my vampire novel.

These essays appeared over an extended period in a wide range of magazines, journals, and online resources. Details follow (with more information in the bibliography). I would like to thank the editors and publishers for their generous reception of the work and for their kind permission, where necessary, to reproduce the essays here.

“Beyond Codexspace.” Apart from its original publication in the journal Visible Language, 1996, this essay was translated into Finnish for Parnasso, 3 (1999), pp. 290-302, and was also collected, with revisions, for Media Poetry: An International Anthology, 2007, edited by Eduardo Kac.

“Pressing the ‘REVEAL CODE’ Key” was published, 1996, in one of the first online-only academic journals, EJournal. (This term is now almost as impossible to search effectively on the internet as would be “Journal” as an eponymous proper name.)

“Of Programmatology,” came out, 1998, in the radical London-based new media arts and culture magazine, Mute.

“The Code Is Not the Text (Unless It Is the Text)” was originally sketched out for the “pOes1s: Poetics of digital text” symposion [sic], held in Erfurt, September 28-29, and first published, 2002, in the Electronic Book Review, a vital journal for the field of electronic literature and digital language art.

“Hypertext/Cybertext/Poetext” was presented as a paper at the conference “Assembling Alternatives,” University of New Hampshire, Durham, August 29-September 2, 1996. This conference was important for introducing a transatlantic community of experimental writers, chiefly poets, to digital

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS xiii language art. I maintain an online, mildly transactive, version of the essay on my personal website at http://programmatology.shadoof.net/works/ hypercyberpoetext/. This includes the accompanying, generated mesostic text, “X,” not reprinted here, which was, however, included in the book of conference proceedings, Assembling Alternatives: Reading Postmodern Poetries Transnationally, 2003, edited by Romana Huk. Reprinted by permission of Wesleyan University Press.

“Writing on Complex Surfaces.” This essay was first presented as a paper at the 6th Digital Arts & Culture conference, held at the IT University in Copenhagen, December 1-3, 2005. It was then published in the online journal, also crucial for our field, dichtung digital, 2005, edited by Roberto Simanowski.

“Time Code Language” is loosely based on a presentation to the “New Media Poetics” conference, held at the University of Iowa, October 11-12, 2002, facilitated by Thomas Swiss and Adelaide (Dee) Morris, to whom, along with Sarah Townsend, I owe a debt of thanks for their comments on early drafts. Thanks are also due to N. Katherine Hayles for her correspondence, comments, and unstinting intellectual generosity. Professors Swiss and Morris went on to edit New Media Poetics: Contexts, Technotexts, and Theories, 2006, in which the essay was first published. Reprinted by permission of MIT Press.

“The Gravity of the Leaf” was first presented as “Surface Text: Text as Surface in Immersive 3D Environments” for the “Beyond the Screen” conference devoted to the aesthetics and criticism of digital literature, Siegen, Germany, November 19-21, 2008. I am grateful to Sandy Baldwin and, especially, to Francisco J. Ricardo for reading drafts of the essay in its present form and offering helpful and stimulating comments. Proceedings of the conference were later published in Beyond the Screen: Transformations of Literary Structures, Interfaces and Genres, 2010, edited by Peter Gendolla and Jörgen Schafer. Reprinted by permission of Transcript Verlag.

“Writing to Be Found and Writing Readers” is based on and extended from a presentation entitled “Edges of Chaos: Writing to Be Found” for a workshop at the University of Bergen, Norway, November 8-10, 2009. The final essay resulted from a keynote paper at the Futures of Digital Studies conference, University of Florida, February 25-27, 2010. It was first published in 2011 by Digital Humanities Quarterly.

“Weapons of the Deconstructive Masses (WDM).” This paper was originally prepared as a presentation for: “Visionary Landscapes,” a conference of the Electronic Literature Organization, May 29-June 1, 2008, Vancouver, Washington. A number of colleagues and friends have read this paper since it was first presented. I would like to thank Roberto Simanowski and Aden Evens for particularly detailed and helpful comments. A version of the first part of the paper was published, 2009, in the online journal xiv ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Hyperrhiz: New Media Cultures, and the full essay was first published, 2011, in Revista de Estudos Literários.

“Terms of Reference & Vectoralist Transgressions” was published, 2013, in the online journal Amodern.

“Reading and Giving—Voice and Language” was first published in a special issue of the journal, Performance Research, “On Writing and Digital Media,” edited by Jerome Fletcher, 2013. Reprinted by permission of Taylor & Francis Ltd.

“Reconfiguration” was published, 2017, in a special issue of the online journal Humanities, “The Poetics of Computation,” edited by Burt Kimmelman and Andrew Klobucar.

“At the End of Literature.” This is the second, final, and independent part of a longer piece published as “The Advent of Aurature and the End of (Electronic) Literature” in The Bloomsbury Handbook of Electronic Literature, 2017, edited by Joseph Tabbi. Reprinted here by kind permission of the editor and Bloomsbury Academic.

It was only a few months prior to the gathering of these chapters that I discovered that I had grammalepsy. Ors, rather, I determined that we are all of us, language animals, in the grip of this condition. We are seized by it, and singled out in its thrall, whenever we encounter or make more of the language, the languages, that we have. Linguists, historians of language, scientists studying evolution, philosophers, and philosophers of language are all able to affirm that human beings “have” language, but this is one of the very few things on which they do agree and they do so, in part, as an admission of ignorance—concerning essential details of the when, the how, the why, and, in particular, the what of this species-unique facility—not a trait exactly, because it requires interaction. Language cannot exist for one without others.

So, we—the plural is essential—have, and can use, and can make things with, language. And some philosophers of language also suggest that it has us, or that we dwell within it; that language uses and forms us. We live, in any case, in relations with language that alternate and unravel in terms of who or what determines the practices and performances of whoever or whatever we are—languages and ourselves—when we speak and read. Rather than taking a determinate, prescription-inducing stance on the nature and characteristics of some predominant relationship between humans and language (or language and humans), I preferred, even before discovering that I had grammalepsy, to work with language as a maker, as if it was my medium, and, thus, to learn about language in practice. I compared my practice with that of other makers in other media. And occasionally, I also made other kinds of artifacts in other media.

One of the things that I learned about language is that its “materiality” is singular, or, rather, that the way in which language comes to be is singular—embodied by and fashioned to exist as humanly perceptible material phenomena.! For, whatever language is, it cannot be identified— essentially or substantively—with anything that is materially perceptible to us. Obviously, ’m bracketing certain conceptions of materiality—placing materiality into the phenomenological epoché. This will be clear to you because, for a start, I am trying to engage, explicitly, with an ontology of language. I say that language exists. Moreover, I accept many aspects of what would be characterized as a “materialist” philosophy of language in that, for example, I can work with the notion of “semiotic material,” and I believe that linguistic artifacts have real effects, not only in so far as they operate symbolically or in terms of signification, but also in terms of their affective force, the force of language.

Grammalepsy is, as I say, a condition of language animals. It is not a pathology, unless we think of language itself as a pathology (as some people do, despite the likelihood that thinking itself must suffer, necessarily, from the same malaise). Grammalepsy is, nonetheless, a symptom of our “having” language. And it does, I believe, bear a relationship with pharmacology. It may be poisonous for certain aspects of human experience at certain times and, all at once, it may be rendered experientially therapeutic when administered with care. The condition is symptomatic of a process, grammalepsis, that I have come to understand as constitutive for linguistic ontology. We behave and we gesture—we set out to inscribe—in our attempts to make language, but language as such only comes into being when we succeed in grammalepsis, when our gestures become readable—to ourselves and to others—when they can be read as the grammé of (a) language.

Another way of putting this is simply to say that language comes into being as a function of reading. I do not, of course, mean by this that language, somehow, depends on writing for its existence. The gestures of inscription that I speak of are heedless of support media—with which, as I’ve already said, language cannot be identified. These gestures are referred to grammatology, within which writing as such serves to provide us with a better way of understanding the practices of language in terms of their general principles (and the metaphysical consequences). Writing has, historically, materialized differently with respect to speech, but reading— grammaleptic reading, the reading of grammé—has remained what it was, regardless of actual linguistic practices in visually perceptible graphics. The etymology of “[to]read,” in English, supports this media agnosticism, deriving (as I read it) from something like the ability to make well-advised, convincing guesses.

If we are happy to say (in plain English) that reading brings language into being, then what is the point of inventing a new word for an implicated symptom? What is the point of grammalepsy? For one thing, the intimate association of reading with actual, historical writing is a problem for us. It nudges us toward a misdirection to which we have already alluded. Our civilizations are founded on writing and thus also on reading (of literal graphic forms), but our civilizations are as nothing when compared with the eventualities of biological evolution that gave us—that allowed us to

“have”—language. And our evolutionary disposition is unlikely to change any time soon. The brain plasticity that allows us to adopt literal reading and writing with extraordinary facility does not imply that we have evolved with respect to language.

More pragmatically, there are the implications of “-lepsis.” This suffix captures and expresses an important overall characteristic of the manifold processes of reading that bring language into being. It suggests seizure, sudden seizure, the “grasp” of something that we experience as we encounter elements of language that we can understand or can use to understand. This characteristic of grammaleptic reading is, I believe, underappreciated and possesses significant theoretical potential. It indicates the threshold, for example, between expressive gesture and actual language. Gesture remains gesture until, suddenly, it is seized by grammalepsy and thus becomes a sign within the discrete, structured world of language, within a particular language. In the case of sign languages, this abstract analogy becomes “literal.” Gestures made by someone who does not know a natural sign language remain gestures. But once they are grasped within a practice of language, they become, suddenly, something different. They become language. Grammalepsy helps us to locate and specify the horizons of language.

Grammalepsy also helps to explain how and when phenomenon with wildly various, apparently continuous interrelations of substance and form can suddenly be grasped and read as signs. Or, rather, it cannot explain exactly “how” this happens but it reminds us that it happens suddenly—I used to think and say, catastrophically—once substantive forms have, in their shifting morphologies, passed a threshold that causes them to be recognized as: distinct phonemes or letters, words, phrases, clauses, sentences. Past this threshold, substantive forms that were once in the world of material things are suddenly also in the world of language.* And once they have entered language, unless they lose or abandon the form that they have achieved—a phonologically or orthographically readable shape—they cannot go back. They will remain distinctly separated from other forms, even forms of the same material substance, in so far as they remain readable.

If we consider certain problems of language in general—with respect to translation for example—and (other) natural languages (“other” in the sense of those that we do not know), grammalepsy also helps us. Why should a language that we do not know be so absolutely incomprehensible to us despite our sense that the people who know it are talking and writing about the same experiences? Grammalepsy suggests that, at every level of linguistic structure, there is no reason for any of the forms in another language to be graspable, to be readable, until they (suddenly) are—until they are learned, known, and seized upon—since, until they are, these forms are simply gestures, just unreadable parts of our perceptual world, gesturing toward language, without having reached its threshold, not, at least, for us.’

Why set out, in an introduction to this book, by proposing and then beginning to explain a new term that is designed for a philosophy of language? Because it helps me to understand what I have done and what I was trying to do while making the aesthetic work that underpins much of the theory in these expositions. Specifically, grammalepsy helps me to grasp important characteristics of my chosen medium, and, because I also work with digital media—networked and programmable media—it is crucial, I believe, to be able to single out a particular medium and determine what it is that I am doing with it, especially when aesthetics are at stake. Grammalepsy reminds me that it is precisely the sudden change it makes to the materiality of a medium—at the moment of grammalepsis—that brings language into being and thus, ontologically, distinguishes it from any and all substantive media within which it must, nonetheless, simultaneously, be embodied. If my concern is an art of language, then it follows that I will work with language and with digital media in the knowledge that the latter will influence and inflect the when and the how and the why of grammalepsis but not necessarily the what of the language that grammalepsis brings into being—the language that is made readable. My aesthetic responsibilities for language art and for its digital situation are distinct. This practical and theoretical orientation is quite different from that of many other practitioners in the field that usually goes by the name of electronic literature.

Because of its explicit association with grammatology, grammalepsy also helps me to recall and maintain the principle of media agnosticism with respect to language art, to apply this principle whenever writing and literature are evoked. Writing and literature are overdetermined by their implicit media—archival publication in print, and practices of writing in a visuality that is constrained, typically, to literary forms or, of necessity, to literal forms. As the final chapter of this selection, “At the End of Literature,” claims, I believe that one of the most significant future cultural potentialities—as digital affordances continue to be applied to language— will be the reconfiguration of the relationship between language practices and their predominant support media. In principle, the digitalization of culture will give rise to an aurature that is able to contest the traditional sovereign claims of literature.

For the practice of language art in digital media, grammalepsy lends us perspective on a particular and a particularly critical issue. This is the question of the status, the ontology, the significance and affect of the synthetic, or, perhaps, virtual “language” that is generated by algorithmic processes. Related questions are taken up by the chapter “Reading and Giving,” within which grammalepsy is discussed before, as it were, I had learned what best to call it. Not all the practices of digital language art call for “text generation.” Indeed, much that is produced or studied as “electronic literature” bears little relation with computation that is compositionally involved with fashioning its incorporated language. On the other hand, algorithmic text generation, translation, and reconfiguration are all important in my own work and in that of a number of colleagues, some of whose work is discussed here. Moreover, since the passing of an AI (artificial intelligence) winter into its spring during the 2010s, the ascendency and popularization of natural language processing (NLP), the aggregation of vast quantities of statistically analyzed “big data” for natural languages, and the application of neural net and recursive neural net technologies to linguistic corpora, all of these factors and others mean that there is an ocean of generated artificial language out there, especially on the internet, ostensibly readable by language animals. This is a world of materially existing linguistic forms within which digital language artists must now make their own interventions and artifacts. Grammalepsy offers, in this context, a way of reflecting on and perhaps judging the relative artificiality or virtuality of algorithmically generated language. For, although all literally inscribed (and thus encoded) language has been grasped by a symbolic order that is continuous with contemporary computation, grammalepsy indicates an analogous but distinct process that is defined by reading, the reading performed by the only language animals that are known to us. When elements of language are grasped and thus brought into being as language through grammalepsis, this is not to say, reductively, that they have (just) been “parsed” and processed by a formal computational system. The material presence of language-like tokens within encoded computational structures does not guarantee their linguistic ontology—not until, in some manner, grammalepsis has also taken place. Within the computational order, traces of actual language and tokens of synthetic or virtual language are materially indistinguishable, but this does not mean that they are the same thing. And it is vital, in my opinion, that human readers remain capable of distinguishing actual language from synthetic “language,” especially those readers who are also practitioners and theorists of digital language art.

There is also, simply, the reason—for introducing grammalepsy in this introduction—that it represents thinking and theory to which my practice has brought me. It is an outcome in itself, part of a final, if unfinished, chapter.

The essays selected for these chapters span a relatively lengthy period of time—from the mid-1990s down to the time of writing, in the late 2010s— longer than might be expected of comparable collections. Given the pace of change in digitally mediated culture, this period may seem even longer, one during which its early artifacts must surely appear to have dated significantly if not catastrophically. I was pleasantly surprised to find that, although much of the work referred to in these pages has ceased to be supported on contemporary platforms, its underlying principles of composition and the associated theory still have something to offer.

This book is by someone who identifies, first, as a practitioner, a translator and poet-turned-digital poet and (digital) language artist. But I am the kind of practitioner who never works without a more or less articulated theoretical understanding of what it is that I am trying to do, and I have endeavored to take this self-reflexive understanding seriously, siting it in the context of literary criticism, poetics, critical theory, and cultural studies. The essays collected here always aimed to be engaged with their proximate critical discourses. They do, however, gravitate around my own production, and thus, this self-reflexive theory tends to involve more reference to my own work than to that of my colleagues. This selection’s first chapter, “Beyond Codexspace,” is, in particular, more of a description of work, more of an artist’s talk, than a developed thought or argument. This is excusable, I trust, in so far as it provides the reader with some initial context, by populating the book with initial examples of practice for which, at the time, literary and poetic theory barely accounted.

I have, of course, reread all of the chapters in this book and done a little light editing of their main texts. There is more of this for the earlier chapters, rendering their allusions to contemporary circumstances a little more relevant, or general, or up-to-date. The notes throughout have been more extensively edited. To the best of my knowledge and abilities, I’ve brought references, especially internet references, up-to-date. I’ve also tried to use URLs that will persist, and I have checked for accessibility, and included most recent access dates in the bibliography. Links for which I was responsible but which have broken since first publication have been repaired or substituted. I have had to remove a few links that were irreparable, and I apologize in anticipation of those broken links that will surely remain.

There are a number of obsessions that run in threads throughout these chapters. By way of brief introduction, I will follow some of these threads, aiming to touch on each of the chapters at least once, where appropriate, and link their thinking to the more general entanglement.

From well before the 1990s and even today, after more than two decades of hyperhistory, the media that concern us—networked and programmable media in my terms—have been characterized as “new.” Newly perceptible phenomena call for—and are brought into language by—new terms, and the field within which I have practiced and theorized is beset with the problem of naming. I was and am as much a part of the problem as anyone. In 2008, I tried to settle some of the issues in the “Weapons of the Deconstructive Masses” (WDM) but singularly failed, since I hadn’t then come up with the term with which I am now content. The field I work within is “digital language art.” “Literary art” is a highly privileged subfield of language art, but this name concedes relations with both literal media ([typo]graphic media) and “the literary” as an assertion of cultivated values which are implicated with particular canons and traditions of practice. “Language art” specifies a medium without the implicit commitment to particular support media, while “art,” at the head of the phrase, asserts a pragmatic intimacy with art as it is practiced in other media. I always balked at “electronic” and at all the various “e-” and “i-” prefixes. Except by analogy with “electronic music” (where “electronic” indicates technicity and a very wide range of actual electronic sound-making and recording instruments), it seemed to me foolish for aesthetic language practices to establish inappropriate material associations from the get-go, especially in the context of computation, given the latter’s singular, problematic materiality. But just as electronic music has an established tradition and nomenclature (although for longer than its literary bedfellow), electronic literature has now, along with a canon of sorts, an established place in the academy and, to an extent, in the world of letters.