Legibility in the age of signs and machines / / edited by Pepita Hesselberth, Janna Houwen, Esther Peeren and Ruby de Vos.

• TeilnehmendeR: Hesselberth, Pepita,; Houwen, Janna,; Peeren, Esther,; Vos, Ruby de,
• Place / Publishing House: Boston : : Brill,, [2018]
• Year of Publication: 2018
• Language: English
• Series: Thamyris/Intersecting: Place, Sex and Race 33.
• Physical Description: 1 online resource (296 pages).

Legibility in the Age of Signs and Machines offers a compelling reflection on what the notion of legibility entails in a machinic world in which any form of cultural expression – from literary texts, films, artworks and museum exhibits to archives, laws, computer programs and algorithms – necessarily partakes in ever-more complex processes of (mass) mediation. Divided over four clusters focusing on desire, justice, machine and heritage, the chapters in the volume explore what makes something legible or illegible to whom or, indeed, what; the kinds of reading, processing or navigating such il/legibility facilitates or forecloses; and the role critical (media) theory, literary studies and the Humanities in general can play in tackling these and related issues. Contributors: Ernst van Alphen, Anke Bosma, Siebe Bluijs, Sean Cubitt, Colin Davis, Katrine Dirckinck-Holmfeld, David Gauthier, Giovanna Fossati, Isabel Capeloa Gil, Pepita Hesselberth, Yasco Horsman, Janna Houwen, Looi van Kessel, Esther Peeren, Seth Rogoff, Roxana Sarion, Frederik Tygstrup, Inge van de Ven, Ruby de Vos, Peter Verstraten, Tessa de Zeeuw

Table of Contents

Introduction: Legibility in the Age of Signs and Machines / Pepita Hesselberth , Janna Houwen , Esther Peeren and Ruby de Vos -- Desire -- Legible Affects: The Melodramatic Imagination in Painting / Ernst van Alphen -- Overreading: Intentions, Mistakes and Lies / Colin Davis -- Freud’s Conquest of the Dreamscape: Legibility and Power in Freud’s “Specimen Dream” / Seth Rogoff -- Illegible Desire: James Purdy’s Resistance to Sexual Identity / Looi van Kessel -- Justice -- The Legibility of Legislation in Kafka’s “In the Penal Colony” / Siebe Bluijs -- Lex Fugit: On Acts of Legibility / Isabel Capeloa Gil -- Encountering the Law: Machinic and Theatrical Space in Criminal Prosecution / Tessa de Zeeuw -- Machine -- OK, Computer? Understanding Cybernetic Personhood / Yasco Horsman -- Machine Language and the Illegibility of the Zwischen / David Gauthier -- Connectivity, Legibility and the Mass Image / Sean Cubitt -- Too Much to Read? Negotiating (Il)legibility between Close and Distant Reading / Inge van de Ven -- Heritage -- Between Nostalgia and Utopia: A Conversation on the Legibility of Film Archives / Peter Verstraten and Giovanna Fossati -- Intersecting Frames of Legibility in Conversion de Piritu (1690): A Remodeling of Paratexts in the Digital Setting / Roxana Sarion -- “That the Section ‘Weapons’ Had to Be Plentiful Is Evident for Aceh”: The Readability of Colonial Conquest in Dutch Ethnographic Exhibitions / Anke Bosma -- Ledgers and Legibility: A Conversation on the Significance of Noise within Digital Colonial Archives / Katrine Dirckinck-Holmfeld and Pepita Hesselberth -- Coda -- Representational Assemblages: Forms, Concerns, Affects / Frederik Tygstrup.