[reading through Janine M. Utell’s ‘The Archivist, The Archeologist and the Amateur: Reading James Joyce’]
In bringing about a closed text before the reader – a text that is an artifact, a work of art, finished and therefore available to disregard as soon as read through- literature has become linear. This approach rejects the linear, and attempts a broad-view account of the text. The reader can move from the finished text, to notes and letters concerning characters and other things that the writer changes, to manuscript, and back to the finished text – in this way, a reading is never finished and a writer’s work never fully attainable.
row, man... 