Katherine Hayles’ Theoretical Study On Literary Materiality

Materiality is an important concept in Contemporary Western media theory.It is also one of the indispensable dimensions for theorists to think about the digital age,investigate technical media and analyze the field of communication.However,in the field of literary research,literariness and materiality are always binary opposites.The literary world is an emotional space opposite to the material world.This concept makes the material problem a blind spot in literary research.In this context,Katherine Hayles discusses the materiality orientation of literature and makes an ontological study of the materiality of literature.Influenced by the ideological trend of material turn,Hayles rejected the dualistic opposition between materiality and literariness and believed that materiality was the basic attribute of literature.The problem of literary materiality fully released the ontological thought of text as a medium and promoted the transformation of literary ideas from language art to material media.Hayles’ s materiality theory is based on the literary ecological vision of symbiosis and coexistence,and aims to construct the feedback cycle of literary activities.This paper consists of introduction,body and conclusion.The body includes three chapters:The first chapter examines the origin of literary materiality theory.Firstly,it traces the origin of Hayles’ s literary materiality theory by combing the development of materiality in the period from Saussure’s linguistics to Neo materialism;Secondly,it points out that Hayles’ s literary materiality theory takes the text as a material object to explore,breaking through the limitations of materiality in the perspective of language symbols,formal structure and text content.Hayles finally turned his attention from affirming the subjectivity of material texts to discussing the complex relationship between man and things,and developed a relational dimension;Finally,it makes an overall grasp of Hayles’ s literary materiality theory from the two aspects of ontology and relationship theory,and points out that Hayles’ s literary materiality theory guides the text from closed to self open.The second chapter discusses the connotation of literary materiality theory around the characteristics of literary materiality.Openness,interaction and communication are the three characteristics of Hayles’ s literary materiality theory.Firstly,Hayles believes that materiality breaks away from text centrism and life centrism,evokes the organizational and structural ability of the text itself,and then shows the whole process of opening the text to itself;Secondly,Hayles creates an interactive channel of literary activities among subject,text and material.In this interactive mode,literary works are always in the unfinished stage,showing the current nature of the text;Finally,combined with Hayles’ s concept of shape,this paper discusses the communication between text body and human body.Hayles believes that the text body is the extension of human perceptual organs.Human subjects can enrich themselves with the help of the text body to meet people’s desire for text construction,so as to get more ways to intervene in the text.We can also participate in the construction of text meaning with the help of text body,so as to bring the subject,text and material into the feedback cycle of openness,interaction and communication.The three update the text world in the communication and interaction.The third chapter analyze the value and significance of literary materiality theory.Firstly,the theory of literary materiality affects the generation of meaning.Hayles regards the text as an open place,a feedback system to be discovered and continuously updated.It is precisely because the text is always acting that it provides more possibilities for interpretation of the meaning world;Secondly,the theory of literary materiality promotes the transformation of literary research paradigm and affects people’s cognition of literature.Due to the emergence of the material research perspective,the research direction of contemporary literature has been promoted from the original linguistic research to the material media research.The former is to position the material problem as a methodology in literary research,and take the material as the carrier of content,thought and value.The latter bridged the separation of literariness and materiality and affirmed the intermediary role of text as a material medium in the literary ecosystem;Finally,this paper argues that the deficiency of literary materiality theory is that when the text is an independent and open material medium,its own logical order will also be challenged,which is very easy to cause chaos in the text world,and Hayles did not clearly point out the way to solve this problem.