Materiality matters : literature, the archive, and the self in a digital landscape

The use of digital tools for literary studies brings about emergent new textualities\ud that challenge and reconfigure the ways in which we engage with the text. A re-evalution\ud of textuality must consider the medium used for the inscription and transmission of a text.\ud Materiality matters, and an ???awareness of the mechanism??? (to borrow William Gibson???s\ud phrase) significantly contributes to literary interpretation???the medium in and through\ud which the text is instantiated is as important as the linguistic components of a text, and a\ud theory of the text existing solely in language is insufficient. Using the online Walt\ud Whitman Archive to illustrate how a poetics of digital textuality must engage the\ud multifarious materialities of a text, this project argues that materiality goes beyond\ud physicality: socio-cultural contexts are, arguably, also material components that make up\ud the text???s networked and distributed life in culture and in the Web