En bibliotekshermeneutik : Om skrivandets förutsättningar i Martina Lowdens Allt

This paper analyzes Allt, Martina Lowden's novel from 2006, from a media discursive perspective. The theoretical framework consists of Michel Foucault's discourse analysis, Friedrich Kittler's research on hermeneutic reading, and N. Katherine Hayles's studies of pattern–randomness controlled meaning production. Various examples on how communication technology influences the narrator’s act of writing illustrate the medial discourse surrounding the body of Allt. Initially the underlying archive that constitutes the narrators raw material for writing (lists, lexical representations and institutional bibliographies) will be identified. The archival background is, further on, essential for the understanding of how a hermeneutic act of reading (to compare with the product of the late 1800-century educational reform, described by Kittler in his essay "Authorship and Love") takes place throughout the novel. Confronted through a hermeneutic interaction, the literature surrounding the act of writing in Allt, becomes meaningful when put back into a distribution system; when red about and written again – in short, when mutated to fit on to new text consumers. This constant and instant meaning production is, as a final step in this paper, compared with the pattern-randomness network described in Hayles's book How We Became Posthuman