Between Postphilologies and Cybercultures: a Walk through Two Contributions about Reading New Textualities in the Twenty-First Century

Abstract

In the face of the disciplinary crisis of philology and the emergence of cyberculture, two authors shed light on new ways of theorizing about reading. Studying the contributions of Daniel Link in Suturas and Juan José Mendoza in “Avatares de los textos en la época de la reproductibilidad digital” can show how the new forms of textuality brought by cyberculture stand at the core of the crisis of philology that has been diagnosed by a number of leading theorists. The paper begins with a state of the art of the crisis of philology between the late twentieth century and the middle of the second decade of the twenty-first century, and then continues with an analysis of the works by Link and Mendoza. From there, a series of questions emerge, and this paper addresses them in order to investigate whether or not philology should be in charge by living up to this new textuality. It concludes by explaining what conceptions it can leave behind to do so and that philology is undoubtedly the discipline that must be in charge of reading this massive textbook flow that is the empire of internet.

Keywords

• link
• mendoza