of the page
lurking below
the official text
...waiting for you
to notice
Waiting
to deepen your understanding
and multiply your reading--
pleasure and productivity
Waiting
to extend your thinking
further define your way
creating a text
below the text
around the text
over the text
--a set of old school subpages(2).
----------------------------------------------------
House of Leaves
by Mark Z. Danielewski is the first book that comes to my mind when I think about footnotes (3).The sheer volume of footnotes, in Danielewski's text, their strange placements, arrangements, and connections to the regular text or text proper (if we could describe anything in this work as regular or text proper) is cause for notice. The footnotes in his work create additional narratives, subtexts, theories, reports, and in some cases entire books within the book.
Click here to look at the myriad configurations (4) of text on pages in House of Leaves.
We usually think of footnotes as the proof in the pudding of scholarly, academic and professional literature. By merely using footnotes, a writer can support, refute, backstab, snub, praise, or question the work of others. I never realized how controversial or complex the construction of a footnote could be, nor did I understand the degree to which the seemingly innocent notes at the bottom of the page could rewrite/reroute a text.
Anthony Grafton sheds light on all of this-- the history, theory, and politics of the footnote-- in his entertaining and informative book, The Footnote: A Curious History.
Click here to read the first chapter of The Footnote.
For more footnote fun, Jeanann Verlee offers her short poem, along with her lengthy title, WHEREIN THE AUTHOR PROVIDES FOOTNOTES AND BIBLIOGRAPHIC CITATION FOR THE FIRST STANZA DRAFTED AFTER A SIGNIFICANT AND DANGEROUS DEPRESSION INCURRED UPON BEING REFERENCED AS A “HACK” BOTH BY INDIVIDUALS UNKNOWN TO THE AUTHOR AND BY INDIVIDUALS WHOM THE AUTHOR HAD PREVIOUSLY CONSIDERED FRIENDS.
This magnificent tour de force--this 82-word poem becomes ostensibly longer as it is copiously footnoted(5) and includes a bibliography of more than 40 entries--all of which are essential to create her poetic whole--which simultaneously pokes fun at the practice of annotating, footnoting, citing bibliographic references, and generally extending the text with more text, yet expresses an authentic poetic notion.
Read Verlee's poem here.
Footnotes are serious business.
They document what we write, provide a path or map of our research, our references, and our relationship to the related work of others.
But footnotes can also be fun. We can manipulate and play with them to create unique texts.
----------------------------------------------------------
1. Footnotes are notes at the bottom or foot of the page that explain something in the text or cite references, or further define, explain, or support statements, concepts or information. Click here for visual examples of foot notes.2. A subpage is a subordinate page of a website, usually having the same Uniform Resource Locator or URL with an added slash followed by specific identifying path information- see more at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subpage
3. That is when I think about footnotes
in anyway other than the standard fifth-grade- reading-class way in which we teach that information which will define, explain, or clarify is to be found in the footnotes usually placed at the bottom of the page.4. This link will take you to a set of images resulting from Google search results for 'House of Leaves'.
5. There are 30 numbered footnotes and an additional 6 identified with by symbols.
Today's Deeper Writing Possibities
Examine several texts to analyze how footnotes that are used in each. You may want to include a variety of texts--books, articles, essays, poems.
Write your own text--a poem, essay, narrative or other form and use footnotes in a creative way as an integral part of your creation.
No comments:
Post a Comment