Tom Pettitt: The Gutenberg parenthesis and cultural differences (2005)
Tom Pettitt talks about the Gutenberg Parenthesis a phase where everything is stable, original and individual, speaking in terms of culture e.g. literature. The Gutenberg Parenthesis has a pre-parenthetical and a post-parenthetical period in which things are not stable. Pettit says about it: “[…] I am particularly attracted by the way “parenthesis” suggests development over time: a before, a during and an after, with the implication that the post-parenthetical period after and the pre-parenthetical period before may have more in common with each other than either has with the parenthetical phase that came in between […]” Pettitt goes even so far as to say that the post-parenthetical period is a mirror from the pre-parenthetical period as in both periods things are unstable and rather collective than individual. He points out that some things enter the parenthesis later than other things and gives an example from the Elizabethan time: poetry was already in the parenthesis as it was published with the authors name, but plays were just on the verge of entering it because they were usually published without the name, but started being sometimes published with the authors name.
Something I don’t understand about the whole construction is why it has actually any significance. What is the point in categorising things under one or the other phase? It is interesting to know that there are changes like that during time and that especially in the time of electronic media everything becomes more unstable again as people use ready-made things to make it their own, to create something new with it.
And interesting is also the comparison Tom Pettitt draws to illustrate that point by saying that Elizabethan theatre was like today’s Remix culture as he points out that Elizabethan theatre treated plays in a way which can be described as remixing, sampling, borrowing, reshaping, appropriating and recontextualizing, in short using ready-made materials to make something else out of it. This is actually exactly what I want to point out with my research topic, that Shakespeare himself remixed. So in this point I totally agree with Tom Pettitt and as for the rest I might get closer to it through the discussion in class.
