What is the matter? Or, what literary theory neither hears nor sees
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Concerned with the relationship between sound and images on the printed page, this essay analyzes two poems by William Wordsworth, connecting their cognitive operations to the changes in print technology that affected reading practices of the time. I show in Wordsworth's lyrics a shift in the stimulus that he deploys to evoke sound. The process of code-reading afforded by computers and software reveals Wordsworth's practice of making sounds for the eye, a practice that has been virtually invisible to close-reading and high theory, as a material substrate capable of generating lyric subjectivity.
