No need to get excited. According to Julie Reiser, The Affect Theory Reader offers the reader no end of theory but little affect. Reiser suggests this points to a broader and systemic problem in any reading or theory of affect.
(source: http://electronicbookreview.com/thread/endconstruction/affective)
Consider a work from Shakespeare. Imagine, as you read it, being able to call up instantly the Elizabethan usage of a particular word, variant texts for any part of the work, critical commentary, historically relevant facts, or oral interpretations by different sets of actors. This is the sort of richly interconnected, immediately accessible literary universe that can be created by hypertext (electronically linked texts) and hypermedia (the extension of linkages to visual and aural material).The essays in Hypermedia and Literary Studies discuss the theoretical and practical opportunities and challenges posed by the convergence of hypermedia systems and traditional written texts. They range from the theory and design of literary hypermedia to reports of actual hypermedia projects from secondary school to university and from educational and scholarly to creative applications in poetry and fiction.
In The Poetics of Space Bachelard applies the method of phenomenology to architecture basing his analysis not on purported origins but on lived experience of architecture. Wikipedia
This panel explores alternative avenues for education in digital poetics and electronic literary studies. The panel pieces together problems with categorical, single discipline approaches to electronic literature, critical, cultural, and technological studies looking at the pedagogical and curricular issues associated with media-based and network forms of meaning-making, storytelling, and communication. The primary questions here are: What are the conditions under which a practitioner or scholar are considered expert in the as yet undefined field of media-based expression? And: What solutions are traditional academic institutions offering? Thinking beyond, or outside the exclusive field of electronic literature the panel examines and offers potential alternatives to traditional disciplinary scholarship and accreditation. Each panelist will offer viewpoints, curricular and structural suggestions. The panel will be divided into two sections; the first will be a performative example of an alternative avenue for media culture education, and the second will be a rigorous discussion of the issues related to teaching digital culture and electronic creative practice in single discipline, and sometimes tangential programs and departments. The panel members have been selected based on their own experience with these issues as well as their pursuit of alternatives to institutional formulas.
(Source: Author's abstract, 2012 ELO Conference site)
John Cayley reads John Cayley reads and discusses his poem PENTAMETERS TOWARD THE DISSOLUTION OF CERTAIN VECTORALIST RELATIONS (which examines the effect of Google on language and poetics) with discursive and conversational interrupts from Jhave.
Recorded on John's Providence, Rhode Island home as part of i2.literalart.net/ on 12 Feb 2012.
(Source: David (Jhave) Johnston's vimeo account.)
David (Jhave) Johnston: discursive and conversational interrupts.
In this passionate, lucid, and surprising book, Timothy Morton argues that all forms of life are connected in a vast, entangling mesh. This interconnectedness penetrates all dimensions of life. No being, construct, or object can exist independently from the ecological entanglement, Morton contends, nor does “Nature” exist as an entity separate from the uglier or more synthetic elements of life. Realizing this interconnectedness is what Morton calls the ecological thought.
In three concise chapters, Morton investigates the profound philosophical, political, and aesthetic implications of the fact that all life forms are interconnected. As a work of environmental philosophy and theory, The Ecological Thought explores an emerging awareness of ecological reality in an age of global warming. Using Darwin and contemporary discoveries in life sciences as root texts, Morton describes a mesh of deeply interconnected life forms—intimate, strange, and lacking fixed identity.
A “prequel” to his Ecology without Nature: Rethinking Environmental Aesthetics (Harvard, 2007), The Ecological Thought is an engaged and accessible work that will challenge the thinking of readers in disciplines ranging from critical theory to Romanticism to cultural geography.
(Source: Harvard University Press catalog)
Thinking the ecological thought is difficult: it involves becoming open, radically open -- open forever, without the possibility of closing again. Studying art provides a platform, because the environment is partly a matter of perception.
The ecological thought must imagine economic change; otherwise it's just another piece on the game board of capitalist ideology.
Meditation means exposing our conceptual fixations and exploring the openness of the mesh.
How to care for the neighbor, the strange stranger, and the hyper-object, are the long-term problems posed by the ecological thought.
In his widely acclaimed book Hypertext George P. Landow described a radically new information technology and its relationship to the work of such literary theorists as Jacques Derrida and Roland Barthes. Now Landow has brought together a distinguished group of authorities to explore more fully the implications of hypertextual reading for contemporary literary theory.Among the contributors, Charles Ess uses the work of Jürgen Habermas and the Frankfurt School to examine hypertext's potential for true democratization. Stuart Moulthrop turns to Deleuze and Guattari as a point of departure for a study of the relation of hypertext and political power. Espen Aarseth places hypertext within a framework created by other forms of electronic textuality. David Kolb explores what hypertext implies for philosophy and philosophical discourse. Jane Yellowlees Douglas, Gunnar Liestol, and Mireille Rosello use contemporary theory to come to terms with hypertext narrative. Terrence Harpold investigates the hypertextual fiction of Michael Joyce. Drawing on Derrida, Lacan, and Wittgenstein, Gregory Ulmer offers an example of the new form of writing hypertextuality demands.
(Source: Publisher's catalogue copy)
Linking post-structuralist theory and developments in hypertext text technology, Hypertext: The Convergence of Contemporary Critical Theory and Technology was for many the definitive work on hypertext during the 1990s and established hypertext as a field of serious critical discourse.
CONTENTS
1. Hypertext and Critical Theory
Hypertextual Derrida, Poststructuralist Nelson?The Definition of Hypertext and Its History as a ConceptOther Convergences: Intertextuality, Multivocality, and De-CenterednessVannevar Bush and the MemexVirtual Texts, Virtual Authors, and Literary ComputingThe Nonlinear Model of the Network in Current Critical TheoryCause or Convergence, Influence or Confluence?Analogues to the Gutenberg RevolutionPredictions
2. Reconfiguring the Text
From Text to HypertextProblems with Terminology: What Is the Object We Read, and What IsText in Hypertext?Verbal and Nonverbal TextVisual Elements in Print TextDispersed TextHypertextual Translation of Scribal Culture; or, The Electronic ManuscriptArgumentation, Organization, and RhetoricBeginnings and Endings in the Open TextBoundaries of the Open TextThe Status of the Text; Status in the TextHypertext and De-centrality: The Philosophical Grounding
3. Reconfiguring the Author
How I Am Writing This BookVirtual PresenceCollaborative Writing, Collaborative AuthorshipExamples of Collaboration in Intermedia
4. Reconfiguring Narrative
Hypertext and the Aristotelian Conception of PlotNarrative Beginnings and EndingsMichael Joyce¹s Afternoon: The Reader¹s Experience as Author
5. Reconfiguring Literary Education
Threats and PromisesReconfiguring the InstructorReconfiguring the StudentReconfiguring the Time of LearningReconfiguring Assignments and Methods of EvaluationExamples of Collaborative Learning from IntermediaReconceiving Canon and CurriculumWhat Chance Has Hypertext in Education?
6. The Politics of Hypertext: Who Controls the Text?
Answered Prayers; or, the Politics of ResistanceThe Marginalization of Technology and the Mystification of LiteratureThe Politics of Particular TechnologiesHypertext and the Politics of ReadingThe Political Vision of Hypertext; or, The Message in the MediumThe Politics of AccessAccess to the Text and the Author's Right (Copyright)
From the publisher: From Intermedia to Microcosm, Storyspace, and the World Wide Web, Landow offers specific information about the kinds of hypertext, different modes of linking, attitudes toward technology, and the proliferation of pornography and gambling on the Internet. For the third edition he includes new material on developing Internet-related technologies, considering in particular their increasingly global reach and the social and political implications of this trend as viewed from a postcolonial perspective. He also discusses blogs, interactive film, and the relation of hypermedia to games. Thoroughly expanded and updated, this pioneering work continues to be the "ur-text" of hypertext studies.
A collection of interlinked materials for studying digital culture assembled primarily from George P. Landow's courses on Hypertext and Literary Theory and Cyberspace, Virtual Reality, and Critical Theory at Brown University. Course syllabi are available, and because the majority of materials collected there were created students in these courses visitors can glean ideas about how to design and/or participate in long-running courses, led by a permanent faculty member, in which students play an active and essential role in developing effective course materials updated each time the class is offered.