Linda Carroli reviews Michael Joyce on networked culture, whose emergence changes our ideas of change.
An overview of Gregory Ulmer’s thought by Victor Vitanza.
Gregory Ulmer (a.k.a. ‘Glue’) has been for some time developing a theory of invention that would be appropriate and productive for those cultural theorists who have an interest in electronic media. (Invention, classically defined in oral and print culture, is the art of recalling and discovering what it is that one would think or say about a given subject. In electronic culture, invention takes on new ramifications). In his Applied Grammatology (1985), Ulmer moves from Derridean deconstruction (a mode of analysis that concentrates on inventive reading) to grammatology (a mode of composition that concentrates on inventive writing); that is, he moves towards exploring “the nondiscursive levels - images and puns, or models and homophones - as an alternative mode of composition and thought applicable to academic work, or rather, play.
It is equally deadly for a mind to have a system or to have none. Therefore, it will have to decide to combine both. Frederich Schlegel
Moving text into e-space has thus far taken as many steps backward as it has forward, largely because the paradigm of the printed book has served as a blinder that keeps us from seeing possible new ways of writing—something nowhere more obvious than in nonfiction. After looking at a few examples of such failures of imagination, including an internet-only scholarly publication that fails to take advantage of virtual textuality, this essay first notes some nonfictional genres and modes after which it looks the relations between fiction and nonfiction as literary forms. Next, it suggests new methods of argumentation made possible by computer-based textuality. The largest part of this essay then explores three new forms: the blog as the electronic translation of the journal, the hypertext essay, and the Ulmerian mystory.
Source: Author's Abstract