pragmatics

This essay compares two novel forms that are separated by more than 250 years: Henry Fielding's Joseph Andrews, published in 1742, and Philippa Burne's hypertext fiction "24 Hours with Someone You Know," copyrighted in 1996. Using narratological, pragmatic, and cognitive tools and theories, the confrontation of the two distant texts aims to highlight that while "the ethics of the telling" is congruent with the "ethics of the told" in both stories (), the texts differ in the pragmatic positioning of their audiences and the freedom that they seem to grant readers, thereby emphasizing the evolution of the author-reader relationship across centuries and media. The article shows to what extent digital fiction can be said to invite the active participation of the reader via the computer mouse/cursor. Meanwhile it exposes a paradox: although Joseph Andrews is a highly author-controlled narrative, guiding the reader's ethical interpretation of what is told, it seems to leave more "space" for the actual reader, while Burne's participatory framework, conveyed through a second-person pronoun that blurs the line between implied and actual audience, requires some "forced participation" () via the "virtual performatives" that hyperlinks represent. Finally, the specificity of "you" digital fiction as opposed to its print counterpart is theorized in two contrasted models of audience.

Interfaces are back, or perhaps they never left. The familiar Socratic conceit from the Phaedrus, of communication as the process of writing directly on the soul of the other, has returned to center stage in today's discussions of culture and media. Indeed Western thought has long construed media as a grand choice between two kinds of interfaces. Following the optimistic path, media seamlessly interface self and other in a transparent and immediate connection. But, following the pessimistic path, media are the obstacles to direct communion, disintegrating self and other into misunderstanding and contradiction. In other words, media interfaces are either clear or complicated, either beautiful or deceptive, either already known or endlessly interpretable. Recognizing the limits of either path, Galloway charts an alternative course by considering the interface as an autonomous zone of aesthetic activity, guided by its own logic and its own ends: the interface effect. Rather than praising user-friendly interfaces that work well, or castigating those that work poorly, this book considers the unworkable nature of all interfaces, from windows and doors to screens and keyboards. Considered allegorically, such thresholds do not so much tell the story of their own operations but beckon outward into the realm of social and political life, and in so doing ask a question to which the political interpretation of interfaces is the only coherent answer. Grounded in philosophy and cultural theory and driven by close readings of video games, software, television, painting, and other images, Galloway seeks to explain the logic of digital culture through an analysis of its most emblematic and ubiquitous manifestation – the interface. (Source: Polity Press)

November 2013 marked twenty years since artist, writer, performer, and researcher J. R. Carpenter first began using the internet as a medium for the creation and dissemination of experimental texts. This interview examines the material, formal, and textual traces of a number of pre-web media – including the LED scrolling sign, the slide projector, and the photocopy machine – which continue to pervade Carpenter’s digital work today.

This article has two objectives. One is to give a clear example of the way in which practice and theory, or rather practice-as-research, can exist in a symbiotic relationship – each benefiting and illuminating the other. The second aim is to propose and map out an area of potential further research into the discursive positioning of e-literature. It draws on some of the thinking of Deleuze and Guattari around language and literature, in particular as it is articulated through a reading of them by Jean-Jacques Lecercle. In this respect it should be seen as a point of departure, not a presentation of findings. The article is an extended version of one I gave at Kingston University as part of the From Page to Screen to Augmented Reality Conference. The original article was designed to be delivered in conjunction with a video of a digital text work in performance. For this context I have taken some screenshots of that video and added them to the article. They will at least provide some sense of how the digital text work is displayed and how it functions.

Source: author's abstract