technotext

In her book Writing Machines, N. Katherine Hayles described the concept of thetechnotext. Hayles used this concept to provide an analysis of a range of texts, including online work, based on their materiality. The analysis described in this article complements this method by developing an approach that explores the conditions of production of contemporary digital literature. It achieves this aim by providing a close reading of the online paratextual elements associated with the first four episodes ofInanimate Alice by Kate Pullinger and Chris Joseph. In doing so, it modifies the print-based analytical framework provide by Gérard Genette and others to develop a detailed account of the off-site, on-site and in-file paratexts of this online work. It sets out a range of thresholds that mould the reception of this text. It also notes how they position it within wider discourses about genre, media, literature and literacy. This article concludes by exploring the limits of this paratextual reading. It discusses whether it provides an adequate account of the material conditions of these texts. It then seeks to integrate this approach into the vision of literary studies described by Hayles in Writing Machines.

Tracing a journey from the 1950s through the 1990s, N. Katherine Hayles uses the autobiographical persona of Kaye to explore how literature has transformed itself from inscriptions rendered as the flat durable marks of print to the dynamic images of CRT screens, from verbal texts to the diverse sensory modalities of multimedia works, from books to technotexts.

Weaving together Kaye's pseudo-autobiographical narrative with a theorization of contemporary literature in media-specific terms, Hayles examines the ways in which literary texts in every genre and period mutate as they are reconceived and rewritten for electronic formats. As electronic documents become more pervasive, print appears not as the sea in which we swim, transparent because we are so accustomed to its conventions, but rather as a medium with its own assumptions, specificities, and inscription practices. Hayles explores works that focus on the very inscription technologies that produce them, examining three writing machines in depth: Talan Memmott's groundbreaking electronic work Lexia to Perplexia, Mark Z. Danielewski's cult postprint novel House of Leaves, and Tom Phillips's artist's book A Humument. Hayles concludes by speculating on how technotexts affect the development of contemporary subjectivity.

(Source: Publisher's description)

Designed by Anne Burdick.

New media poetry—poetry composed, disseminated, and read on computers—exists in various configurations, from electronic documents that can be navigated and/or rearranged by their "users" to kinetic, visual, and sound materials through online journals and archives like UbuWeb, PennSound, and the Electronic Poetry Center. Unlike mainstream print poetry, which assumes a bounded, coherent, and self-conscious speaker, new media poetry assumes a synergy between human beings and intelligent machines. The essays and artist statements in this volume explore this synergy's continuities and breaks with past poetic practices, and its profound implications for the future. By adding new media poetry to the study of hypertext narrative, interactive fiction, computer games, and other digital art forms, New Media Poetics extends our understanding of the computer as an expressive medium, showcases works that are visually arresting, aurally charged, and dynamic, and traces the lineage of new media poetry through print and sound poetics, procedural writing, gestural abstraction and conceptual art, and activist communities formed by emergent poetics.

(Source: Publisher's description)