Article in a print journal

On a five year old i-book, the sporulation [in "Dreamlife of Letters"] is clearly visible; on a recent macbook, the animation is run slightly faster, and the sporulation seems less visible; on a more powerful non-portable computer, it becomes even imperceptible! In this particular case, the reader is given no opportunity to grasp the meaning the author wants to convey. He is not even able to guess it, for there is no theoretical paratext to warn him about the fact that certain surface events may become invisible (482).

[T]here are two main shifts to which fiction (literary or otherwise) must adjust when it is communicated in a medium in which the recipient helps to assemble the system of inscriptions in topologically significant ways. First, it needs to recognize that the role of the reader familiar to us from print changes in the degree to which the links between textual elements remain semantically underdetermined. Second, fiction somehow needs to manage the fact that the user’s navigational decisions can be driven by motives wholly divorced from the fictional world, provoking a crisis of fictionality. The fictionalization of reception is one way of addressing both shifts, for a fictionalized “interaction” would be severely limited by the boundaries of the fiction, thus rendering the fictional world a larger, more complex, and more interesting space to inhabit.

Rather than the endless expansion of markets and identities typical of the new liberal economic regime, and in contrast to the current overproduction of both popular entertainments and academic publications, the literary countertradition identified by Kevorkian, in its various attempts at "thinking inside the black box," seeks to know the mechanisms that both constrain expression and create alternative possibilities.

It is worth listing the authors in Kevorkian's counterweb, to give an idea of what a literary response to the new liberal technoculture might look like: Thomas Pynchon; Richard Powers; Paul D. Miller, a.k.a. DJ Spooky; That Subliminal Kid; Jane Smiley; Mary Anne Breeze, a.k.a. Mez; Talan Memmott; Brian Lennon; John Cayley; and Walter Mosley.

Shelley Jackson’s hypertext, Patchwork Girl, offers a cyborgian reading of reproductive technologies that challenges the dominant discourse of fetal imaging.

Part male, part female, part animal, 175 years old, and “razed” up through hypertext technology, the patchwork girl is a different type of cyborg than discussed thus far; she is a reproductive freak whose story only comes into being through hypertext and who embraces her flaws at every turn of the story

One of the ways the story posits a concept of new reproductive technologies outside the norm is by having the monster aware of how her birth was assisted. The monster knows that she is an assemblage of body parts rather than a unified self because she carries memories of her own creation as well as those she is made up from.