Book (Ph.D. dissertation)

Our thesis aims at exploring, through the cyborg metaphor, the part of the contemporary literature which produces texts that are the fruit of a hybridization between books and hypermedia. The cyborg enables us to draw a parallel between the connections that exist today between books and hypermedia, and the relationships made up of fears and fantasies, that people have with the technologies they create. Cyborg literature does not propose works within which books and hypermedia are opposed, but works born from the reunion of two material supports, thus offering a media hybridization of the literary text. New media have to be appreciated as a motor of evolution rather than as a threat. Indeed, contemporary literary and books have to take up the challenge imposed by new media. The book is at the core of our problematic. We have to consider it as a medium for text, a mediumthat is not neutral and that holds its own characteristics and potential. New media offer an opportunity to reevaluate the book in its material dimension which is no longer the only medium for text: our daily reading practices, between books and screens, prove it.Studying books along hypermedia enables us to reconsider the technical nature of the literary text. We will analyze how materiality is highlighted by the modifications implied bymedia hybridization. Hybrid literary works are at a crossroads between two imaginative worlds: that of the book and that of the cyberculture. Through the study of the corpus, we will define a poetic of mediation, whose stakes will have to be discussed. We will elaborate a typology of the different connections that exist between printed texts and hypermedia andidentify three kinds of relationships: adaptation, transmediation and representation. Our corpus of cyborg literature offers new combinations of different media which have an impacton textuality. We will study how technology, in its practical (media related) and imaginary dimensions, has an influence on poetic aspects. Our cyborg corpus belongs to a time when literature is going through a shift in media paradigm: from a culture centered on books to onecentered on screens.

This dissertation has as its object of research new feminist hypermedia and it is located in the fields of hypertext theory, gender studies, and semiotics. This work offers close-readings of three recent feminist hypertext fictions written in English language exploring the problematics of gender, sexuality and multiple identities: Dollspace (1997-2001) by Francesca da Rimini, Brandon (1998) by Shu Lea Cheang and Blueberries (2009) by Susan Gibb. The aim of the study is, in the first place, show how feminist hypertext fictions can be analysed: categorising the work, interpreting its nodes and lexias, emphasizing the cultural references it evokes and studying the readers’ reactions to the hypertext. And in the second place, promote the study of electronic literature as a useful tool for literature courses as well as to demonstrate the beneficial aspects of hypertexts to work with gender studies literature.

This dissertation addresses the need for a strategy that will help readers new to new media texts interpret such texts. While scholars in multimodal and new media theory posit rubrics that offer ways to understand how designers use the materialities and media found in overtly designed, new media texts (see, e.g,, Wysocki, 2004a), these strategies do not account for how readers have to make meaning from those texts. In this dissertation, I discuss how these theories, such as Lev Manovich’s (2001) five principles for determining the new media potential of texts and Gunther Kress and Theo van Leeuwen’s (2001) four strata of designing multimodal texts, are inadequate to the job of helping readers understand new media from a rhetorical perspective. I also explore how literary theory, specifically Wolfgang Iser’s (1978) description of acts of interpretation, can help audiences understand why readers are often unable to interpret the multiple, unexpected modes of communication used in new media texts. Rhetorical theory, explored in a discussion of Sonja Foss’s (2004) units of analysis, is helpful in bringing the reader into a situated context with a new media text, although these units of analysis, like Iser’s process, suggests that a reader has some prior experience interpreting a text-as-artifact. Because of this assumption of knowledge put forth by all of the theories explored within, I argue that none alone is useful to help readers engage with and interpret new media texts. However, I argue that a heuristic which combines elements from each of these theories, as well as additional ones, is more useful for readers who are new to interpreting the multiple modes of communication that are often used in unconventional ways in new media texts. I describe that heuristic in the final chapter and discuss how it can be useful to a range of texts besides those labelled new media.

The expression interactive literary narrative applies to a variety of works. In its diversity, theinteractive literary narrative raises questions on narratives, interactive architecture, multimedia aswell as on literature. It is because the interactive literary narrative is wrought by tensions that it hasthis questioning and maybe even revealing capacity. This tension is first and foremost that which lies between narrativity and interactivity and which investigates other connections or tensions :- with regards to the narrative, the tension between adherence and distance can be characterized by a play on fictionalization and reflexivity;- with regards to the interactive architecture, the tension between assistance and control roles canmanifest itself by a play on loss of grasp,- with regards to the multimedia, the tension between a text-based narrative and a multimedianarrative can be reached by work on text as a dynamic and polysemiotic object, and also thetheatralization of interactive objects endowed with behaviour,- with regards to its recognition as a literary work, the tension between horizon of expectations and aesthetic distance manifests itself by the aesthetics of the materiality of the text, the interface and the medium. Thus, the interactive literary narrative corresponds more to an experimental field than to a well defined autonomous genre.

Source: author's abstract

In the past few years there have been a number of theories emerge in media, film, television, narrative and game studies that detail the rise of what has been variously described as transmedia, cross-media and distributed phenomena. Fundamentally, the phenomenon involves the employment of multiple media platforms for expressing a fictional world. To date, theorists have focused on this phenomenon in mass entertainment, independent arts or gaming; and so, consequently the global, transartistic and transhistorical nature of the phenomenon has remained somewhat unrecognised. Theorists have also predominantly defined it according to end-point characteristicssuch as the "expansion" trait (a story continues across media). This has resulted in the phenomenon being obscured amongst similar phenomena. Therefore, rather than investigate the phenomenon as it occurs in isolated artistic sectors and with an end-point characteristic, this thesis investigates all of these emergences through the lens of transmedia practice. That is, this thesis investigates the nature of transmedia practice in general, according to the way practitioners conceive and design a fictional world to be expressed across distinct media and environments. To do this, this thesis draws on the semiotic theory of “multimodality” and “domains of practice” (Kress and van Leeuwen, 2001) to illuminate the unique knowledge and skills of practitioners involved in the design of transmedia projects. The industrial and aesthetic implications of the employment of distinct media are discussed, along with their semiotic activation. Related theories such as "hypertextuality" and "transfictionality" are problematised in light of transmedia phenomena. Since the phenomenon involves both narrative and game modes, a new methodology is introduced to study their presence at various stages of design: transmodality. The employment of the actual world in transmedia practices is discussed in light of Aristotle's "dramatic unities" and through "deictic shift theory". Through research questions from media, narrative and game studies as well as semiotics, this thesis aims to explain how transmedia is a peculiar practice that demands its own research area and methodologies.

This dissertation offers a history of hypertext, and does not reference any creative works of electronic literature. It has many references to critical writing that is important in the study of electronic literature. The following is the author's abstract: ---

How does one write the history of a technical machine? Can we say that technical machines have their own genealogies, their own evolutionary dynamic? The technical artefact constitutes a series of objects, a lineage or a line. At a cursory level, we can see this in the fact that technical machines come in generations - they adapt and adopt characteristics over time, one suppressing the other as it becomes obsolete. It is argued that technics has its own evolutionary dynamic, and that this dynamic stems neither from biology nor from human societies. Yet 'it is impossible to deny the role of human thought in the creation of technical artefacts' (Guattari 1995, p. 37). Stones do not automatically rise up into a wall - humans 'invent' technical objects. This, then, raises the question of technical memory. Is it humans that remember previous generations of machines and transfer their characteristics to new machines? If so, how and where do they remember them? It is suggested that humans learn techniques from technical artefacts, and transfer these between machines. This theory of technical evolution is then used to understand the genealogy of hypertext. The historical differentiations of hypertext in different technical systems is traced. Hypertext is defined as both a technical artefact and also a set of techniques: both are a part of this third milieu, technics. The difference between technical artefact and technical vision is highlighted, and it is suggested that technique and vision change when they are externalised as material artefact. The primary technique traced is association, the organisational principle behind the hypertext systems explored in the manuscript. In conclusion, invention is shown to be an act of exhumation, the transfer and retroactiviation of techniques from the past. This thesis presents an argument for a new model of technical evolution, a model which claims that technics constitutes its own dynamic, and that this dynamic exceeds human evolution. It traces the genealogy of hypertext as a set of techniques and as series of material artefacts. To create this geneaology I draw on interviews conducted with Douglas Engelbart, Ted Nelson and Andries van Dam, as well as a wide variety of primary and secondary resources.

Source: author's abstract