Book (monograph)

The terms ‘interculturality’ and ‘transculturality’ are every time more present in literary studies. However, the relationship between the phenomena of cultural contact and aesthetic dimension demand understand deeply of which both consist. This study explores the need of a convergence between culture sciences (Kulturwissenschaften) and literary theories to tackle in the right way the relationship between cultural interactions and aesthetic-literary strategies. In the first place, from a critical and systematic revision of the main theories and conceptualizations to nowadays, a new method is elaborated to produce readings from an intercultural perspective. In other words, a focus that deals with cultural contacts in production and textual reproductions. In the second place, the analysis of three contemporary novels representative of different models of interculturality and transculturality illustrate this approach to the texts and offers contributions that move beyond the literary.

In Escrituras nómades, Belén Gache has created an encyclopaedia that presents in a pleasant and documented fashion several centuries of game and experimentation with the text. Some of the sections are 'Conjuros', 'Espacialidades', 'Signos' and 'Temporalidades'. For Belén Gache writing is in a constant shift; revolving in a material formal, playing with it, living in the new electronic limbo (Translated by Maya Zalbidea) (Source: El País)

Interculturas-transliteraturas tries to answer to the development that the concept of interculturality has had in the last decades. Product of demographic evolution, social and cultural in our world, the world "interculturality" has suffered from overuse. This book intends to turn on the light of theoretical and metodological objectives that have been supported for the use of the term as well as for its criticism and recovery in an area necesarily open that goes from the origins of Sociology and Philosophy, to the developments of the field of literary criticism (Translated by Maya Zalbidea)

Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man is a 1964 book by Marshall McLuhan, a pioneering study in media theory. McLuhan proposes that the media, not the content that they carry, should be the focus of study. He suggests that the medium affects the society in which it plays a role not by the content delivered through it, but by the characteristics of the medium. McLuhan pointed to the light bulb as an example. A light bulb does not have content in the way that a newspaper has articles or a television has programs, yet it is a medium that has a social effect; that is, a light bulb enables people to create spaces during nighttime that would otherwise be enveloped by darkness. He describes the light bulb as a medium without any content. McLuhan states that "a light bulb creates an environment by its mere presence." More controversially, he postulated that content had little effect on society — in other words, it did not matter if television broadcasts children's shows or violent programming, to illustrate one example — the effect of television on society would be identical. He noted that all media have characteristics that engage the viewer in different ways; for instance, a passage in a book could be reread at will, but a movie had to be screened again in its entirety to study any individual part of it. The book is the source of the well-known phrase "The medium is the message". It was a leading indicator of the upheaval of local cultures by increasingly globalized values. The book greatly influenced academics, writers, and social theorists.

Deep Time of the Media takes us on an archaeological quest into the hidden layers of media development—dynamic moments of intense activity in media design and construction that have been largely ignored in the historical-media archaeological record. Siegfried Zielinski argues that the history of the media does not proceed predictably from primitive tools to complex machinery; in Deep Time of the Media, he illuminates turning points of media history—fractures in the predictable—that help us see the new in the old. Drawing on original source materials, Zielinski explores the technology of devices for hearing and seeing through two thousand years of cultural and technological history. He discovers the contributions of "dreamers and modelers" of media worlds, from the ancient Greek philosopher Empedocles and natural philosophers of the Renaissance and Baroque periods to Russian avant-gardists of the early twentieth century. "Media are spaces of action for constructed attempts to connect what is separated," Zielinski writes. He describes models and machines that make this connection: including a theater of mirrors in sixteenth-century Naples, an automaton for musical composition created by the seventeenth-century Jesuit Athanasius Kircher, and the eighteenth-century electrical tele-writing machine of Joseph Mazzolari, among others. Uncovering these moments in the media-archaeological record, Zielinski says, brings us into a new relationship with present-day moments; these discoveries in the "deep time" media history shed light on today's media landscape and may help us map our expedition to the media future. Source: http://mitpress.mit.edu/books/deep-time-media

In this book, Astrid Ensslin examines literary videogames—hybrid digital artifacts that have elements of both games and literature, combining the ludic and the literary. These works can be considered verbal art in the broadest sense (in that language plays a significant part in their aesthetic appeal); they draw on game mechanics; and they are digital-born, dependent on a digital medium (unlike, for example, conventional books read on e-readers). They employ narrative, dramatic, and poetic techniques in order to explore the affordances and limitations of ludic structures and processes, and they are designed to make players reflect on conventional game characteristics. Ensslin approaches these hybrid works as a new form of experimental literary art that requires novel ways of playing and reading. She proposes a systematic method for analyzing literary-ludic (L-L) texts that takes into account the analytic concerns of both literary stylistics and ludology.

After establishing the theoretical underpinnings of her proposal, Ensslin introduces the L-L spectrum as an analytical framework for literary games. Based on the phenomenological distinction between deep and hyper attention, the L-L spectrum charts a work’s relative emphases on reading and gameplay. Ensslin applies this analytical toolkit to close readings of selected works, moving from the predominantly literary to the primarily ludic, from online hypermedia fiction to Flash fiction to interactive fiction to poetry games to a highly designed literary “auteur" game. Finally, she considers her innovative analytical methodology in the context of contemporary ludology, media studies, and literary discourse analysis.

(Source: MIT Press catalog copy)

In Reading Writing Interfaces, Lori Emerson examines how interfaces—from today’s multitouch devices to yesterday’s desktops, from typewriters to Emily Dickinson’s self-bound fascicle volumes—mediate between writer and text as well as between writer and reader. Following the threads of experimental writing from the present into the past, she shows how writers have long tested and transgressed technological boundaries.

Table of Contents:

Introduction

Chapter 1: Indistinguishable From Magic | Invisible Interfaces and Digital Literature as Demystifier

Chapter 2: From the Philosophy of the Open to the Ideology of the User-Friendly

Chapter 3: Typewriter Concrete Poetry and Activist Media Poetics

Chapter 4: The Fascicle as Process and Product

Chapter 5: Postscript | The Googlization of Literature

Works Cited

As ICT continues to grow as a key resource in the classroom, this book helps students and teachers to get the best out of e-literature, with practical ideas for work schemes for children at all levels. Len Unsworth draws together functional analyses of language and images and applies them to real-life classroom learning environments, developing pupils’ understanding of ‘text’. The main themes include: What kinds of literary narratives can be accessed electronically? How can language, pictures, sound and hypertext be analysed to highlight the story? How can digital technology enhance literary experiences through web-based 'book talk' and interaction with publishers' websites? How do computer games influence the reader/ player role in relation to how we understand stories?

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)