Book (monograph)

From the publisher: Ever since Gutenberg invented movable type we have lived in a culture dominated by print. Now we are in the midst of a communications revolution as profound as that which saw the printed book replace oral and manuscript texts. Hypertext- a way of connecting text, pictures, film, and sound in a nonlinear manner by electronic links- not only creates the forking paths and blind alleys of the electronic labyrinth but also provides our means of navigating through it. Hypertext is dramatically changing how we read and write, how we teach reading and writing, and how we define literary practices.In her knowledgeable guide to this revolutionary work, Ilana Snyder gives a lucid and straightforward overview of the radical effects that hypertext is having on textual practices. Focusing on what we mean by text, author, and reader, she explores the connections between the practical experience of hypertext and some of the key insights found in the works of critical theorists such as Barthes and Derrida, and hypertext theorists Land and Joyce. Neither a computer evangelist nor a fearful Luddite, she assesses the implications for education of reading and writing in hypertext.

A model of contemporary remixing and a groundbreaking reflection on digital media. Digital technology has transformed contemporary culture. New social media, hyperlinks, and cut-and-paste techniques have changed the way we write. E-books, which allow us to carry entire libraries with us, are bringing new browsing and reading habits. Digital editing and other on-the-fly postproduction processes have altered how we make music, films, and visual art. A key rhetorical trope employed in all aspects of digital media is the remix, the creation of innovative new works of visual, literary, and performance art through the mashup. In remixthebook, Mark Amerika explores the mashup as a defining cultural activity in the digital age. A pioneering media artist and acclaimed cultural theorist, Amerika offers a series of philosophical essays that trace the art of the remix to previous forms of avant-garde and modernist art through mashups of deftly sampled phrases and ideas from a wide range of visual artists, poets, novelists, musicians, comedians, and philosophers—among them Alfred North Whitehead, Guy Debord, William S. Burroughs, Kathy Acker, and Allen Ginsberg. A provocative textual performance that is at once a dazzling model of the literary remix and a state-of-the-art reflection on remix culture, remixthebook captures the unique and continually shifting digital moment in which we live and situates the remix as an art form and literary intervention. To coincide with the publication of remixthebook, Amerika will launch a companion website, remixthebook.com, to facilitate new ways of participating in remix culture by inviting other artists and writers to create remixthebook mashups of their own, pushing the boundaries of art and literary culture further, beyond the current publishing paradigms.

(Source: University of Minnesota Press)

The first comprehensive look at the effect of new technologies on contemporary American fiction. Bringing together cognitive science and literary analysis to map a new "media ecology," Cognitive Fictions limns an evolutionary process in which literature must find its place in an artificial environment partly produced and thoroughly mediated by technological means. Joseph Tabbi provides a penetrating account of a developing consciousness emerging from the struggle between print and electronic systems of communication. Central to Tabbi's work is the relation between the arrangement of communicating "modules" that cognitive science uses to describe the human mind and the arrangement of visual, verbal, and aural media in our technological culture. He looks at particular literary works by Thomas Pynchon, Richard Powers, David Markson, Lynne Tillman, Paul Auster, and others as both inscriptions of thought consistent with distributed cognitive models, and as self-creations out of the media environment. The first close reading of contemporary American writing in the light of systems theory and cognitive science, Cognitive Fictions makes needed sense of how the moment-by-moment operations of human thought find narrative form in a world increasingly defined by competing and often incompatible representations.

(Source: University of Minnesota Press)

Aux amateurs de littérature numérique, le Web offre en deux clics l’œuvre et son envers, son mystère et une partie de ses clés, le spectacle et sa machinerie intellectuelle ou technique. Qu’on l’appelle «cyberlittérature» ou «littérature numérique», cette littérature n’aurait pas de réalité sans le support numérique et le dispositif informatique grâce auxquels l’œuvre est produite, lue et souvent agie. L’ambition de cet ouvrage est de faire entrer le lecteur dans l’univers des œuvres numériques, en interrogeant au passage le modèle classique de l’édition. Les auteurs ont choisi d’observer deux dispositifs collectifs : autrement dit, deux lieux sur le Web où deux communautés d’acteurs livrent simultanément quelques-unes des clés essentielles de leur raison sociale dans le domaine littéraire en ligne. Du territoire occupé sur le réseau au geste d’une écriture qui revendique son originalité, en passant par la possible émergence d’un modèle inédit d’édition, il ne s’agit pas moins que de se demander si, finalement, ce que l’on désigne par «littérature numérique» n’est pas l’expression d’un nouveau paradigme pour la littérature.

Source: https://books.openedition.org/bibpompidou/214?lang=en