social text

"The Machine in the Text, and the Text in the Machine" is a review essay on Electronic Literature: New Horizons for the Literary (University of Notre Dame, 2008) by N. Katherine Hayles, and Mechanisms: New Media and the Forensic Imagination (MIT Press, 2008), by Matthew G. Kirschenbaum. Both works make remarkable contributions for the emerging field of literary studies and the theory of digital media. While Hayles analyses the interaction between humans and computing machines as embodied in electronic works, Kirschenbaum conceptualizes digitally at the level of inscription and establishes a social text rationale for electronic objects.

This article introduces EJES, vol. 11, issue 2, "New Textualities." It briefly outlines the relation between theoretical and technological changes that has led to a re-examination of textual forms in the digital age. Texts as both social text and technotext are tentatively explored in the context of remediation and proliferation of textual materialities that defines contemporary culture. The six articles contained in this issue deal with specific aspects of this linguistic and literary context, in which texts, metatexts and tools for analysing texts are fostering a new critical awareness of textual phenomena and textual representation.

(Source: Author's Abstract)