In The Post Card, Jacques Derrida argues that "an entire
epoch of so-called literature ... cannot survive a certain technological
regime of telecommunications.... Neither can philosophy, or
psychoanalysis. Or love letters." To which list one may add, with the
recent editor of Hyper/Text/Theory, literary criticism and
theory. Indeed, one can now see significant aspects of the attention
devoted to literary theory in the 70s and 80s as responding to the
initial shock waves of computer-mediated communication. The computer is
making a new kind of writing space, one which will reformat what is meant
by such traditional concepts as "text," "narrative," "literacy,"
"research," "authorship," "publication," "teaching." To paraphrase
Blake, the text-technology altering, alters all.
This seminar will be a theoretical and practical investigation of issues
associated with new electronic writing, focussing in particular on
hypertextual networks and the nature of this new technological prosthesis
which turns writers and scholars into cyborgs. Without assuming any prior
knowledge
or experience, we will read and create hypertexts, consider the
alteration they make for our sense of literature, and study their looming
role in the "global, interactive, dynamic, cross-platform, distributed,
graphical hypertext information system" that is the World Wide Web (L.
Lemay) (or, double-you cubed: W3).
Required reading will include: Eisenstein, The Printing Revolution in Early Modern Europe; Bolter, Writing Space: The Computer, Hypertext, and the History of Writing; Landow, Hyper/Text/Theory; Gibson, Neuromancer, and several hypertexts. An efficient personal computer and high-speed modem are highly recommended.
Hours: M, 10am-noon; W, 10am-10:50am; F, 9am-10:50 (lab). uga.eng.885