The scientific discovery that chaotic systems embody deep structures of order is one of such wide-ranging implications that it has attracted attention across a spectrum of disciplines, including the humanities. In this volume, fourteen theorists explore the significance for literary and cultural studies of the new paradigm of chaotics, forging connections between contemporary literature and the science of chaos. They examine how changing ideas of order and disorder enable new readings of scientific and literary texts, from Newton's Principia to Ruskin's autobiography, from Victorian serial...
The scientific discovery that chaotic systems embody deep structures of order is one of such wide-ranging implications that it has attracted attention...
In this age of DNA computers and artificial intelligence, information is becoming disembodied even as the "bodies" that once carried it vanish into virtuality. While some marvel at these changes, envisioning consciousness downloaded into a computer or humans "beamed" Star Trek-style, others view them with horror, seeing monsters brooding in the machines. In How We Became Posthuman, N. Katherine Hayles separates hype from fact, investigating the fate of embodiment in an information age. Hayles relates three interwoven stories: how information lost its body, that is, how it...
In this age of DNA computers and artificial intelligence, information is becoming disembodied even as the "bodies" that once carried it vanish into vi...
We live in a world, according to N. Katherine Hayles, where new languages are constantly emerging, proliferating, and fading into obsolescence. These are languages of our own making: the programming languages written in code for the intelligent machines we call computers. Hayles's latest exploration provides an exciting new way of understanding the relations between code and language and considers how their interactions have affected creative, technological, and artistic practices. My Mother Was a Computer explores how the impact of code on everyday life has become comparable to...
We live in a world, according to N. Katherine Hayles, where new languages are constantly emerging, proliferating, and fading into obsolescence. These ...
Ira Livingston's "Between science and Literature sets out to introduce the fundamentals of cultural and literary theory to a non-specialist audience. Using ideas about self-reference, self-organizing processes occur at all scales, cutting across traditional divisions between words and things, and argues for an approach that sees language as a part of the world, rejecting the traditional split between words in our minds and things "out there" to which they are supposed to refer. Livingston makes his case by drawing on the work of thinkers across disciplines, ranging like Stuart Kaufman, as...
Ira Livingston's "Between science and Literature sets out to introduce the fundamentals of cultural and literary theory to a non-specialist audience. ...
Critics of contemporary culture have argued that critical theory must keep pace with technological change and, in the process, have instituted a theoretical model that restricts consideration of technology's impact on human experience to those dimensions that can be captured in language. In this wide-ranging critical study of poststructuralism's legacy to contemporary cultural studies, Mark Hansen challenges the hegemony of this model, contending that technologies fundamentally alter our sensory experience and drastically affect what it means to live as embodied human agents. Embodying...
Critics of contemporary culture have argued that critical theory must keep pace with technological change and, in the process, have instituted a theor...
A visible presence for some two decades, electronic literature has already produced many works that deserve the rigorous scrutiny critics have long practiced with print literature. Only now, however, with "Electronic Literature" by N. Katherine Hayles, do we have the first systematic survey of the field and an analysis of its importance, breadth, and wide-ranging implications for literary study.Hayles' book is designed to help electronic literature move into the class-room. Her systematic survey of the field addresses its major genres, the challenges it poses to traditional literary theory,...
A visible presence for some two decades, electronic literature has already produced many works that deserve the rigorous scrutiny critics have long pr...
A visible presence for some two decades, electronic literature has already produced many works that deserve the rigorous scrutiny critics have long practiced with print literature. Only now, however, with "Electronic Literature" by N. Katherine Hayles, do we have the first systematic survey of the field and an analysis of its importance, breadth, and wide-ranging implications for literary study.Hayles s book is designed to help electronic literature move into the classroom. Her systematic survey of the field addresses its major genres, the challenges it poses to traditional literary...
A visible presence for some two decades, electronic literature has already produced many works that deserve the rigorous scrutiny critics have long...
How do we think? N. Katherine Hayles poses this question at the beginning of this bracing exploration of the idea that we think through, with, and alongside media. As the age of print passes and new technologies appear every day, this proposition has become far more complicated, particularly for the traditionally print-based disciplines in the humanities and qualitative social sciences. With a rift growing between digital scholarship and its print-based counterpart, Hayles argues for contemporary technogenesis the belief that humans and technics are coevolving and advocates for...
How do we think? N. Katherine Hayles poses this question at the beginning of this bracing exploration of the idea that we think through, wi...
For the past few hundred years, Western cultures have relied on print. When writing was accomplished by a quill pen, inkpot, and paper, it was easy to imagine that writing was nothing more than a means by which writers could transfer their thoughts to readers. The proliferation of technical media in the latter half of the twentieth century has revealed that the relationship between writer and reader is not so simple. From telegraphs and typewriters to wire recorders and a sweeping array of digital computing devices, the complexities of communications technology have made mediality a...
For the past few hundred years, Western cultures have relied on print. When writing was accomplished by a quill pen, inkpot, and paper, it was ...
Kinder, Marsha; Mcpherson, Tara; Hayles, N. Katherine
Editors Marsha Kinder and Tara McPherson present an authoritative collection of essays on the continuing debates over medium specificity and the politics of the digital arts. Comparing the term transmedia with transnational, they show that the movement beyond specific media or nations does not invalidate those entities but makes us look more closely at the cultural specificity of each combination. In two parts, the book stages debates across essays, creating dialogues that give different narrative accounts of what is historically and ideologically at stake in medium specificity and digital...
Editors Marsha Kinder and Tara McPherson present an authoritative collection of essays on the continuing debates over medium specificity and the polit...
