criticism - Elise Vist on Diigo

01 Apr 09

First of all
there is the basic conviction that critical attention does not matter, or even
that it is not appropriate to works belonging to a medium which has as one of
its primary principles the absence of � literally � fixed shapes and � literally
� fixed meanings
Like in the first years of cinema, when films were made to promote the
marketing of projection and recording machines, the important thing is not the
message but the apparatus
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- Third, we often hear the argument that hyperfiction has not yet produced enough
  interesting works to justify a turn towards a more literal and literary tackling
  of the material. We would like to contend this view by pointing at the fact
  that even if there is not yet any 'high literature' in the electronic realm,
  its works can still be significant.
- The only
  way to act as a free reader is not to read more rapidly, but, on the contrary,
  to slow down, to look into details, to build up a framework brick after brick.
  We need to be able to establish a dialogue with the forms, the structures, and
  the meanings of both the text and the hypertext. Until that has happened, a
  (hyper)text cannot become a discourse, i.e. a meaningful whole grasped by a
  conscious reader (Fontanille 1999).
- What does it mean to read electronic text? How do we deal with changeability
  and multilinearity? Can we read multimedia content? And what is its status in
  the reading? Does it contribute to the meaning of the text or is it merely surface?
  Is it only a catalyst, some sweets to keep the attention of the reader, or does
  it introduce a new kind of writing where the monopoly of the alphabetic sign
  is definitively broken? What happens if there is no longer one central text?

31 Mar 09

Results (page 1): jane douglas

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criticism hypertext fd

30 Mar 09

Susan Smulyan - Everyone A Reviewer? Problems and Possibilities in Hypertext Scholarship - American Quarterly 51:2

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scholarship hypertext criticism smulyan

Bronwen Thomas - Stuck in a Loop? Dialogue in Hypertext Fiction - Narrative 15:3

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bronwen ryan hypertext criticism dialogue interactivity

For critics such as Marie-Laure Ryan, now that the hype about hypertext fiction has died down, we are left with the sobering fact that outside of university departments and a fairly small group of writers/theorists, these fictions are not widely read or talked about.
I shall argue that some of the techniques employed in hypertext fiction are recognizable from print novels, but this is not to say, as critics of hypertext fictions tend to do, that there is nothing new here
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- creating the effect for the reader of being "stuck in a loop" where the "same" utterances recur, but mean something quite different because of where and when they are encountered.
- In such an environment, being "stuck in a loop" becomes infinitely preferable to being "out of the loop," maintaining contact is an end in itself,
- the reader is left in some uncertainty about the causes of the accidents and the timelines and causal sequences in which events occur.
- However, these representations are less about trying to offer the reader a
  
  [End Page 360]
  
  faithful rendering of how the characters speak, than about conveying the randomness of their connections with one another, and their sense of displacement.
- But as was suggested earlier, the work that we are required to do as readers may also be richly rewarding, as the characters, and the circumstances in which they find themselves, emerge as far more complex than they at first appear.
- metadiscoursal comments that bring into question both the ability of the characters to work through the issues facing them, and our impulse to take their disclosures at face value
- As is true with so many aspects of hypertext fiction, it is not so much what we encounter that seems new or different, as how we get there, and how every seeming point of arrival marks another possible departure.
- "hypertext can show us that context is everything," then what it also seems to show us is that context is mutable and ever-shifting
- , what we are left with is versions of how the conversation may have been played out, offering the possibility of endlessly revisiting the exchanges and the relations between characters.

Edward M. Jennings - Review Essay: The Text Is Dead; Long Live the Techst (Review of: George P. Landow, Hypertext: The Convergence of Contemporary Literary Theory and Technology) - Postmodern Culture 2:3

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techst hypertext criticism landow

It can be imagined as an endless electronic nesting of
"footnotes," each one enriching all the others, none of them
secondary even though one had to be encountered first.
Hypertext is nothing more than electronically
connected chunks of text.
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- 
  
  The crux of hypertext is where those spatially
  distinct "cubes" intersect with temporally distinct
  sequences.
- The book, the
  artist, and even "intellectual property" are fragile,
  socially constructed phenomena. Landow predicts that
  hypertext will, in its turn, frame and historicize several
  such heretofore "self-evident" Truths about Art
- The reader is no longer subjected totally to the
  authoritative will of a single mind, and the reader can be a
  collaborating writer within the hypertext space. BUT each
  new reader IS still under the previous reader-writer's
  control, and NO reader can tamper with the lexias already in
  place.
- To
  capture what really goes on in hypertextual pactice we will
  need to develop a new vocabulary capable of signifying such
  concepts as "wreading" and "wriding."
- Writer
  and reader are not identical. There is no aleatoric
  "audience participation," no wresting of control from the
  performance artist.
- The struggle is not between the
  trivial and the serious, or between absurdity and order,
  even though Miller (and Aristotle) implies that the absence
  of centralized, authorial control of time, and the
  concomitant absence of obvious causes and necessities, would
  leave hypertext vulnerable to the defamatory epithets
  "random" and "chaotic
- The author's authority is decreased
  and the reader's power is increased by the same "amounts,"
  it would seem. Democracy gains to the extent that autocracy
  loses
- In certain
  contexts, power resembles information, in that sharing power
  does not leave the sharer with less of it.

29 Mar 09

Electronic Literature: What is it?

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literature theory hypertext writing hayles criticism

To see electronic literature only through the lens of print is, in a significant sense, not to see it at all.
Of necessity, electronic literature must build on these expectations even as it modifies and transforms them
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- Nevertheless, electronic text remains distinct from print in that it literally cannot be accessed until it is performed by properly executed code. The immediacy of code to the text's performance is fundamental to understanding electronic literature, especially to appreciating its specificity as a literary and technical production. Major genres in the canon of electronic literature emerge not only from different ways in which the user experiences them but also from the structure and specificity of the underlying code
- network
- How to maintain such conventional narrative devices as rising tension, conflict, and denouement in interactive forms where the user determines sequence continues to pose formidable problems for writers of electronic literature, especially narrative fiction.

The Shaping of Hypertextual Narrative- Sergio Cicconi

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cicconi hypertext criticism

hypertext will introduce substantial changes in our way of dealing
with information, of perceiving, creating, preserving, and representing
knowledge; in short: our way of thinking
tell about
the irritation I cannot avoid when I am faced with the task of reading
– or rather of pretending to read – narrative hypertexts
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- this electronic state of things well
  represents the nihilistic condition described by Nietzsche
- pure (non multimedial) hypertextuality”
- fragmentation of the narrative development,
  but also drives us towards a lack of analysis, a lack that is not counterbalanced
  by other advantages given to the readers.
- a convincing and captivating
  plot.”
- That is, most of the times, hypertexts try to take
  the same routes of the previous narratives, but they cannot and should
  not.
- But the risk we run is
  to fall into the Baroque, the over-elaborate, that is, the desire to pile
  up gimmicks, and to amaze with special effects
- often there is no pleasure while reading, there
  is no understanding of what has been read. Narrative hypertexts are anonymous,
  cold, impersonal, chaotic, inconclusive. In short: narrative hypertexts
  are ugly.
- First of all,
  we should remember that the access to the content – mostly multimedial – constituting
  the node can be either linear or non-linear.
- fundamental characteristic
  of hypertexts is their being dynamic
- we can then conceive hypertexts
  as developed extensions of printed texts.
- In this case, it almost goes without saying, the links connecting a section
  of the text to another are almost completely ornamental, mainly created
  for readability requirements of a continuous text inside the limited frame
  of a computer monitor
- Although
  disguising themselves as hypertexts, narratives built in this way are
  still essentially linear and, we could say, well-formed (in accordance
  with Aristotelian principles)
- a
  reader who follows, link after link, any of the possible narrative paths
  – the narration will seem absolutely linear, or at least linear as any
  traditional and well-formed narration.
- 3.2.5. Web-like Hypernarratives

Matthew G. Kirschenbaum - Review Essay: The Cult of Print (Review of: Sven Birkerts, The Gutenberg Elegies: The Fate of Reading in an Electronic Age) - Postmodern Culture 6:1

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birkerts elegies criticism

But first, I should note that the above passage allows
us to glimpse at the outset a disturbing tendency in Birkerts's thought:
here and elsewhere, "The Book" collapses far too readily into "Serious
Literature," a category which in turn collapses too often into a familiar
canon of novels, a canon which, whatever its merits or demerits, forms
only one constellation in the Gutenberg galaxy.
Birkerts's claim that the classics will soon lie
unread, for example,
is not only stale, but it also displays complete ignorance of a project
such as the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI).
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- 
  
  In a recent Harper's Magazine forum
  on technology
  in which he was a participant, Birkerts said the following: "I have
  very nineteenth-century, romantic views of the self and what it can
  accomplish and be. I don't have a computer. I work on a typewriter.
  I don't do e-mail. It's enough for me to deal with mail. Mail itself
  almost feels like too much. I wish there were less of it and I could go
  about the business of living as an entity in my narrowed environment"
- But until Birkerts at least acquaints himself with
  the technologies he so fears, he will not participate in this work in
  any meaningful way.

JSTOR: New Literary History, Vol. 20, No. 2 (Winter, 1989), pp. 265-290

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lanham digital media criticism

J. David Bolter and Richard A. Grusin - Remediation - Configurations 4:3

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grusin bolter criticism digital media

web sites are often riots of diverse media forms, including graphics,
digitized photographs, animation, and video--all
set up in pages whose graphic design principles recall the psychedelic
1960s or dada in the 1920s.
virtual reality should
come as close as possible to the visual world
outside. Its graphic space should be continuous and full of objects and
should fill the viewer's field of vision
without rupture. But today's technology still contains many ruptures,
including slow frame rates, jagged graphics,
bright colors, bland lighting, and system crashes.
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- Its interface is
  automatic in the sense that it consists of layers of programming that
  are executed with each click of the mouse. The
  interface is interactive in the sense that these layers of programming
  always return control to the user, who then
  initiates another automated action. Although the programmer is not
  visible in the interface, the user as a subject is
  constantly present, clicking on buttons, choosing menu items, and dragging
  icons and windows.
- Both the apparent
  autonomy of the machine and the user's intervention can be interpreted
  as contributing to the transparency of the
  technology. On the other hand, the buttons and menus that provide user
  interaction can also be seen as getting in the
  way of the transparency of the digital image
- As Michael Joyce reminds us, replacement is the essence of
  hypertext,
- The Voyager interface remediates the printed
  book without doing much to challenge print's assumptions about linearity
  and closure. Even the name "Expanded Books"
  indicates the priority of the older medium. Much of the current World
  Wide Web also remediates older forms without
  challenging them. Its point-and-click interface allows the developer to
  reorganize texts and images taken from books,
  magazines, film, or television, but the reorganization does not call
  into question the semantic character of a text or
  the ontological status of an image. In all these cases, the new medium
  does not want to efface itself entirely

What Jay David Bolter has to say ...

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bolter eliteracies criticism kaplan

electronic writing has just the opposite effect. It opposes
standardization and unification as well as hierarchy.

E-literacies -- Mo' Better Questions

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eliteracies kaplan criticism

he compelling logic of hypertextual writing, however, has so far
failed to produce many of these "open" texts

E-literacies -- A Point

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kaplan eliteracies criticism

that humanists must themselves learn a new
literacy--the skills and knowledge required to understand the design of

machines and software if not the skills and knowledge required to do the
designing ourselves--so as to engage in productive exchanges with those who
are designing and deploying the literacy tools of the future.

E-literacies -- Tuman

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eliteracies tuman criticism

he stability, and the authority of the printed
word guaranteed a culture

E-literacies -- Lanham

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criticism lanham eliteracies

Electronic texts, Lanham insists, can free us from the illusion that language, or at least written language, is transparent, referential, real

E-literacies -- Way In-Way Out

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eliteracies criticism

social, political, and economic elites try to shape the
technologies we have so as to preserve, insofar as possible, their own
social, political, and economic status. They try to suppress or seek
to control those elements of electronic technologies uncongenial to
that purpose. The degree to which they are successful in controlling
the development and use of electronic texts will define the nature and the problems of literacy
in the future.

E-literacies

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eliteracies kaplan criticism

the knowledge and skill required to make marks in an electronic age with electronic devices. Such knowledge and skill generally includes alphabetic literacies as well as at least a rudimentary grasp of a computer's interface (what Cynthia Selfe terms "screen literacy") and some specialized knowledge for issuing computer-readable commands to save a document, print it, send it out over a network and the like.
There is a pun here too, on elites, what we might think of as literacy elites

Resisting the Kindle - The Atlantic (March 2, 2009)

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reading kindle ebooks literature criticism

But these structures evolved over centuries in ways that map our collective endeavor to understand and express our world
My fear is that as Wikipedia is to information, so will the Kindle become to literature and the humanities: a one-stop outlet, a speedy and irresistibly efficient leveler of context.
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- reinforced by our libraries and bookstores, by the obvious physical adjacency of certain text
- We read and absorb as the age demands, and our devices set the pace
- Turning up a quote by tapping a keyboard is not the same as, say, going to Bartlett’s—it short-circuits all contact with the contextual order that books represen
- woven narrative consistency of the story. That is the trade-off. Access versus context.
- how it emerged and took its place in the context of other texts—and how it moved through the culture
- But we misjudge it if we construe it as just another useful new tool.

Game Studies 0101: Ryan: Beyond Myth and Metaphor: The Case of Narrative in Digital Media

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ryan hypertext narrative criticism

What is narrative?
For
theorists such as Landow, Bolter and Joyce, hypertext is a textual object
that appears bigger than it is because readers could spend hours-ideally
their entire lifetime--unraveling new stories from it
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- Like
  many authors before them-Proust, Mallarm�, James Joyce-the pioneers of
  hypertext dreamed their brainchild as the ultimate literary work, the
  sum of all possible narratives, the only text the reader will ever need
  because its meaning cannot be exhausted.
- he feature that
  enables hypertext to "reconfigure narrative" on the discourse level is,
  evidently, the interactive nature, or ergodic dimension of the medium.
- Textual fragments are like the pieces of a jig-saw puzzle; some fit easily
  together, and some others do not because of their intrinsic shape, or
  narrative content. It is simply not possible to construct a coherent story
  out of every permutation of a set of textual fragments, because fragments
  are implicitly ordered by relations of logical presupposition, material
  causality and temporal sequence. What for instance will I do if in the
  course of my reading I encounter a segment that describes the death of
  a character, and later on a segment that describes his actions when alive
  ? Should I opt for a supernatural interpretation, according to which the
  character was resurrected
- Put in simpler words: there
  are plot types and character types that are best for the novel, others
  are best for oral storytelling, and yet others are best for the stage
  or the cinema. The question, then, is to decide which types of stories
  are suitable for digital media.
- interactivity consists of the freedom
  to chose routes across a textual space, but this space has nothing to
  do with the physical space of a narrative setting
- Randomness sets in after one or two transitions. But randomness is incompatible
  with the logical structure of narrative. Since it would be impossible
  for the author to foresee a coherent narrative development for each path
  of navigation, the order of discovery of the lexia cannot be regarded
  as constitutive of narrative sequence. The only way to preserve narrative
  coherence under such conditions is to regard the text as a scrambled story
  which the reader puts back together, one lexia at a tim
- The external/exploratory mode is therefore better suited for self-referential
  fiction than for narrative worlds that hold us under their spell for the
  sake of what happens in them
- Since the operator of the narrative system is
  external to the fictional world, he has no interest at stake in any particular
  branch of its virtual history; gratification resides instead in the contemplation
  of the whole field of possibilities. The individual forking paths in the
  plot are therefore less interesting than the global pattern of their interconnections.
- The best known example of a narrative system with an ontological/external
  type of interactivity is the series of children books Choose Your Own
  Adventure.
- Hypertext may or may not succeed in creating coherent,
  sustained narrative meaning on the macro or micro level, nor does it necessarily
  aim to create such a meaning, but when it does, it tells a story to the
  reader in the same diegetic mode as print novels or short stories. It
  just makes the recovery of narrative meaning more problematic than in
  the case of standard print novel (a category that, needless to say, excludes
  postmodern texts).

Stuart Moulthrop: Essays

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moulthrop essays electronic critisism criticism

Elise Vist's Library tagged criticism → View Popular

Introduction: Close Reading Electronic Literature

Results (page 1): jane douglas

Susan Smulyan - Everyone A Reviewer? Problems and Possibilities in Hypertext Scholarship - American Quarterly 51:2

Bronwen Thomas - Stuck in a Loop? Dialogue in Hypertext Fiction - Narrative 15:3

Edward M. Jennings - Review Essay: The Text Is Dead; Long Live the Techst (Review of: George P. Landow, Hypertext: The Convergence of Contemporary Literary Theory and Technology) - Postmodern Culture 2:3

Electronic Literature: What is it?

The Shaping of Hypertextual Narrative- Sergio Cicconi

Matthew G. Kirschenbaum - Review Essay: The Cult of Print (Review of: Sven Birkerts, The Gutenberg Elegies: The Fate of Reading in an Electronic Age) - Postmodern Culture 6:1

JSTOR: New Literary History, Vol. 20, No. 2 (Winter, 1989), pp. 265-290

J. David Bolter and Richard A. Grusin - Remediation - Configurations 4:3

What Jay David Bolter has to say ...

E-literacies -- Mo' Better Questions

E-literacies -- A Point

E-literacies -- Tuman

E-literacies -- Lanham

E-literacies -- Way In-Way Out

E-literacies

Resisting the Kindle - The Atlantic (March 2, 2009)

Game Studies 0101: Ryan: Beyond Myth and Metaphor: The Case of Narrative in Digital Media

Stuart Moulthrop: Essays

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