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Electronic
Literature and Culture
Department of English, University of Minnesota Spring 2000 Rita Raley |
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| In what ways is the “literary” relevant to the
Information Age? What are the differences between a novel on the
page and a hypertext novel on the screen? What we have seen
in the prophecies of the “death” or “end”
of the literary book has been the end of the belief in the book
as repository and transmitter of definitive cultural value; that
sense of value has in part been displaced onto the chip, the database,
the electronic archive, and their framing mechanism, the screen.
Hypertext narratives, though, complicate this displacement—they
are a site of literature’s adaptation to the digital condition
that is perpetually “under construction.” Thus,
one premise of this course is that literature is by no means an
antiquated cultural form relegated to the obsolescent spheres of
print—it has instead virtually morphed in response to the
new electronic culture, and we will investigate how it has done
so. We will also discuss the relations between text and image;
post-humanism; cyborgs and the technology of reproduction; simulation
and the simulacrum; the tropes and figures of electronic culture;
the digital condition; techno-paranoia; “making do”
and the figure of the hacker; the theoretical and cultural antecedents
of hypertext; the end of the book question; the anamorphic text;
the stylistics of hypertextual narrative; and the general problem
of aesthetics in relation to “Information.”
See also, "Hypertext Fiction & Theory" (Winter 1999 graduate seminar), also taught at the University of Minnesota |
