Digital Texts and Print Experiments:

Cultural Production in the Information Age

Spring 2003 | Languages & Literatures

FLA 494/598 | GER 494/598 | HUM 494 | ENG 494/549
Class meets T/Th 3:15 – 4:30 pm

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Course Description

This course will introduce graduate students and advanced under-graduates to some of the issues surrounding the impact of digital technology on cultural production. Specifically, we will explore various ideas of subjectivity as they relate to reconfigured notions of authorship and readership. How might the author/reader interaction change in the digital environment? We will also investigate the nature of hypertext and its development from within critical theoretical discourse, and experience for ourselves some new modes of interaction in these online environments. Finally, we will also examine related issues in the realm of scholarly publishing, intellectual property and copyright. Students will have the opportunity, as well, to begin creating electronic publications stemming from their own research and to collaborate in exciting new ways.

The course will range widely from materials marking the transition from print to bits (print texts that anticipate hypertextual structures, and digital texts that mimic print's constraints) to digital hypertext fiction, and online scholarly research projects. We will be reading theoretical texts that provide a foundation for discussing issues of subjectivity, identity, authorship/ownership, multi-linear and multi-layered narrative forms. We will also analyze scholarly digital projects related to texts of great cultural value (Decameron Web, Encylopédie, Projekt Gutenberg) and will explore print authors from four national literatures: Italo Calvino, Jorge Luise Borges, Alain Robbe-Grillet and Christoph Ransmayr.

Fictional Works	Theoretical Works	Films
Collected Short Works –     Jorges Luis Borges If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler –     Italo Calvino The Last World –     Christoph Ransmayr Djinn –     Alain Robbe-Grillet Patchwork Girl –     Shelley Jackson	Essays by: Walter Benjamin Roland Barthes Michel Foucault Jean Baudrillard Pierre Bourdieu George Landow Jay Bolter Sven Birkerts	eXistenZ, David Cronenberg, dir. Lola rennt, Tom Tykwer, dir. Synthetic Pleasures, Iara Lee, dir. Strange Days, Kathyrn Bigelow, dir. Tetsuo, Shinya Tsukamoto, dir.