Books Read 2011

  1. Beowulf & Other English Poems
  2. The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy by Douglas Adams
  3. Roland Barthes by Graham Allen
  4. With A Tangled Skein by Piers Anthony
  5. Collection of Aristophanes’ Plays
  6. The Windup Girl by Paolo Bacigalupi
  7. Camera Lucida by Roland Barthes
  8. Empire of Signs by Roland Barthes
  9. Incidents by Roland Barthes
  10. Writing Degree Zero by Roland Barthes
  11. The Savage Detectives by Roberto Bolano
  12. Collected Fictions by Jorge Luis Borges
  13. High Druid of Shannara: Jarka Ruus by Terry Brooks
  14. High Druid of Shannara: Tanaquil by Terry Brooks
  15. The Path To The Nest of Spiders by Italo Calvino
  16. Six Memos For The Next Millennium by Italo Calvino
  17. Under The Jaguar Sun by Italo Calvino
  18. The Cambridge Companion To Chaucer
  19. Spray Paint The Walls: The Story of Black Flag by Stevie Chick
  20. The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins
  21. Matched by Ally Condie
  22. Context-Further Selected Essays on Productivity, Creativity, Parenting, and Politics in the 21st Century by Cory Doctorow
  23. Makers by Cory Doctorow
  24. With A Little Help by Cory Doctorow
  25. Ten Plays by Euripides
  26. Discipline & Punish-The Birth of the Prison by Michel Foucault
  27. H.P Lovecraft: Against The World, Against Life by Michel Houellebecq
  28. Virgina Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway: Invisible Presences by Molly Hoff
  29. The Odyssey by Homer (Butler translation)
  30. An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding by David Hume
  31. Basrayatha: The Story Of A City by Muhammad Khudayyir
  32. New York Hardcore 1986-1991: A Time We’ll Remember by David Koenig
  33. Teaching Literature & Language Online (Edited by Ian Lancashire)
  34. Piers Plowman by William Langland
  35. The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge by Jean-Francois Lyotard
  36. Italo Calvino: A Journey Toward Postmodernism by Constance Markey
  37. Shakespeare’s Tragic Cosmos by McAlinden
  38. Utopia by Sir Thomas More
  39. Plato-Euthyphro
  40. Imaginative Qualities of Actual Things by Gilbert Sorrentino
  41. Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything by Don Tapscott
  42. Civil Disobedience & Other Essays by Henry David Thoreau
  43. Look At The Birdie by Kurt Vonnegut
  44. Mother Night by Kurt Vonnegut
  45. The Sirens of Titan by Kurt Vonnegut
  46. The Death of the Moth by Virginia Woolf

ThatCamp Jersey Shore: Engaging With Massive Humanities Datasets

The final panel of ThatCamp: Jersey Shore was run by Amanda French on engagement with massive humanities datasets. I’ve been tipping my toes into this field a bit recently, so I was eagerly awaiting this panel.

  • Franco Moretti’s very important Graphs, Maps, and Trees was discussed. Even with canon expansion, still only 10% of 19th century publications.
  • Digital humanities apply millions of pieces of data to Dickens instead of Foucault.
  • Moretti article Style Inc. looks at thousands of titles.
  • What does these large datasets do to applications like the Oxford English Dictionary? For example, the OED’s proclamation that OMG was first used in 1914.
  • Someone (Amanda?) wondered if these large datasets are leading to something like Borges’ Library of Babel.
  • Datasets more about questions than theory.

After ThatCamp was over, I headed out for lunch With Amanda, John Theibault, and Deb Gussman. A great end to an excellent conference.

 

The Multiplicity Of Discursive Elements

My first semester of graduate school, one of the courses I took was on Critical Theory with Dr. Bluemel.  As we went from theorists as varied as Eve Sedgwick, Stanley Fish, and Roland Barthes I noticed a pattern forming during our discussions.  A number of my contributions to the discourse were referential to not only outside sources, but even some outside of what is normally considered “literature” by most students.  My professor told me to try to stay within the bounds of literature in order to not lose or confuse other students, which was fine by me.  Still, I was troubled that I received blank stares from my classmates when bringing up David Hume, John Dewey, or even a popular contemporary like Zadie Smith.  I had an extremely hard time trying to stay “in bounds” which it came to our classroom discourse. 

In History Of Sexuality, while discussing the unity of power and knowledge in discourse, Foucault offers this definition of discourse:

We must conceive discourse as a series of discontinuous segments whose tactical function is neither uniform or stable.  To be more precise, we must not imagine a world of discourse divided between accepted discourse and excluded discourse, or between the dominant discourse and the dominated one; but as a multiplicity of discursive elements that can come into play in various strategies (100). 

As an undergraduate, I took a number of extra courses to attain a minor in Philosophy.  I did this in order to supplement my literary studies.  What I learned from Dewey, Hume, Nietzsche, Arthur Danto, and others went with me back to the English classroom to accentuate my work there.  Perhaps this is why theoretical concerns are more compelling to me than the standard close reading associated with English, but I see no reason for not extending into other fields for further enlightenment and thought.  Just talking about English in English classes bores the hell out of me. 

 

Feral Hypertext : When Hypertext Literature Escapes Control

A new idea!  Instead of a weekly update of what I am reading for my thesis and the project Toni and I are working on, how about I just blog my research daily as it goes on.  Bear with me: I am bouncing between a number of sources so posts will go back and forth between them often.  My goal is to upload one per day.  In fact, if all goes well the focus of this blog will shift for the time being to my current, in progress, research and writing almost exclusively.

Oh, I will get back to War Prayers soon.

History Lesson
My first entry will be for Jill Walker-Rettberg’s Feral Hypertext : When Hypertext Literature Escapes Control.   Dr. Walker’s paper offers a lot of useful information on two fronts.  There is plenty of good historical information about hypertext and many useful arguments for what Toni and I are working towards in our project, which is moving towards a focus on how texts have been, and are, defined and how this effects electronic literature.  Walker argues that hypertext before the World Wide Web is “domesticated…bred in captivity” (1).  She continues by arguing that hypertext was, however, always intended for individual users.  In 1974, Ted Nelson insists that ordinary people need to have access to personal computers.  Thirty years before, in an essay for The Atlantic in 1945, Vannevar Bush also argues for this:

Consider a future device for individual use, which is a sort of mechanized private file and library. It needs a name, and to coin one at random, “memex” will do. A memex is a device in which an individual stores all his books, records, and communications, and which is mechanized so that it may be consulted with exceeding speed and flexibility. It is an enlarged intimate supplement to his memory.

Continuing the historical look, Nelson creates the term “hypertext” in 1965.  Two years later, Julia Kristeva does the same for Intertextuality.  What becomes important here for my own thinking is, as Walker notes, the similarities between contemporary critical theory and hypertext have been pointed out numerous times, including, the work I am most familiar with, George Landow’s Hypertext 2.0 from 1997.  Walker is quick to point out, as Landow is as well, that the “relationship between hypertext and critical theory is not that simple” (3).

Walker continues by offering a brief history of preweb hypertext systems like Hypercard and Storyspace:

Though the first personal computers became available in the late seventies, the first home hypertext systems weren’t available till the late eighties. Peter Brown’s GUIDE [8] was followed by HyperCard, a hypertext authoring system that was packaged with Macintosh computers. Soon afterwards, Eastgate’s Storyspace became available, first for the Macintosh and later for the PC.  Tinderbox, released from Eastgate in 2001, is probably the tool that most closely follows in the footsteps of these systems, which were very much created in the spirit of Vannevar Bush and the desire for an intimate extension to memory. These hypertext authoring systems allow an individual to organise his or her personal notes and create his or her own self-contained hypertext which can be shared with others by copying it onto a diskette or CD or by emailing it as a single file. While Tinderbox and HyperCard were primarily intended as organisational tools, Storyspace was explicitly developed as a tool for fiction authors.

The Evolution Of The Writerly Text
Distribution of literary hypertext before the World Wide Web still shared many of the characteristics of the bounded text.  Like a copy of Sorrentino’s Aberration of Starlight in paperback, a CD of Shelley Jackson’s Patch Work Girl still restricted readers to a “sustained reading of a self-contained work” (5).  The rise of cheaper personal computers and the World Wide Web began to allow anyone with an Internet account to publish on the web, link, and be linked to.  This led to what Walker refers to as “feral hypertext,” hypertext that is “no longer tame and domesticated” (1).  For my own work, the most important point here is that hypertext on the World Wide Web in general cannot be tamed any longer.  Hypertext is very unruly and rather disobedient!

As Walker points out, literary hypertext that has gone, in her words, “feral” demands of the reader “to accept structures that are neither predefined nor clearly boundaried” (2).  Collaboratively written works like The Unknown and digital poetry like Megan Sapnar and Ingrid Ankerson’s Cruising defy the boundaries of the bounded text.  An interactive memoir like Caitlin Fisher’s These Waves Of Girls is an unruly and rather untamed account of growing up told with audio and visual links.  After making sure to note that Landow and others have pointed out the differences between critical theory and hypertext while pointing out their similarities, Walker expresses the idea, which I strongly agree with, that theorists involved with critical theory and intertextuality are already arguing that texts are unruly and extremely disobedient.  Literary hypertext on the World Wide Web is an evolution of the writerly text.  Hypertext that is feral is, as I see it, an interactive expression of the writing of the work on authorship of theorists like Foucault, Derrida, and Barthes.

 

Position Paper #7

William P. Wend
3/30/06
Dr. Rettberg
Position Paper #7

In his essay Representation, Enaction, and The Ethics Of Simulation Simon Perry attempts to achieve two goals.  First, he wants to “enhance critical discussion of interactive media practice and interactive media cultural practice,” which he considers an academic goal (73).  Secondly, as an activism goal, Perry wishes to discuss the ethical responsibility of objects which may be considered an environment where someone can be trained to kill.

Perry begins his essay by citing Foucault and Bordieu to discuss repetitious social behaviors.  From Foucault, Perry gathers that “bodily training is a powerful tool in the formation of citizens” (73).  The repeating of psychical actions has been used in the education and socialization of citizens since the dawn of time.  This socialization, Perry argues from Bordieu, is “learned without conscious intellectual understanding” (74).  The rationalization of behaviors on an intellectual level is completely different from this.  Perry argues that behaviors are learned successfully only when they become “automatic” (74). 

Perry's paper continues by discussing the American military and their use of video games for training purposes.  The Marines have licensed Doom from its creator, Id Software, to create what they called Marine Doom.  Nintendo has created products for the Army.  Finally, The Navy has used The Sims to simulate terror cell organization.    This begs the question which Perry asks next: when someone plays these games, military of civilian, what are they being trained to do? 

David Grossman, the author of the book Stop Teaching Our Kids To Kill, argues that video games, and the entertainment industry in general, trains young people the same way that the military trains soldiers via Doom.  Grossman argues that these games “hardwire young people for shooting at humans” (76).  Eric Zimmerman, disputes this by arguing for Quake:

In single player mode, and especially in multi player “death match” mode, Quake's blend of light speed tactics and hand-eye coordination has more in common with the cerebral athletics of tennis than the spectacular violence of Rambo.  Quake and games like it have succeeded in creating meaningful space for play...  (76)

When playing Quake on a computer or laptop, Perry continues, the player is not using a gun or a gun shaped device to play the game.  Doom is played often using a QWERTY style keyboard.  This is significant for Perry because, in the world we all live in post Operation Desert Storm, today more often than not military offensives are done using keyboard like interfaces.

Perry continues by proposing a question about actors and why those who play serial killers on television do not become serial killers themselves.  Theater, he argues, is a “virtual world” (81).  Perry then asks what is the difference between performing Shakespeare and say, battle training. 

Perry raises some interesting ideas in this paper.  Behaviors, as learned from the Foucault and Bordieu citations, are learned from repetition until they are automatic. Citizens are taught from childhood to behave in certain ways which as acceptable to polite society.   A child who knows to not cross until the light is green has been successfully socialized to cross the street at the right time. 

It is interesting to me that the military uses video games to trains its soldiers.  Video games are so realistic these days that a game like Golden Eye or Halo 2 could be used by the Marines to help teach soldiers how to use their weaponry.  I am against the military industrial complex but if America has to have a military I am glad they are learning from something that will give them an accurate way to train themselves for combat. 

As for Grossman's book about video games teaching children to kill, I have to absolutely disagree with his findings.  Like Zimmerman, I believe that games like Quake teach hand eye coordination and being able to react to fast moving situations.  As a child I had a lot of problems with hand eye coordination and playing video games was one of the things that helped me immensely in my adolescent development.  I am also blind in one eye so learning how to react to what was happening on the screen helped me to adjust to the loss of eye sight. 

Also, as Zimmerman briefly mentions, if Quake is so bad, what about Rambo?  What about the NFL each Sunday?  When ESPN shows all the “big hits” from the weekend's football matches in slow motion over and over again doesn't that show the developing minds of children that violence is not only ok, but really cool?  Don't these things teach children to be violent?  If critics are going to attack Doom they better also attack Rambo, G.I. Joe, and all things of that nature.

Grand Theft Auto Three is a game in which the ethics of simulation can be discussed.  In this game the player kills cops, beats sex workers with baseball bats, and robs people.  These things, while not necessarily a necessary part of the game, are part of what makes the game world interesting.  I'm sure a critic such as Grossman would find this game deplorable for children to play.  I actually would have to agree with that.  Why are twelve year olds playing Grand Theft Auto? 

While I don't think there is a problem with playing GTA, putting a game where the player murders and steals in the unsupervised hands of children who are still developing intellectually is problematic.  I think parents should teach their children the difference between the way that they behave in a game than how they believe in real life.  The same way children should be taught that there is a difference between Rambo and reality, children should be taught there is a difference between GTA and how someone behaves in reality.  Video games teach the player excellent skills, but children should be supervised when playing so any Rambo like fantasies can be deterred.