This course will focus on the opportunity provided by the emergence of new media to rethink the institutional histories of literature, print culture, and the book as cultural form. The argument we will be assessing claims that our current transitional moment in the development of computer-mediated communication and new media forms also generates a renewed self-consciousness about the materiality of the book as a medium and the particularity of the cultural and cognitive values it embodies, last seen during the transition from medieval manuscript culture to print technology and the standardization of print in the 18th century. This self-consciousness, it is argued, opens print up to new experiments and makes it possible to revalue different aspects of literary history. The course will therefore be organized around basic questions about the object of literary or more generally English studies, defined in relation to the method of intermediation or the situating of print culture within a comparative media framework. We will use N. Katherine Hayles’s book Electronic Literature, which includes a CD-ROM with an extensive selection of electronic texts in a variety of genres, along with some selections from The Future of the Book (ed. Geoffrey Nunberg). In addition to the texts listed below, we will likely read some critical essays, short stories, and poems, available online or on reserve. If time permits, we will also discuss popular practices of electronic writing, especially blogging, and some examples of visual culture, such as Warren Ellis and Darick Robertson’s Transmetropolitan graphic novels, films such as Strange Days, Robot Stories, or The Matrix, or television (Battlestar Galactica). Assignments will probably include three papers and an oral presentation

Text listed below and/or:
Either Vernor Vinge, Rainbow’s End or Cory Doctorow, Little Brother or
Bruce Sterling, Distraction

Texts:

• N. Katherine Hayles. Electronic Literature: New Horizons for the Literary.
• Shelley Jackson. Patchwork Girl (CD-ROM).
• Steve Tomasula. The Book of Portraiture.
• Samuel R. Delany. Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand.
• Paul D. Miller aka DJ Spooky That Subliminal Kid. Rhythm Science (book and CD).