2 options
Links and their vicissitudes: Essays on hypertext.
- Format:
- Book
- Thesis/Dissertation
- Author/Creator:
- Harpold, Terry.
- Language:
- English
- Subjects (All):
- Computer science.
- Comparative literature.
- 0295.
- 0984.
- Penn dissertations--Comparative literature and literary theory.
- Comparative literature and literary theory--Penn dissertations.
- Local Subjects:
- Penn dissertations--Comparative literature and literary theory.
- Comparative literature and literary theory--Penn dissertations.
- 0295.
- 0984.
- Physical Description:
- 256 pages
- Contained In:
- Dissertation Abstracts International 56-03A.
- System Details:
- Mode of access: World Wide Web.
- text file
- Summary:
- The dissertation is an application of psychoanalytic theory (Freud and Lacan) to the interfaces and narrative forms of hypertexts and other interactive digital media. It focuses primarily on the contingency of narrative in these texts, describing their structural irregularities and resistance to closure in terms of disjunctive paradigms of representation and textuality. Our responses to the refusal of closure in these texts are sustained, I propose, by a transferential relation: the presumption that there is an authority to whom the text is lucid and saturated, and for whose satisfaction we read for cues of structure and narrative resolution. I describe several etiologies of digital reading: the persistent digression of obsessional neurosis, the fetishistic utilitarianism of perversion, and the super-structural fascination of paranoia, illustrating each with readings from contemporary hypertext fictions (by Joyce, Guyer, McDaid, and Moulthrop) and interactive multimedia (The Manhole, Virtual Valerie) that elicit these modes of reading. I conclude by proposing that a digital poetics must be founded on a cautious account of the structural inconsistencies and material fragility of digital texts--precisely those traits that the aforementioned modes of reading obscure or deny.
- Notes:
- Thesis (Ph.D. in Comparative Literature and Literary Theory) -- Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, University of Pennsylvania, 1994.
- Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 56-03, Section: A, page: 0916.
- Supervisor: Gerald Prince.
- Local Notes:
- School code: 0175.
- Access Restriction:
- Restricted for use by site license.
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