WRT: Writer Response Theory

Please enjoy my completed Ph.D. dissertation. Yes, this also marks my return to writing on WRT. Yes, it’s good to be back.

I’m pleased to announce that my Ph.D. dissertation: “Command Lines: Aesthetics and Technique in Interactive Fiction and New Media” is filed and available in final form. You can download Command Lines […]

Facebook as a Genre
As students and, increasingly, faculty move into Facebook, the slew of applications catering to their needs have been slewing fast, sent forth by the release of the API back in May. While many of these merely add on a new infective meme to the wildly-popular social network, […]

Literary hypertext is experiencing a renaissance. As part of a year-long series on this renaissance, I would like to offer several posts about recent works in the form. Part of the renaissance comes from time travel. Note: This post builds on the ideas introduced in Noah Wardrip-Fruin and Pat Harrigan’s new collection Second Person.

Time travel is a favorite topic for science fiction lovers and loveable losers, the Marty McFly in all of us. (see this U Michigan course onThe Drs. Phebson time travel lit.) The topic seems particularly popular in time-based and time-fixed media such as film (see this film list, for example. However, time travel becomes more than just a plotline of regret in the world of hypertext because through this narrative device moving from time period to time period becomes a metaphor for moving from page to page on the web. Or perhaps, another way to say it, drawing from N. Katherine Hayles’ terminology, the internet becomes a material metaphor for time travel.

On the Polyphonic Method
A couple of months ago Micheal Benton approached us at Writer Response Theory to participate in the Reconstructions issue on blogging. We’re Really Thrilled about the idea — who wouldn’t want to blog about blogging?! But when the time came to write, we three researchers kept weaving in and out of approaches. Should we have a single voice? That is always a good approach, but a collaborative document isn’t written with a single voice in the first draft. It begins as a mixture of voices that synergise and become one (either with poetic ease or a crow-bar). We haven’t reached that chorus point yet. Don’t know if we ever will. And, to be frank, we like the idea of pulling back the curtain and revealing what a collaborative-text-in-formation looks like. Indeed, it is emblematic of our collaborative blogging at WRT.

So, why do we blog…together?

What can we learn from Curious George?
(By no means do I mean to make a monkey out of one of the forefathers of eliterary criticism and a mentor of mine, a man who worked harder than most to firmly plant hypertext in a literary and academic arboretum.  If anything, this post swings between homage and lament).

**CURIOUS GEORGE […]