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Writing Machines Designed by Anne Burdick 2002 144 pages Complementary Texts N. Katherine Hayles (How We Became Posthuman) Jay David Bolter & Richard Grusin Keywords Copyright © 2005-2007 Isabel Pedersen |
Hayles constructs an autobiographical persona, Kaye, to communicate connections amongst her life narrative, her media theory, and the electronic literary works of others. Largely, this book is about hypertext, specifically “technotexts,” and materiality. Hayles writes: “This book is an experiment in forging a vocabulary and a set of critical practices responsive to the full spectrum of signifying components in print and electronic texts by grounding them in the materiality of the literary artifact.” (Preface 6) Embodiment is a key term; “Like all literature, technotext has a body (or rather many bodies), and the rich connections between its material properties and its content create it as a literary work in the full sense of the term” (32). “Media ecology” communicates the interrelationship amongst media. Comparing and contrasting this term with Bolter & Grusin’s “Remediation,” Hayles writes that media ecology “suggests that the relationships between different media are as diverse and complex as those between different organisms coexisting within the same ecotome, including mimicry, deception, cooperation, competition, parasitism, and hyperparasitism” (5). One key factor is change. In media ecology, “change anywhere in the system stimulates change everywhere in the system” (33). Much of the book structures a history. Hayles organizes literary hypertexts like Shelley Jackson’s Patchwork Girl into a history of works. She draws out significant real-world events like the PhD defence of Espen Aarseth (Aarseth coined the term “cybertext”) and relates these events to the emergence of hypertext theory. Because Hayles served as an examiner at this defence, she cites an intersection between her own life and a significant event in media theory. She embodies theory, theory embodies her. Anne Burdick, the book’s designer, communicates with the reader through various subtle design strategies. When you hold all the pages together, the ink patterns on the page edges spell out the words “writing” and “machines.” Eerily, the book names itself. Burdick uses a magnifying glass effect on some of the text so that certain passages bulge out at the reader at significant moments. The copyright information appears on the last page. |