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1. New narrative pleasures? A cognitive-phenomenological study of the experience of reading digital narrative fictions

   Thesis for the degree doctor artium. EXCERPT FROM INTRODUCTION: This dissertation aims to address – and answer – some of the questions surrounding the ways in which the interface of the digital computer (also known as the GUI) is impacting how we experience – read – GUI narrative fictions. In my view, questions such as these are of utmost importance if we are to appropriately understand how digital technology is affecting central realms of human existence, such as our experiences of the fictions that are created and displayed in an ever increasing variety of media materialities and technological platforms. The main research questions to be dealt with in the following revolve around processes typically taking place when we read, watch, listen, experience, interpret, are engaged in, and interact with, digital hypermedia narrative fictions – what I, for the sake of simplicity, call GUI fictions. In short, how do we read GUI fictions? How, and why, is this reading different from our reading of narrative fiction in print, or of reading narrative fictions on other screens, such as on TV or in a movie theater?

   Jill Walker Rettberg - 13.12.2012 - 21:28

2. Growing Intimate With Monsters: Shelley Jackson’s Patchwork Girl and the Gothic Nature of Hypertext

   Described by Robert Coover as “perhaps the true paradigmatic work” of the “golden age” of hypertext literature, Shelley Jackson’s Patchwork Girl (1995) provides not only a rewriting of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818), but an opportunity to consider the ways in which the gothic as a genre serves to problematize the somatic dimension of our writing technologies. In its capacity to touch the reader directly, at the level of the nerves, tissues, and fibres of the body, Patchwork Girl recalls the debates concerning the affective force of the gothic novel, and, in particular, the threat it was thought to pose for women readers. The gothic, in this sense, emerges as the deep and unsettling recognition that the technological is the formative ground of subjectivity, the very condition of our becoming. What Jackson calls “the banished body,” the monstrous materiality of subjectivity, haunts not only the eighteenth-century faith in the powers of rational powers of intellection, but our own post-human dreams of transcendence.

   Jill Walker Rettberg - 06.07.2013 - 09:27