Electronic media and theory

Until recently, discussion of electronic media among literary scholars has been framed in terms of poststructuralist theory (as in the writings of George Landow, Jay David Bolter, Stuart Moulthrop).

Hypertext, the medium that has received the most attention, has been considered to exemplify the unmargining and intertextuality claimed by Barthes, Kristeva, or Derrida, and to facilitate the reader's emancipation as an author. This early phase of theorizing now seems to be waning as a new generation of theorists rethink the nature of electronic textuality.

Earlier debates about the problems of literary hypertext seems now to be irrelevant. The founding arguments of authors such as George Landow, J. David Bolter, and Michael Joyce have been sometimes superseded. But how textual medium works really ?

We must approach computer literacy as literacy, and not as something completely different, be that text, theatre, cinema, comics or continental philosophy. And this purpose has to think electronic textuality in termes of Rhetorics of hypertext. While it is true that earlier attempts to situate hypertext in relation to poststructuralist text theorists such as Barthes or Derrida may seem misplaced, even naïve, I will suggest that the questions these accounts raised about the status of hypertext have not been superseded so much as abandoned.

Download ebooks on http://www.frenchtheory.com/ - See that post with different algorithms in metabole - See the journal French Metablog with today different posts - Jean-Philippe Pastor