Borges' “The Library of Babel” and Moulthrop's Cybertext
Total Page:16
File Type:pdf, Size:1020Kb
Load more
Recommended publications
-
ENG 1131: Writing Through Media—Ergodic Literature
Milligan i ENG 1131: Writing Through Media—Ergodic Literature Section 1983 Instructor:Caleb Milligan MWF, 6; W, E1-E3 Email:[email protected] ARCH 116 Office Hours:TUR 4367; MWF, 4 (and by appointment) Course Description Ergodic literature, according to media theorist Espen J. Aarseth, are those works for which “nontrivial effort is required to allow the reader to traverse the text,” demanding responsibilities beyond just “eye movement and the periodic or arbitrary turning of pages.” In this course, we will investigate important historical and more recent examples of ergodic texts, paying particular attention to the ways they require us to engage with and interact with the work. Our assigned texts should demonstrate that ergodic literature is not medium specific, as we investigate print literature, film, hypertext fiction, and games that all merit consideration as “cybertexts.” As we read and play these works, we will “write through media” by composing our own exercises of ergodic writing and reading through assignments that test limits of print and digital media. Course screening times will be dedicated to collaborative reading/viewing works that test ergodic and interactive possibilities, and to workshopping with print craft and required software for composition. We will regularly “read together” to emphasize the diversity of experiences ergodic texts may solicit, and to compare the differing resolutions each of you may reach to the shared resolutions we arrive at as a group. You should thus gain appreciation for the analysis and composition -
Time, Infinity, Recursion, and Liminality in the Writings of Jorge Luis Borges
Kevin Wilson Of Stones and Tigers; Time, Infinity, Recursion, and Liminality in the writings of Jorge Luis Borges (1899-1986) and Pu Songling (1640-1715) (draft) The need to meet stones with tigers speaks to a subtlety, and to an experience, unique to literary and conceptual analysis. Perhaps the meeting appears as much natural, even familiar, as it does curious or unexpected, and the same might be said of meeting Pu Songling (1640-1715) with Jorge Luis Borges (1899-1986), a dialogue that reveals itself as much in these authors’ shared artistic and ideational concerns as in historical incident, most notably Borges’ interest in and attested admiration for Pu’s work. To speak of stones and tigers in these authors’ works is to trace interwoven contrapuntal (i.e., fugal) themes central to their composition, in particular the mutually constitutive themes of time, infinity, dreaming, recursion, literature, and liminality. To engage with these themes, let alone analyze them, presupposes, incredibly, a certain arcane facility in navigating the conceptual folds of infinity, in conceiving a space that appears, impossibly, at once both inconceivable and also quintessentially conceptual. Given, then, the difficulties at hand, let the following notes, this solitary episode in tracing the endlessly perplexing contrapuntal forms that life and life-like substances embody, double as a practical exercise in developing and strengthening dynamic “methodologies of the infinite.” The combination, broadly conceived, of stones and tigers figures prominently in -
Cybertext: a Topology of Reading
Cybertext: A Topology of Reading Citation info: Lee, T.K. (2017) “Cybertext: A Topology of Reading”, Modern Chinese Literature and Culture 29(1): 172-203. Tong King Lee “Cybertext” was first used by Espen Aarseth as a critical term to denote dynamic forms of literature in his seminal book Cybertexts: Perspectives on Ergodic Literature. To Aarseth (1997) the cybertext “is not a ‘new,’ ‘revolutionary’ form of text” (18) exclusive to the digital or computing realm. Nor is it a radical departure from “old-fashioned textuality,” (18) that is, the codex book – often seen as having little to do with technology defined in a restricted sense. The notion of the cybertext was indeed proposed in response to the print-digital divide that continues to govern how we think about contemporary literary practice. In the popular imagination, the neologism “cyberliterature” evokes the idea of electronically-enabled literary works produced and received via computing platforms; printed literature, accordingly, is not normally considered as belonging to the “cyber” domain. Aarseth’s re-definition is therefore fundamental in unlocking the medial and generic constraints imposed on the prefix-signifier cyber. In the advent of Aarseth’s theory, the term cybertext does not refer to a particular text genre; instead, it describes “a broad textual media category,” (5) “a perspective on all forms of textuality.” (18; original emphasis) It challenges the traditional assumptions of literary criticism by encompassing a wide range of textual formations, some of which are not conventionally regarded as literature proper. The cybertext is therefore a heuristic category that cuts across media and genres “with no obvious unity of aesthetics, thematics, literary history, or even material technology.” (5) The defining characteristic of the cybertext rests not with its medium of representation – it can be instantiated in print, digital, or mixed-media formats – but within the dynamics of its design and reception. -
Chaos Theory, Hypertext, and Reading Borges and Moulthrop
View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk brought to you by CORE provided by Purdue E-Pubs CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture ISSN 1481-4374 Purdue University Press ©Purdue University Volume 8 (2006) Issue 1 Article 1 Chaos Theory, Hypertext, and Reading Borges and Moulthrop Perla Sassón-Henry United States Naval Academy Follow this and additional works at: https://docs.lib.purdue.edu/clcweb Part of the Comparative Literature Commons, and the Critical and Cultural Studies Commons Dedicated to the dissemination of scholarly and professional information, Purdue University Press selects, develops, and distributes quality resources in several key subject areas for which its parent university is famous, including business, technology, health, veterinary medicine, and other selected disciplines in the humanities and sciences. CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture, the peer-reviewed, full-text, and open-access learned journal in the humanities and social sciences, publishes new scholarship following tenets of the discipline of comparative literature and the field of cultural studies designated as "comparative cultural studies." Publications in the journal are indexed in the Annual Bibliography of English Language and Literature (Chadwyck-Healey), the Arts and Humanities Citation Index (Thomson Reuters ISI), the Humanities Index (Wilson), Humanities International Complete (EBSCO), the International Bibliography of the Modern Language Association of America, and Scopus (Elsevier). The journal is affiliated with the Purdue University Press monograph series of Books in Comparative Cultural Studies. Contact: <[email protected]> Recommended Citation Sassón-Henry, Perla. "Chaos Theory, Hypertext, and Reading Borges and Moulthrop." CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture 8.1 (2006): <https://doi.org/10.7771/1481-4374.1289> This text has been double-blind peer reviewed by 2+1 experts in the field. -
Ge Fei's Creative Use of Jorge Luis Borges's Narrative Labyrinth
Fudan J. Hum. Soc. Sci. DOI 10.1007/s40647-015-0083-x ORIGINAL PAPER Imitation and Transgression: Ge Fei’s Creative Use of Jorge Luis Borges’s Narrative Labyrinth Qingxin Lin1 Received: 13 November 2014 / Accepted: 11 May 2015 © Fudan University 2015 Abstract This paper attempts to trace the influence of Jorge Luis Borges on Ge Fei. It shows that Ge Fei’s stories share Borges’s narrative form though they do not have the same philosophical premises as Borges’s to support them. What underlies Borges’s narrative complexity is his notion of the inaccessibility of reality or di- vinity and his understanding of the human intellectual history as epistemological metaphors. While Borges’s creation of narrative gap coincides with his intention of demonstrating the impossibility of the pursuit of knowledge and order, Ge Fei borrows this narrative technique from Borges to facilitate the inclusion of multiple motives and subject matters in one single story, which denotes various possible directions in which history, as well as story, may go. Borges prefers the Jungian concept of archetypal human actions and deeds, whereas Ge Fei tends to use the Freudian psychoanalysis to explore the laws governing human behaviors. But there is a perceivable connection between Ge Fei’s rejection of linear history and tradi- tional storyline with Borges’ explication of epistemological uncertainty, hence the former’s tremendous debt to the latter. Both writers have found the conventional narrative mode, which emphasizes the telling of a coherent story having a begin- ning, a middle, and an end, inadequate to convey their respective ideational intents. -
1 Jorge Luis Borges the GOSPEL ACCORDING to MARK
1 Jorge Luis Borges THE GOSPEL ACCORDING TO MARK (1970) Translated by Norrnan Thomas di Giovanni in collaboration with the author Jorge Luis Borges (1899-1986), an outstanding modern writer of Latin America, was born in Buenos Aires into a family prominent in Argentine history. Borges grew up bilingual, learning English from his English grandmother and receiving his early education from an English tutor. Caught in Europe by the outbreak of World War II, Borges lived in Switzerland and later Spain, where he joined the Ultraists, a group of experimental poets who renounced realism. On returning to Argentina, he edited a poetry magazine printed in the form of a poster and affixed to city walls. For his opposition to the regime of Colonel Juan Peron, Borges was forced to resign his post as a librarian and was mockingly offered a job as a chicken inspector. In 1955, after Peron was deposed, Borges became director of the national library and Professor of English Literature at the University of Buenos Aires. Since childhood a sufferer from poor eyesight, Borges eventually went blind. His eye problems may have encouraged him to work mainly in short, highly crafed forms: stories, essays, fables, and lyric poems full of elaborate music. His short stories, in Ficciones (1944), El hacedor (1960); translated as Dreamtigers, (1964), and Labyrinths (1962), have been admired worldwide. These events took place at La Colorada ranch, in the southern part of the township of Junin, during the last days of March 1928. The protagonist was a medical student named Baltasar Espinosa. We may describe him, for now, as one of the common run of young men from Buenos Aires, with nothing more noteworthy about him than an almost unlimited kindness and a capacity for public speaking that had earned him several prizes at the English school0 in Ramos Mejia. -
Tar for Mortar: "The Library of Babel" and the Dream of Totality
tar for mortar Before you start to read this book, take this moment to think about making a donation to punctum books, an independent non-proft press, @ https://punctumbooks.com/support/ If you’re reading the e-book, you can click on the image below to go directly to our donations site. Any amount, no matter the size, is appreciated and will help us to keep our ship of fools afoat. Contri- butions from dedicated readers will also help us to keep our commons open and to cultivate new work that can’t fnd a welcoming port elsewhere. Our ad- venture is not possible without your support. Vive la open-access. Fig. 1. Hieronymus Bosch, Ship of Fools (1490–1500) tar for mortar: “the library of babel” and the dream of totality. Copyright © 2018 by Jonathan Basile. Tis work carries a Creative Commons BY-NC-SA 4.0 International license, which means that you are free to copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format, and you may also remix, transform and build upon the material, as long as you clearly attribute the work to the authors (but not in a way that suggests the authors or punctum books en- dorses you and your work), you do not use this work for commercial gain in any form whatsoever, and that for any remixing and transformation, you distribute your rebuild under the same license. http://creativecommons.org/ licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/ First published in 2018 by dead letter office, babel Working Group an imprint of punctum books, Earth, Milky Way. -
Beyond Codexspace: Potentialities of Literary Cybertext." Grammalepsy: Essays on Digital Language Art
Cayley, John. "Beyond Codexspace: Potentialities of Literary Cybertext." Grammalepsy: Essays on Digital Language Art. New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2018. 15–32. Bloomsbury Collections. Web. 28 Sep. 2021. <http://dx.doi.org/10.5040/9781501335792.ch-002>. Downloaded from Bloomsbury Collections, www.bloomsburycollections.com, 28 September 2021, 10:59 UTC. Copyright © John Cayley 2018. You may share this work for non-commercial purposes only, provided you give attribution to the copyright holder and the publisher, and provide a link to the Creative Commons licence. 1 Beyond Codexspace: Potentialities of Literary Cybertext The use and abuse of visible language—or writing in the broadest sense— began, in the 1990s, to undergo huge, unprecedented, still continuing growth.1 This growth takes place in what was once called cyberspace, in what many critics still consider an environment that is hostile to cultivated letters—hostile, at the very least, to the traditional and still pre-eminent delivery media which made language visible to civilized language animals. The still narrow bandwidth of networks in the 1990s and the limited capabilities of affordable interfaces meant that encoded text became the dominant medium of information exchange on computer-based networks. And to communicate over these networks, people still, predominantly, write and read. That is, they compose (literary) texts and publish them in cyberspace, where they are read, usually in silence, by friends, colleagues, and the general public.2 All this has stimulated the emergence of an exuberant mass of new forms and proto-genres of visible language: Listserv mailing lists, online conferences or “chat” zones, MOO spaces, and so on. -
The Emergence of Cyber Literature: a Challenge to Teach Literature from Text to Hypertext
Proceedings | “Netizens of the World #NOW: Elevating Critical Thinking through Language and Literature” | ISBN 978-602-50956-4-1 THE EMERGENCE OF CYBER LITERATURE: A CHALLENGE TO TEACH LITERATURE FROM TEXT TO HYPERTEXT Deri Sis Nanda [email protected] Susanto Susanto [email protected] Bandar Lampung University, Indonesia Abstract In a digital era, people live in a cyberspace that they become part of modern society. The information that they have acquired is from the World Wide Web (WWW). This WWW has become an important medium for people in the world to disseminate information. Because of the technology of Web, cyber literature emerges. This study talks about the emergence of cyber literature which changes the way of reading and teaching in various institutions. It becomes a challenge for people who teach literature because they should leave the printed text and move to the digital text as called hypertext. The existence of cyber literature also drives them change their style to analyze and criticize the work of literature. So, it becomes a challenge for them to teach literature from text to hypertext. Keywords: cyber literature, emergence, text, hypertext, cyberspace, challenge, development. Introduction The influence of technology changes all aspects of people’s lives in the world. They become modern society who always get information and do communication in a virtual space. The influence can be seen in work places, homes and teaching institutions. Most of them acquire the information from the World Wide Web (WWW). It is a space for the users to read, write, and access the information with devices connected with the internet. -
CYBERTEXT NARRATOLOGY Markku Eskelinen Introduction
(INTRODUCTION TO) CYBERTEXT NARRATOLOGY Markku Eskelinen Introduction This paper combines Espen Aarseth´s typology and textonomy of cyber- texts with three advanced late 20th century models of narrativity: those of narratology as systematized by Gérard Genette, Seymour Chatman and Gerald Prince, the well-known constructions of postmodernism by Brian McHale, and finally the combinatorial and constrictive practices of the OuLiPo as described by Marcel Bénabou and Jacques Roubaud. In its own modestly exponential way my paper also introduces cybertext fiction, not much in existence yet. Consequently, we will focus on three main issues. At first, we’ll see how the basic and still somewhat heuristic concepts and categories of narratology have to change in order to be able to map out the possibilities and new constellations of cybertextual narration. Secondly, there is the digital dominant, that is, a new set of both epistemological and ontological problems caused or called forth by cybertext fiction and theory. And finally we’ll introduce oulipian objects and operations to temporally dynamic aspects of cybertext theory. It is important to clarify right from the start that cybertext fiction denies its users’ mastery in ways hypertext fiction does not. And in doing so it is much closer to that once hyped hypertext prophecy: print stays; electronic text replaces itself. Firstly, cybertext fiction reads its readers and reacts back by changing itself far more profoundly than by simply playing around with conditional links. In other words it operates as an average piece of 52 interactive art. It should be remembered that this so called interactivity, so far best explained and moderated by Aarseth’s user functions, has a much longer conceptual and practical history in many other forms of art. -
The-Circular-Ruins-Borges-Jorge
THE CIRCULAR RUINS miseroprospero.com/the-circular-ruins 31 March 2017 FRIDAY FICTION [3] A short story from Ficciones by Jorge Luis Borges NO ONE saw him disembark in the unanimous night, no one saw the bamboo canoe sinking into the sacred mud, but within a few days no one was unaware that the silent man came from the South and that his home was one of the infinite villages upstream, on the violent mountainside, where the Zend tongue is not contaminated with Greek and where leprosy is infrequent. The truth is that the obscure man kissed the mud, came up the bank without pushing aside (probably without feeling) the brambles which dilacerated his flesh, and dragged himself, nauseous and bloodstained, to the circular enclosure crowned by a stone tiger or horse, which once was the colour of fire and now was that of ashes. The circle was a temple, long ago devoured by fire, which the malarial jungle had profaned and whose god no longer received the homage of men. The stranger stretched out beneath the pedestal. He was awakened by the sun high above. He evidenced without astonishment that his wounds had closed; he shut his pale eyes and slept, not out of bodily weakness but of determination of will. He knew that this temple was the place required by his invincible purpose; he knew that, downstream, the incessant trees had not managed to choke the ruins of another propitious temple, whose gods were also burned and dead; he knew that his immediate obligation was to sleep. Towards midnight he was awakened by the disconsolate cry of a bird. -
Towards a History of Electronic Literature
CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture ISSN 1481-4374 Purdue University Press ©Purdue University Volume 16 (2014) Issue 5 Article 2 Towards a History of Electronic Literature Urszula Pawlicka University of Warmińsko-Mazurski Follow this and additional works at: https://docs.lib.purdue.edu/clcweb Part of the Comparative Literature Commons, Digital Humanities Commons, and the Other Arts and Humanities Commons Dedicated to the dissemination of scholarly and professional information, Purdue University Press selects, develops, and distributes quality resources in several key subject areas for which its parent university is famous, including business, technology, health, veterinary medicine, and other selected disciplines in the humanities and sciences. CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture, the peer-reviewed, full-text, and open-access learned journal in the humanities and social sciences, publishes new scholarship following tenets of the discipline of comparative literature and the field of cultural studies designated as "comparative cultural studies." Publications in the journal are indexed in the Annual Bibliography of English Language and Literature (Chadwyck-Healey), the Arts and Humanities Citation Index (Thomson Reuters ISI), the Humanities Index (Wilson), Humanities International Complete (EBSCO), the International Bibliography of the Modern Language Association of America, and Scopus (Elsevier). The journal is affiliated with the Purdue University Press monograph series of Books in Comparative Cultural Studies. Contact: <[email protected]> Recommended Citation Pawlicka, Urszula. "Towards a History of Electronic Literature." CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture 16.5 (2014): <https://doi.org/10.7771/1481-4374.2619> This text has been double-blind peer reviewed by 2+1 experts in the field. The above text, published by Purdue University Press ©Purdue University, has been downloaded 1359 times as of 11/ 07/19.