Ex-foliations
Reading Machines and the Upgrade Path
Published on 10. December 2008
Book
Paperback/Softback
368 pages
978-0-8166-5102-3 (ISBN)
Description
A sophisticated consideration of technologies of reading in the digital age
"Every reading is, strictly speaking, unrepeatable; something in it, of it, will vary. Recollections of reading accumulate in relation to this iterable specificity; each takes its predecessors as its foundation, each inflects them with its backward-looking futurity." In Ex-foliations, Terry Harpold investigates paradoxes of reading's backward glances in the theory and literature of the digital field.
In original analyses of Vannevar Bush's Memex and Ted Nelson's Xanadu, and in innovative readings of early hypertext fictions by Michael Joyce and Shelley Jackson, Harpold asserts that we should return to these landmarks of new media scholarship with newly focused attention on questions of media obsolescence, changing user interface designs, and the mutability of reading.
In these reading machines, Harpold proposes, we may detect traits of an unreadable surface-the real limit of the machines' operations and of the reader's memories-on which text and image are projected in the late age of print.
"Every reading is, strictly speaking, unrepeatable; something in it, of it, will vary. Recollections of reading accumulate in relation to this iterable specificity; each takes its predecessors as its foundation, each inflects them with its backward-looking futurity." In Ex-foliations, Terry Harpold investigates paradoxes of reading's backward glances in the theory and literature of the digital field.
In original analyses of Vannevar Bush's Memex and Ted Nelson's Xanadu, and in innovative readings of early hypertext fictions by Michael Joyce and Shelley Jackson, Harpold asserts that we should return to these landmarks of new media scholarship with newly focused attention on questions of media obsolescence, changing user interface designs, and the mutability of reading.
In these reading machines, Harpold proposes, we may detect traits of an unreadable surface-the real limit of the machines' operations and of the reader's memories-on which text and image are projected in the late age of print.
Reviews / Votes
"Harpold's book provides a useful and interesting argument which can aid us greatly in developing a better understanding of textuality in the new media ecology."-Culture Machine"Terry Harpold's book is in itself a demonstration of one of the messages in this ground-breaking work on the digitization of literature. As he very convincingly argues, it is now time to study the electronic text as a form of visual reading and writing, and in this shift the necessity of folding the e-text back to previous forms of print culture in inescapable."-Image & Narrative
"Ex-foliations is a rich compendium that situates current reading practices with a long historical continuum."-American Literature
"Ex-foliations is an exploratory book. It aims to draw a map of the early years of the 'upgrade path', the path of textuality in new media. Harpold takes a much needed polemical stance in saying that scholars must be wary of dominant narratives on this path, with their promises of ever-improving experiences and their quite obvious commercial drives."-Culture Machine
More details
Series
Language
English
Place of publication
Minnesota
United States
Target group
Professional and scholarly
Dimensions
Height: 229 mm
Width: 152 mm
Thickness: 23 mm
ISBN-13
978-0-8166-5102-3 (9780816651023)
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Schweitzer Classification
Person
Terry Harpold is associate professor of English, film, and media studies at the University of Florida.