In an age dominated by media, religion has been assumed to be resurging, albeit in different forms. This study hypothesises that the massively multiplayer online role-playing (MMORPG) video game World of Warcraft, with its powerful ludic, narrative and fa

Virtually religious: myth, ritual and community in World of Warcraft

is thesis considers the portrayal of uncertain or amateur encounters with new technologies in the late twentieth century. Focusing on "ctional responses to the incipient technological and cultural changes wrought by the rise of the personal computer, I demonstrate how authors during this period drew on experiences of empowerment and uncertainty to convey the impact of a period of intense technological transition. From the increasing availability of word processing software in the 1980s to the exponential popularity of the “World Wide Web”, I explore how perceptions of an “information revolution” tended to emphasise the increasing speed, ease and expansiveness of global communications, while more doubtful commentators expressed anxieties about the pace and effects of technological change. Critical approaches to the cultural impact of computing technologies have tended to overlook the role played by perceptions of expertise and familiarity, and my thesis seeks to redress this by identifying a broad range of imagery, language and cultural references used to depict amateur or inexpert encounters with computing technologies. My interest in literary representations of amateur or marginalised users of computing technology reveals how the ease and speed of reading and writing promised by technological expertise can be countered by uncertainty arising from limited understanding of the complex processes involved. In a pre-smartphone age, the computer loomed as an object which was simultaneously baffling and enchanting, "lled with potential but also obscure in its fundamental workings. Examining instances within experimental literary "ction and poetry which portray, imply, or respond to, encounters with personal computing, I demonstrate how individuals’ attempts to understand a technologically-in%ected world can be described and enacted by the use of unusual narrative and poetic devices, where experimental literary strategies work to recreate the complex sensations associated with thrilling, difficult, or incomprehensible aspects of information technologies.

Electric amateurs : literary encounters with computing technologies 1987-2001

The Cambridge Introduction to Postmodernism surveys the full spectrum of postmodern culture - high and low, avant-garde and popular, famous and obscure - across a range of fields, from architecture and visual art to fiction, poetry, and drama. It deftly maps postmodernism's successive historical phases, from its emergence in the 1960s to its waning in the first decades of the twenty-first century. Weaving together multiple strands of postmodernism - people and places from Andy Warhol, Jefferson Airplane and magical realism, to Jean-Francois Lyotard, Laurie Anderson and cyberpunk - this book creates a rich picture of a complex cultural phenomenon that continues to exert an influence over our present 'post-postmodern' situation. Comprehensive and accessible, this Introduction is indispensable for scholars, students, and general readers interested in late twentieth-century culture.

The Cambridge Introduction to Postmodernism

Twenty-first century literature is computational, from electronic works to print books created as digital files and printed by digital presses. To create an appropriate theoretical framework, the concept of intermediation is proposed, in which recursive feedback loops join human and digital cognizers to create emergent complexity. To illustrate, Michael Joyce's afternoon is compared and contrasted with his later Web work, Twelve Blue. Whereas afternoon has an aesthetic and interface that recall print practices, Twelve Blue takes its inspiration from the fluid exchanges of the Web. Twelve Blue instantiates intermediation by creating coherence not through linear sequences but by recursively cycling between associated images. Intermediation is further explored through Maria Mencia's digital art work and Judd Morrissey's The Jew's Daughter and its successor piece, The Error Engine, by Morrissey, Lori Talley, and Lutz Hamel.

Intermediation: The Pursuit of a Vision

Why #WomenAreTooHardToAnimate: Exploring gender and identity in communities of play

This is an in-depth history and analysis of hyperlinked fiction. The marriage of narrative and the computer dates back to the 1980s, with the hypertext experiments of luminaries such as Judy Malloy and Michael Joyce. What has been variously called "hypertext fiction," "literary hypertext," and "hyperfiction" has surely surrendered any claim to newness in the 21st century. David Ciccoricco establishes the category of "network fiction" as distinguishable from other forms of hypertext and cybertext: network fictions are narrative texts in digitally networked environments that make use of hypertext technology in order to create emergent and recombinant narratives. Though they both pre-date and post-date the World Wide Web, they share an aesthetic drive that exploits the networking potential of digital composition and foregrounds notions of narrative recurrence and return. Ciccoricco analyzes innovative developments in network fiction from first-generation writers Michael Joyce ("Twilight, A Symphony", 1997) and Stuart Moulthrop ("Victory Garden", 1991) through Judd Morrissey's "The Jew's Daughter" (2000), an acclaimed example of digital literature on the Web. Each investigation demonstrates not only what the digital environment might mean for narrative theory but also the ability of network fictions to sustain a mode of reading that might be called "literary." The movement in the arts away from representation and toward simulation, away from the dynamics of reading and interpretation and toward the dynamics of interaction and play, has indeed led to exaggerated or alarmist claims of the endangerment of the literary arts. At the same time, some have simply doubted that the conceptual and discursive intricacy of print fiction can migrate to new media. Against these claims, "Reading Network Fiction" attests to the verbal complexity and conceptual depth of a body of writing created for the surface of the screen.

Reading network fiction

An international group of digital fiction scholars proposes a platform of critical principles, seeking to build the foundation for a truly "digital" approach to literary study

A [S]creed for digital fiction

“Focalization,” perhaps one of the sexiest concepts to surface from narratology’s lexicon, still garners considerable attention nearly four decades after its coinage. The entry for the term in the online Living Handbook of Narratology is by far the most popular one, roughly 400 page views ahead of the second most popular, for “author.”1 Granted, that statistic may be more a function of the term’s inherent confusion than its inherent appeal, as classical narratology has spawned multiple models with irreconcilable differences and single terms with multiple meanings, all in the service of elaborating Gérard Genette’s foundational distinction that the agent who tells the narrative is not necessarily the same one who perceives it. In his contribution to the recent collection Point of view, Perspective, and Focalization, Uri Margolin outlines three directions for a revision of focalization theory: 1) expansion of its application to other media with theoretical modifications as needed; 2) reconfiguration of the available system and its categories; and 3) a reconceptualization of the whole theory by placing it within a more fundamental theoretical framework (41). A general term that Genette endowed with technical meaning in narrative theory’s structuralist prime, focalization is generally understood to involve the filtering of narrative information with varying degrees of subjectivity via any number of vantage points of characters and narrators.2 Given observations that it is, in a broader sense, “one component of a general theory of fictional minds, that is, of the literary representation of mental activity in all its varieties” (Margolin 45) and “is best understood as a reflex of the mind . . . conceptualizing scenes within storyworlds” (Herman 122), models and concepts derived from a cognitivist framework hold tremendous promise

Focalization and Digital Fiction

Refiguring Minds in Narrative Media

Faith, the protagonist of Mirror’s Edge, marks an empowered female character that is not hypersexualized, and the decision to employ a first-person perspective (thereby subverting any gaze offered ...

David Ciccoricco

Papers

Reading network fiction

A [S]creed for digital fiction

Focalization and Digital Fiction

Refiguring Minds in Narrative Media

Narrative, Cognition, and the Flow of Mirror’s Edge