Ex-foliations: Reading Machines and the Upgrade Path: 25 (Electronic Mediations) - Softcover

Harpold, Terry

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0816651027 ISBN 13: 9780816651023

Publisher: Univ Of Minnesota Press, 2008

Synopsis

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.

About this title

About the Author

Terry Harpold is associate professor of English, film, and media studies at the University of Florida.

Edition details

• Publisher: Univ Of Minnesota Press
• Publication date: 2008
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0816651027
• ISBN 13: 9780816651023
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 368