The Baroque Technotext: Literature in a Digital Mediascape

by Elise Takehana

Overview

To date, most criticism of print and digital technotexts – literary objects that foreground the role of their media of inscription – has emphasized the avant-garde contexts of a text’s production. The Baroque Technotext opens new perspectives on this important and innovative literary canon, analysing the role of baroque and neo-baroque aesthetics in the emergence and possible futures of technotexts. Combining the insights of poststructuralist theory of the baroque, postcolonial theory of the neobaroque, and insightful critique of the prevailing modernist approaches to technotexts, The Baroque Technotext reframes critical debate of contemporary experiments in literary practice in the late age of print. Analyses of works from authors including Jonathan Safran Foer, Chris Ware and David Clark are matched with reflections on other media texts – film, visual art and interface design – that have adopted baroque aesthetic tropes.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781789381672
Publisher:	Intellect Books
Publication date:	02/19/2020
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
File size:	15 MB
Note:	This product may take a few minutes to download.

About the Author

Elise Takehana is associate professor of English studies at Fitchburg State University in Massachusetts. Her research interests include composition and rhetoric, media studies, aesthetics and twentieth- and twenty-first-century text production.

Elise Takehana, assistant professor of English studies, teaches writing and twentieth-century and twenty-first-century literature at Fitchburg State University. Her research interests include composition and rhetoric, media studies, aesthetics, and twentieth- and twenty-first-century text production. She is currently researching baroque aesthetics and their application across contemporary print and digital literature. Forthcoming articles by Professor Takehana include 'Prying open the oyster: Creating a digital learning space from the Robert Cormier Archive' in The ALAN Review and 'The shape of thought: Humanity in digital, literary texts' in Comunicazioni sociali. Recent articles include 'Can you murder a novel?' in Hybrid Pedagogy, 'Baroque computing: Interface and the subject-object divide' in Design, Mediation and the Post-Human (Lexington Books), and 'Porous boundaries in Virginia Woolf’s The Waves: Anticipating a digital composition and subjectivity' in Cross Culture Studies.

Table of Contents

 

Introduction: An Anamorphic Projection of the Title 

Reconciling Literary Study with Materiality 

Technotexts as a Focus 

Technotexts Beyond Modernism 

Baroque as the Other Focus 

Baroque Reason as Modernity’s Madness 

Prologue 

Choice 

Monads: A Harmonic Subjectivity for Technotextuality 

Mirrors 

Mise en Abyme: Mirrorish Dimensions Down to the Code 

Illusion 

Trompe L’Oeil: Blending Media and Synesthetic Knowing 

Surface 

Minoring: Baroque Cosmology and Criticizing from Within 

Code 

Collections and Navels: The Horror Vacui of the Database 

Coda 

References 

Index