This course examines the close relationship between narrative form and the technologies of production and dissemination. The digital age into which we are moving involves radical transformations of the ways in which we think, communicate, and interact. How have we begun to see these shifts already? What are our emotional and intellectual responses to them? What do we imagine the digital future will bring? What kinds of literacies are necessary in a digital culture? What is at stake politically, socially, and economically in the unequal development of a global technological culture? What are the race, class, and gender issues crucial to developing digital literacy?

In order to explore these questions, we will be reading a range of texts that analyze different aspects of the ways in which industrial, technological, and digital evolutions have and are continuing to transform culture and literacy. Among these, we will consider:

• Walter Benjamin "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction"
• George Landow's Hypertext/Theory
• Mary Louise Pratt's "Science, Planetary consciousness, Interiors" from Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation
• Anne McClintock's "Soft-Soaping Empire: Commodity Racism and Imperial Advertising" from Imperial Leather

Among the questions this course asks are: How do narratives shape cultural groups and how do cultural groups shape narratives? How does discourse act on and through us? How is the novel as form intricately bound to colonialism, travel, and travel narratives, and how are these narratives intricately bound to the evolution of natural science? How does the narrative form of journalism in a digital culture create "others" for the consumer's gaze? What are the ways in which "to look" and "to write" collapse in a digitial culture, and what implications does this have for our understanding of the roles of "the writer" and "the reader"? What are the roles of the writer and reader in a commodity culture? How did print culture produce the text as "product," the audience as "consumer," and the means of production and distrubition as capitalist enterprise, and how are these modes of production and consumption different in a digital culture? That is, how do radical changes in textual production and distribution in a digitial culture produce differences in audience/consumer and producer/distributor/author, and how are these changes changing narrative forms and the ways in which narratives disseminate into popular culture?

We will be critically exploring these abstract issues through a close reading of literary and popular cultural narratives. These will include (but not be limited to):

• Shelley Jackson's Patchwork Girl
• Brown University's Overview of Hypertext Literature, including online fictiion, drama, poetry, and criticism by authors such as Robert Coover and George Landow, as well as Brown University students
• Amitava Kumar's Names

We will each be developing our own web projects (including MOO realms and hypertexts) for this course. This will involve some technical instruction in hypertext markup language, as well as the nuts and bolts of navigating the internet, creating and managing files, using file transfer protocols, and manipulating images. You do not need any prior knowledge to do well in this course, though you will have a much easier time of things if you can type and if you are not too intimidated by computers. We will be doing a fair amount of our work at Tari Fanderclai's educational MOO, connections. MOO work involves a lot of typing-- be sure that you have ergonomically correct chair/desk/keyboard setups, and let's all get to work on our carpal tunnel prevention exercises!
Syllabus and Course Requirements