Product Information
Can computer games be treated as literature? Do the rapidly evolving and culturally expanding genres of digital literature mean that the narrative mode of discourse - novels, films, television series - is losing its dominant position in our culture? Is it necessary to define a new aesthetics of cyborg textuality? In this book, the author explores the aesthetics and textual dynamics of digital literature and its diverse genres, including hypertext fiction, computer games, computer-generated poetry and prose, and collaborative Internet texts such as MUDs. Instead of insisting on the uniqueness and newness of electronic writing and interactive fiction, however, the author situates these literary forms within the tradition of ergodic literature - a term borrowed from physics to describe open, dynamic texts such as the I Ching or Apollinaire's calligrams with which the reader must perform specific actions to generate a literary sequence. Constructing a theoretical model that describes how new electronic forms build on this tradition, the author bridges the divide between paper texts and electronic texts. He then uses the perspective of ergodic aesthetics to re-examine literary theories of narrative, semiotics, and rhetoric and to explore the implications of applying these theories to materials for which they were not intended.Product Identifiers
PublisherJohns Hopkins University Press
ISBN-139780801855795
eBay Product ID (ePID)86594129
Product Key Features
Book TitleCybertext: Perspectives on Ergodic Literature
AuthorEspen J. Aarseth
FormatPaperback
LanguageEnglish
TopicLiterature
Publication Year1997
Dimensions
Item Height216mm
Item Width140mm
Additional Product Features
Title_AuthorEspen J. Aarseth
Country/Region of ManufactureUnited States