Read more
This is a guide, in theory and in practice, to how current technological changes have impacted our interaction with texts and with each other. Henry Sussman rereads pivotal moments in literary, philosophical and cultural modernity as anticipating the cybernetic discourse that has increasingly defined theory since the computer revolution. Cognitive science, psychoanalysis and systems theory are paralleled to current trends in literary and philosophical theory.Chapters alternate between theory and readings of literary texts, resulting in a broad but rigorously grounded framework for the relation between literature and computer science. This book is a refreshing perspective on the analog-orientated tradition of theory in the humanities - and offers the first literary-textual genealogy of the digital.
List of contents
Acknowledgements
List of Illustrations
Preface
1. Reading Kandinsky
2. From
The Brothers K. to Joseph K.: The Digitization of Literature
3. The Calculable, the Incalculable and the Rest: Kafka's Virtual Environment
4. Urban Introjections:
Berlin Alexanderplatz5. Theory on the Fly: Critical Synthesis under Conditions of Material Pirating and Borrowed Time
6. Playful Healing: The Transitions of D. W. Winnicott
7. The Figure in the Network: Douglas Hofstadter and the Ethics of Intelligence
8. The Phenomenology of Jetlag
Afterword: Healing, Systematically
Notes and References
Index
About the author
Henry Sussman is Visiting Professor of Germanic Languages and Literatures at Yale University, USA.
Summary
This is a guide, in theory and in practice, to how current technological changes have impacted our interaction with texts and with each other. Henry Sussman rereads pivotal moments in literary, philosophical and cultural modernity as anticipating the cybernetic discourse that has increasingly defined theory since the computer revolution. Cognitive science, psychoanalysis and systems theory are paralleled to current trends in literary and philosophical theory.
Chapters alternate between theory and readings of literary texts, resulting in a broad but rigorously grounded framework for the relation between literature and computer science. This book is a refreshing perspective on the analog-orientated tradition of theory in the humanities – and offers the first literary-textual genealogy of the digital.
