ACLA 2006 Annual Meeting: The Human and Its Others
Princeton University, March 23-26, 2006
Hypertext Literacy
Last modified March 17, 2006Seminar Leader(s):
Katalin Lovász, Princeton UniversityHypertext literacy is a literacy made up of new and technologically altered kinds of access. Publishing on the web has made the virtual printed word the creation of not just the select and selected few: anyone now can easily publish a web site that reproduces the form of established publications, whether journalistic or academic, while the content can bear little to no resemblance to the kinds of publications that trained the web-writer’s eye. The web also produces its own forms of public writing, like blogs, where authority is conferred not by resemblances but connections. Being hypertext-literate would perhaps better be described as being ‘fluent’: not simply knowing the markers of what constitutes literacy but partaking of a flow of writing in which meanings and connotations take unexpected turns that escape their writers’ control. This seminar will explore how this new form of literacy influences and alters our encounters with textuality: for the readers, creators, performers, students and teachers of texts. The papers in this seminar look at how this medium escapes or reinforces existing cultural hegemonies, and affects our creative and pedagogical practices as we attempt to transmit not static bodies of knowledge but the experience of being fluently literate.
Saturday, March 25
Jamie Skye Bianco, Queens College of the City University of New York “Composing and Compositing, Writing (in) New Media”
Barbara Rose Haum, New York University
“Trespassing Boundaries: Internet 2 & domination of space”
Hiie Saumaa, University of Tennessee
“Who is ‘You’ and Who are ‘You’? On Readerly Positions in Hypertext Fiction”
Matthew Vechinsky, University of Washington
“The Welcomed Death of WYSIWYG: A Step Toward Hypertext Literacy and the Aesthetic Experience of Digital Texts”
Sunday, March 26
Christopher Kilgore, University of Tennessee
“What the Traverse Says: Tools for Narrative Innovation in Michael Joyce’s afternoon”
Katalin Lovász, Princeton University
“Technologies of Self-Presentation: Blogging the Real”
Marisa Parham, Amherst College
“Hyperliteracy: Reading, Writing, and Desire”
Jason Tougaw, Queens College of the City University of New York
“Dream Bloggers Invent the University”