Writing Machines

This 'pamphlet' surprises you immediately, it is a black-covered hardback with a lovely feel and design that says this book is different from other books. Pages of shiny paper (you can't write on them) and blocks of text that zoom out at you, or that are printed right up to the page edges, secret inscriptions, screen shots and new terminology introduced as underlined CAPITALS. The outside of the book reflects what the inside of the book is saying, before you even read a word. Hayles contends that the materiality of the work is important to the experience of it and that works in different media require their own media specific analysis (MSA). The 'I' that writes is never the 'I' that is written and so N Katherine Hayles chooses a character 'Kaye' to tell of her journey of discovery from childhood to the present. However in doing so it was more than a little reminiscent of Alice in Wonderland as the naïve young Kaye skipped through science and art and arrived at electronic textuality. And when she arrived at this wonderland she found that all she had thought of her world had been turned upside down."Lulled into somnolence by five hundred years of print, literary studies have been slow to wake up to the importance of MSA. Literary criticism and theory are shot through with unrecognized assumptions specific to print. Only now, as the new medium of electronic textuality vibrantly asserts its presence, are these assumptions clearly coming into view." (pp 29-30)But I am not convinced about the importance Hayles' places on the materiality of works of literature. I think Hayles, and nearly every other student of literature over the last fifty years received a very narrow education as to what constitutes a literary work, a very rigid print-centric view. Digital texts have made her realize that a work can have other representations. Young Kaye skips backwards to see what in the past she overlooked, and sees that the materiality of print all along. She concludes that a media specific analysis of works is required, so that the inscription technology is taken into account in the interpretation of the work. In a past persona of 'komninos the professional spoken word performance poet', I was fully aware of the prejudice that exists within the academy which privileges print over all other material actualizations of poetry. Personally I think if a work gives me a poetic experience then it is a poem irrespective of the presentation/distribution medium. For me poetry is an immaterial thing, a virtual thing (virtual in the Deleuzian sense) an unsolvable problematic with many actualizations in many different media.Anyway this is a good introduction for print-centric lovers of literature to the possibilities of books beyond what we traditionally think of as books. It is also a great way of introducing computer-phobes and sceptics to the mixed semiotic systems that constitute the literary experience in media other than in print. N Katherine Hayles has been one of the