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EJournal Volume 04 Number 03
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November, 1994 _EJournal_ Volume 4 Number 3 ISSN 1054-1055
There are 843 lines in this issue.
An Electronic Journal concerned with the
implications of electronic networks and texts.
3032 Subscribers in 37 Countries
University at Albany, State University of New York
EJOURNAL@ALBANY.edu
CONTENTS: [This is line 19 ]
Editor's Note [Begins at line 49 ]
The Holland _et al_ Exchanges [ at line 86 ]
Announcement: _The Little Magazine_ on CD-ROM [ at line 728]
Information about _EJournal_ - [at line 759]
About Subscriptions, Contents and Back Issues
About Supplements to Previous Texts
About _EJournal_
People [at line 814]
Board of Advisors
Consulting Editors
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* This electronic publication and its contents are (c) copyright *
* 1994 by _EJournal_. Permission is hereby granted to give away *
* the journal and its contents, but no one may "own" it. Any and *
* all financial interest is hereby assigned to the acknowledged *
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EDITOR'S NOTE - [line 49 ]
This issue is made up of "conversations" with Norman Holland about
his essay "Eliza Meets the Postmodern" in V4N1 (April, 1994) of
_EJournal_.
Two readers sent essays directly to us, more or less as extended
letters-to-the-editor. After many iterations of reply- retort-
response, we all agreed to publish one of the sets of exchanges, the
one begun by Doug Brent.
Four readers sent e-mail directly to Professor Holland. He and
three of them graciously agreed to let _EJournal_ present their
correspondence almost verbatim, trying to capture the spontaneity of
their exchanges. After much correspondence, we have chosen the
Harpold and Sikillian exchanges with Norm Holland to make up the
rest of this issue. Professor Holland has suggested the sequence of
presentation.
The spontaneity we sought has been dampened by delays. It took us
longer than it should have to establish and follow the procedures we
felt obliged to set up. Through it all, everyone has been
remarkably patient. We are especially grateful to Professor
Holland, the person with an intellectual investment in every snippet
of text that follows, for his patience as well as for his promptness
in responding to every communication.
In spite of the lag, we think the exchanges were well worth
recording, and the procedure appears to warrant repeating. As we
creep toward html markup and access to _EJournal_ via WWW, we will
try to expand this issue's interspersed linearity in the direction
of convenient cross referencing. [Jennifer Wyman has prepared html
versions of several issues, and she is working on an experimental
home page.]
====================================================================
THE HOLLAND _ET AL_ EXCHANGES - [line 86 ]
Professor Holland has orchestrated the several messages as follows -
Doug Brent's response to "Eliza,", sent to _EJournal_, 14 April
1994 [l. 118]
Holland's reply to Brent [l. 219]
Michael Sikillian's message to Holland, 27 May 1994 [l. 276]
Holland's reply to Sikillian [l. 323]
Terry Harpold's message to Holland, 22 May 1994 [l. 340]
Holland's reply to Harpold [l. 383]
Harpold (again), 26 October 1994 [l. 403]
Holland to Harpold II [l. 450]
"Intermezzo, Interjection, or Intervention" by Holland [l. 472]
Doug Brent's second reply, (via _EJournal_) 10 September 1994
[l. 487]
Holland's reply to all the above (mostly Brent) [l. 592]
Works Mentioned [l. 708]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
DOUG BRENT TO _EJOURNAL_ - 14 April 1994 [line 118]
I find Norman Holland's essay, "Eliza Meets the Postmodern,"
immensely interesting for a large number of reasons, but I am
particularly pleased to see an author with Holland's experience in
literary criticism call into question some facile assumptions about
the "postmodern" character of hypertext.
I think that he has put his finger on a key point. Those who make
vast claims for the power of certain kinds of text to "do" certain
things must be constantly on guard against the temptation to
attribute to the text activities that are actually acts of reading.
Constructivist views of reading have been around for so long now
that they shouldn't have to be restated, but somehow or other they
keep getting forgotten (even sometimes by reader-response critics
who should know better, as for instance Iser who keeps talking about
the "repertoire" of the text when he really means the repertoire of
the reader).
I am not sure that I agree with Holland's definition of a
postmodernist text as one that actually does things on its own as
opposed to offering choices to the reader. This seems a highly
selective account of postmodernism. But the word "postmodernism"
has attracted to itself such a plethora of competing and ambiguous
definitions that the term is almost not worth using; certainly it's
not worth spending a lot of time arguing about. Whether or not the
distinction can be labelled "modern" versus "postmodern," I think
that Holland does us all a service by distinguishing between forms
of "text" which, hyper or not, require the reader to do all of the
work in constructing their meaning, and forms of artifical
intelligence that really do participate in their own construction.
I would, however, like to take issue with Holland's argument that
hypertext is unlikely to alter radically the experience of reading
simply because it does not do anything that cannot be done by
conventional means. In one sense he is quite right. A book with
copious footnotes and cross-references is a primitive form of
hypertext. A reader sitting in a library moving from source to
source can be seen as constructing another primitive form of
hypertext, in this case (as Holland cogently argues) under even more
direct control of the reader. But I disagree with Holland when he
discounts the extent to which the ease of doing something changes
the nature of the experience. [line 160]
Take, for instance, the difference between manuscript and
typographic culture. In one sense the printing press does little
that a manuscript copyist cannot do; it just does it faster, more
economically, and on a greater scale. But scholars from Eisenstein
to Ong have argued persuasively that the printing press created a
profound revolution in Western culture --in effect, created
modernism-- simply because those differences of scale are so very
great. The printing press created the illusion of the autonomous
text, the phenomenon of copyright and the ownership of knowledge,
the critical mass of ideas that resulted in the Renaissance. By
virtue of its ability to create exactly repeatable copies, it
enabled indexing --useless when every copy had different
pagination-- which in turn allowed knowledge to be retrieved on a
scale unimaginable in a manuscript culture. It created what McLuhan
calls a "break boundary": a point at which a phenomenon acquires a
scale that causes it to turn into, not a pumped-up version of same
thing, but another kind of thing altogether.
This is the claim that is applied to hypertext. Those who make it
are not talking about simple hypertext documents confined to a
single disk or CD-ROM, with multiple but highly finite pathways from
one unit of information to another. They are talking about the
rapidly-growing webs of information such as those appearing on
World-Wide Web, in which the links between pieces of information are
potentially infinite. This technology is now in a stage of craft
literacy, more difficult for the average person to access than the
hieroglyphic script that kept literacy from becoming a major
influence on society for many centuries. As this form of text
becomes as ubiquitous as the book, it will not simply make
cross-referencing "easier." It will make it so much easier that it
will become a different activity altogether. Text will cross
another break boundary. Potential effects include the destruction
of the concept of authorship, associational rather than linear
indexing, the breakdown of disciplinarity -- well, I needn't go on.
Read any hypertext futurist such as Jay Bolter for the complete
list. [line 197]
Whether we use the label "postmodern" to describe this phenomenon is
a very good question. Certainly, as Holland argues, our slack-jawed
wonder at the phenomenon should not tempt us to attribute a life of
its own to what is after all just text, however complex its
interconnections. And as always, we will have to wait fifty years
or so before we can look back on this technological revolution and
decide whether all or any of the claims made for it are justified.
(This is an occupational hazard of futurism.) But I would be
willing to bet that a fundamental change in the way we interact with
text, a change brought about by a massive increase in the scale of a
communications medium, will have far more dramatic effects than
simply making it easier to do what we have always done.
Doug Brent
University of Calgary
dabrent@acs.ucalgary.ca
------------------------------------------------------------------------
NORMAN HOLLAND TO DOUG BRENT - [line 220]
I am grateful for Professor Brent's graceful and intelligent
response to my essay. I think he makes a point well worth making.
Not only that, he phrases the distinction I was drawing more
elegantly than I did: "between forms of `text' which . . . require
the reader to do all the work in constructing their meaning, and
forms of artificial intelligence that really do participate in their
own construction." Yes, precisely.
I am not sure, however, that I intended to say (in Professor Brent's
phrasing) that "hypertext is unlikely to alter radically the
experience of reading." Undoubtedly, when I read a hypertext
fiction like Michael Joyce's _Afternoon_, I have a very different
experience from reading the Margaret Atwood paperback currently by
my bed. It's just that the differences don't seem to me to cross
any boundary between modern and postmodern.
Professor Brent goes on to point to the ways printed books altered
manuscript culture and to suggest that hypertext will have a like
effect on print culture. I think the point is well taken and most
intelligently deployed. Unquestionably, by virtue of hypertext's
cross-referencing, we will become able --we have already become
able-- to read even traditional texts in drastically new ways.
Readers' experiences, interactions, and responses are all different.
Some of those differences we can already see. Many we are
unconscious of.
[line 246]
While mulling over Professor Brent's's response, there came across
my screen another highly intelligent writing. This was "Why Are
Electronic Publications Difficult to Classify?" by Professor
Jean-Claude Guedon of the University of Montreal. Electronic
publishing (this journal, for example, or the LISTs on the Internet)
is changing print culture as deeply as print culture changed the
functions of handwriting. Notably, e-publishing replaces the
one-way diffusion of print culture with feedback and dialogue. Thus,
publishing moves from the fixed book toward the "permanent seminar,"
toward process rather than product. At the same time, the
retrievals possible in something like NEXIS correspond to the
indexing and cross-referencing of a hypertext CD-ROM. In general,
the Internet makes hypertext possible across a global scale.
Professor Guedon's point parallels Professor Brent's. Both
hypertext and the networks are profoundly changing print culture.
Should these changes be seen as marking a breakpoint between
modernism and postmodernism? I say not. That was the point of my
original article. I recognize, however, the wisdom of Professor
Brent's last paragraph. Only time will really settle the question.
In the meantime, Professor Brent has elegantly clarified the matter.
--Norm Holland
University of Florida
nnh@nervm.nerdc.ufl.edu
------------------------------------------------------------------------
MICHAEL SIKILLIAN TO NORMAN HOLLAND - 27 May 1994 [line 276]
Professor Holland,
I'd just like to say "bravo" for a long overdue article. As a
multmedia developer, I have followed with some interest (and
amusement) the academic ideas of what exactly multimedia is.
Especially the idea that it is some vindication of postmodernism or
deconstruction as literary theories. More interesting work has been
done by Walter Ong (a bit dated, but still valid) in _Orality and
Literacy_, and by Richard Lanham in _The Electronic Word_. Lanham
makes connections to Quintilian and classical rhetoric. Also Brenda
Laurel has some interesting links to Aristotelian rhetoric and
dramatic theory in her book _Computers as Theatre_.
I have found that my education as a classicist is ironically more
relevant than some of the more technological approaches to new
media. I am doing some work now on texts in interactive media,
specifically with translation. Different types of translations
--literal, "modern", free-- can all be related together in an
interactive program, much as cubism did with perspective.
One of the things that Delaney, Barrett _et al_ point out is that
hypertexts are not linear; that they are diffuse. You correctly
point out that the average reader --skimming a text, leafing through
pages, using commentaries-- does the same thing. I think that the
"linear" nature of a traditional text is overstated. Also, another
thing you hint at --hypertexts can be used to *concentrate* a
reader's experience in a text to a much greater degree than a
traditional text can. The goal of interface design is to understand
and guide a reader's experience in a concrete direction. Any
software package which tells the reader "there are no limits; we
cannot presume to know what you want to do" will fail or be unused.
That is why usability testing is so important. And that is also
what a good print author does. Multimedia and hypertexts are
powerful tools; but they are not necessarily the repudiation of the
entire textual/ critical tradition; rather they can make it much more
efficient.
Congratulations again on a fine article.
Michael Sikillian
762664.1323@CompuServe.COM
Lexigen@world.std.com
--------------------------------------------------------------------
NORMAN HOLLAND TO MICHAEL SIKILLIAN - [line 323]
I read Michael Sikillian as making the same point as Professor
Brent, namely, that the *experience* of hypertext will be different.
I find particularly apposite his remark that hypertext with no aim
at all will simply not be used. In effect, hypertext can limit a
reader to certain connections (while codex can not), *and if
hypertext does not,* it will fail. A most interesting observation
from what is obviously a highly relevant range of experience.
Norman Holland
University of Florida
nnh@nervm.nerdc.ufl.edu
------------------------------------------------------------------------
TERRY HARPOLD TO NORMAN HOLLAND - 22 May 1994 [line 340]
Norm,
I've just read with pleasure your "Eliza meets the Postmodern" piece
in the recent _EJournal_.
I believe that I disagree with you somewhat in the emphasis of your
model of the postmodern --I think that textual/ readerly agency is
the right question, but I would prefer to consider agency with
regard to a dialectic of authority and agency along Lacanian lines:
the contingency of the narrative form imposes the reader's
confrontation with elementary lack in language (in a parallel
formulation, the desire of the Other, as site of language).
But I think that you've made a very valuable contribution here: that
which is most commonly cited by most proponents of the `hypertext
validates/ tests postmodernism' notion --the emphasis on
multiplicity, unlimited connection and diversion-- is, in my mind,
founded on a decidedly *modernist* understanding of texts as highly
complex, profoundly connectionist, but ultimately saturated or
closed fields. In my own work, I emphasize the moments of rupture,
disconnection, misfortune [%dystuche%] or *failure* in these
narratives.
The Eliza or OZ paradigms are useful as antidotes to the
cartographically-modelled connectionist paradigms of digital text
because they introduce elements of inconsistency and a kind of raw
contingency that confronts the human participant with the
irreducibility of the Real to the Symbolic. These programs don't
fully succeed in this --they are too limited in their current forms
--but they point the way to a model of textual agency that clearly
exceeds the modernist forms.
Thanks for the piece. I found it very suggestive.
Terry Harpold
University of Pennsylvania
tharpold@mail.sas.upenn.edu
----------------------------------------------------------------------
NORMAN HOLLAND TO TERRY HARPOLD - [line 383]
Thanks for your kind words about "Eliza," Terry. Yes, I think the
emphasis on multiplicity, etc., is "modernist," a focus on the text
as thing-in-itself that our postmodern theory and our post-1960s
psychological knowledge of perception belies.
With respect to agency, however, you, like most literary folk,
believe that texts have agency or, to put it more simply, can do
things, in particular, can impose themselves on our minds. There is
no psychological evidence for this, and I have to be adamant about
that.
Best, Norm Holland
University of Florida
nnh@nervm.nerdc.ufl.edu
---------------------------------------------------------------------
TERRY HARPOLD TO NORMAN HOLLAND - 26 October 1994 [line 403]
Norm,
Your rejection of the pomo enthusiasm for text-centered agency is
well-known, and I won't waste your time trying to disabuse you of
the prejudice ;-)
But I do think that the locus of agency in digital texts is more
complex than we have been accustomed to thinking for printed texts
--*because the former are in the digital mode*. This aspect of
reading these texts deserves a closer look for that reason.
Digital texts are read within mimetic structures (the "interface")
that locate them inside the boundaries of human interaction --that
is, as objects that appear to be seen *lucidly* and *consistently*
through the aperture of software and hardware. The interface in this
way depicts a kind of super-narrative: it tells a story, if you
will, of user control and user-centered agency, in which the reading
of the digital text is framed.
But digital media are subject to failures that lie outside of the
user's control or purview, and these may fracture the nested
boundaries of the narratives that the interface defines, as well as
the fiction of user agency that these boundaries promote.
A printed text is not likely to collapse catastrophically as you read
it, becoming irreversibly illegible. This is not an uncommon event
in the digital modes, and therein lies a crucial difference.
This is what I meant by my emphasis in my original message on
misfortune [%dystuche%] in digital media. When the embedding
narrative of interface ("there is a story to tell: here it is; you
may read it...") collapses, when the connections break down, when
the text becomes unreadable ("there is <nothing> to tell"), where is
agency situated?
I think that the question is open, and that's where things get
interesting.
Regards, Terry
University of Pennsylvania
tharpold@mail.sas.upenn.edu
--------------------------------------------------------------------
HOLLAND TO HARPOLD [line 450]
Terry, I see what you mean, but I still don't buy into the idea that
a text, even a digital text, is active. How is the tendency of
digital texts to crash any different from the alas, all-too-real
likelihood that our books on acidic paper will collapse into dust
when we pull them from the library shelves? If agency that be, it
is an agency any inert matter has. I think there is a better way of
thinking about such things, namely, keeping our focus firmly on what
the reader is doing and thinking. If the reader thinks the
interface guarantees "user control," that's the reader's
construction. If the reader thinks, as I do, that my connection to
you through the Internet is precarious and complex, that too is the
reader's construction.
Best, Norm
University of Florida
nnh@nervm.nerdc.ufl.edu
====================================================================
HOLLAND INTERMEZZO, INTERJECTION, OR INTERVENTION - [line 472]
Reading over Doug Brent's, Michael Sikillian's, and Terry
Harpold's responses, it seems to me that the colloquy has opened up
an issue latent in the essay and perhaps unresolved there. That is,
even if we grant that a new technology like hypermedia does not in
and of itself *do* anything, don't we need to say that it does open
up, invite, facilitate certain kinds of responses or experiences
more than others? If so and if those responses are "postmodern,"
then isn't the text itself in some sense postmodern? In other
words, is "postmodernism" in texts or in readers? In a second
response, Professor Brent makes this issue very clear.
====================================================================
FROM DOUG BRENT TO NORMAN HOLLAND (via _EJournal_) - 10 September
1994 [line 488]
It's hard to disagree with anyone who finds your remarks elegant and
wise, and I heartily thank Professor Holland for brightening up what
is otherwise a hideous beginning of term. (I mean no sarcasm
here--it really is nice to engage in a civil exchange of ideas. In
many respects, our ideas are not all that far apart, and this makes
civil exchange easy.)
But I think there's a little more at stake here than whether
hypertext is "modern" or "postmodern." I was really going after
Professor Holland's suggestion that hypertext is not much different
from other kinds of text, in which I offer the following as
evidence:
In general, hypermedia simply do electronically what a
reader or researcher might do "by hand" in a library. That
is, one could interrupt one's listening to Beethoven's Ninth
in a music library to consult a score, a biography, or
criticism. In a way, hypermedia are simply a variorum or a
Norton Critical Edition done electronically. They are by no
means as radical a departure from familiar forms as claimed.
Holland is quite right that the issue is not what a medium *does*,
in the sense that no medium actually *does* anything at all --it
makes *us* do something. But paragraphs such as the above seem to
me to radically understate the potential of a medium to make us do
something different.
This is the case I've already made, and I won't remake it. Rather
I'll take another look at the "modern/ postmodern" distinction that
was really Holland's point before he accidentally pushed my
transformative technology button.
Perhaps the confusion arises from an unclear notion --unclear in
much postmodernist theory, not just Holland's piece-- about what it
means for a text to "be" postmodern. Holland is saying, I think,
that unless we begin to talk about artificially intelligent "texts,"
a text can't really "be" modern, postmodern or anything else. It
just sits there being what it is, a bunch of marks on a page waiting
for us to do something to or for or about it. Postmodernism is a
name for an interpretive act, not a type of text.
[line 530]
But interpretive theories tend to leak back into artistic practice.
Many texts in the postmodern era are written in ways that invite
postmodern readings --and yes, I think that certain texts invite
certain types of readings more than others, and that this is
sometimes deliberate on the part of the author.
This is the sense, I think, in which hypermedia "are" postmodern.
Of course they just sit there doing nothing until the reader
activates them. But when activated, they make it vastly easier for
a reader to do postmodern sorts of things with them --to inscribe her
own meanings in the text literally, not just figuratively, to engage
in recursive and associational reading patterns, and --perhaps most
important-- to wallow in instability and uncertainty. Linear
hardcopy text looks stable, even if it isn't. Hypertext jams its
instability up against our bifocals and shouts it in our ears.
This is what I meant when I said that the effect of a medium depends
not on what it makes *possible* but on what it makes *easy.*
Hypertext is "postmodern," not in the sense that it does something
new, but in the sense that it makes postmodern "reading" so easy
that it is virtually inevitable, and "modern" reading so difficult
that it is virtually impossible.
I think the discussion would be helped if we clarifed three terms
hovering at the edges. "Constructivism," "deconstruction" and
"postmodernism" need to be disambiguated. [line 556]
I am no expert in postmodernism, but I read it as a much larger set
of attitudes than "deconstruction." "Deconstruction," I think, is
an activity of a critic, a conscious showing-up of a text performed
by a reader anxious to show that it has no stable meaning.
Postmodernism is a much larger constellation of ideas, in which
deconstruction finds its place, but which is concerned with larger
issues of indeterminacy and interaction between text and reader and
between text and other text rather than between text and world.
"Constructivism" is a term of cognitive science, not a literary
term, but it connects with this discussion in that it, too, suggests
that "meaning" is not in the text but in the reader. Where
constructivism really parts company with deconstruction is that
constructivism is concerned with how meaning, unstable or not, is
nonetheless built up by people bringing their own schemata to bear
on the stimulus of a text. Deconstruction seems determined to leave
the reader coughing in the dust, left behind by a text doing its own
thing.
I think my bias is clear, and I agree with Holland that the notion
of a text doing its own thing seems fundamentally incompatible with
what we know about how people make and more or less share meanings.
I never thought I'd find myself, a confirmed anti-psychoanalytic,
agreeing with Norm Holland, but the persistent misunderstandings of
reader-response psychology make strange bedfellows.
Doug Brent
University of Calgary
dabrent@acs.ucalgary.ca
------------------------------------------------------------------------
NORMAN HOLLAND'S RESPONSE TO ALL OF THE ABOVE - [line 592]
Here again, I find myself in nearly total agreement with Professor
Brent. His definition of postmodern ("concerned with larger issues
of indeterminacy and interaction between text and reader and between
text and other text rather than between text and world") is not
mine, but broader. Mine was: "In postmodern art, artists use as a
major part of their material *our* ideas about what they are working
with."
There is no arguing with definitions, however. The question is
simply, Which works better?, and only time will tell that.
Professor Brent's more discussable point is that there is a sense in
which it is reasonable to call hypertext postmodern in that it
causes postmodern activities on its reader's part. Thus, although
he comes from a reader-active, reader-response position, I would
have to say some of his phrasings are unpsychological: "the
potential of a medium to make us do something different"; "Certain
texts invite certain types of readings"; or "Hypertext jams its
instability up against our bifocals." These seem to me to relapse
into saying texts *do* things, and, as we both agree, that runs
counter to what we know of the psychology of reading.
I'd rephrase: "the potential of a medium to reward our doing
something different." "Certain types of readings succeed with
certain texts, other types of readings don't." "When we read
hypertext, we feel instability quivering in our bifocals." In every
such case I'd rephrase so as always to keep the reader's activity as
the energizing force.
But these are minor quibbles. In other phrasings, Professor Brent
seems to me to have it exactly and elegantly right: "Postmodernism
is a name for an interpretive act, not a type of text." "When
activated, [hypermedia] make it vastly easier for a reader to do
postmodern sorts of things with them."
[line 628]
Professor Brent suggests that when readers enjoy these postmodern
strategies of interpretion, as understood by critics, that
encourages artists to create works that will yield to them. True
enough, and this is very clearly happening in all the arts at the
moment.
Looking backward, however, I would say that visual artists led the
way. In that sense visual artists "invented" postmodernism in my
sense, either preceding the critics or developing independently.
Literary deconstruction came later from an essentially philosophical
base. That is, I see Action Painting and Op Art as transitional
toward postmodernism, and Rosenquist, Warhol, and Lichtenstein doing
definitively postmodern work by the early 1960s. Derrida becomes
recognized in 1966-67. Probably the visual artists never heard of
him, and he certainly does not mention them. I am sure, though,
there are other ways of reading the intellectual history of that
fascinating period.
In this context, I think there can be little disagreement with
Professor Brent's point that the existence of this or that method of
interpretation leads artists to create things that can be
interpreted that way. That was very obviously true in the period of
New Criticism and we see it now in a variety of fields besides
literature.
[line 653]
But what about Professor Brent's point that if a work rewards
postmodern reading strategies, it should be called postmodern?
"Hypertext," he writes, "is `postmodern' . . . in the sense that it
makes postmodern `reading' so easy that it is virtually inevitable,
and `modern' reading so difficult that it is virtually impossible."
Well, yes, but here again it seems to me Professor Brent is lapsing
back into language that attributes to the text attributions of the
reader. "It makes." "Hypertext *is* postmodern." Wouldn't his
sentence be more precise, if less elegant, if it were: We call
hypertext postmodern because we find it easy to read hypertext in a
postmodern way and almost impossible to read it in a modern way.
The problem becomes particularly clear if we use an even more
problematic term than "postmodern," say, Romantic. "This poem is
Romantic because it praises the primitive" or some other of the
myriad definitions of Romanticism. If we rephrase: "I call this
poem Romantic because, as I read it, it praises the primitive," we
are no longer ontologizing the attribution "Romantic." We are no
longer attempting to create the illusion that we all agree about the
poem or defintions of Romanticism or that we are simply reporting on
some neutral fact "out there" beyond our fingertips. We are no
longer involved in the objectivist fallacy (in George Lakoff's
sense) that *the poem* becomes this or that because of something
*the poem* does.
It will of course be said that my insistence on making explicit who
is doing what introduces an infinite regress, total subjectivity,
rampant individualism, the autonomous subject, or some other horror.
Not so. It simply makes explicit who is doing what. I think
Professor Brent agrees with me that the humans are doing things, not
the artworks. Then there is the interesting problem of the
Eliza-type programs, which which my essay began this discussion;
they evoke the illusion that they are doing something.
Professor Brent's parting quip at psychoanalysis raises another
interesting point. Instead of dismissing psychoanalysis, I believe
it meshes with constructivist psychology quite usefully.
Psychoanalysis can add to the constructivist model of human nature a
way of talking about individual differences. That is, individuality
(psychoanalytically understood) is what chooses among the various
testings posited in constructivist accounts of perception,
knowledge, action, or memory. Constructivist psychology discovers
humans' general strategies for perceiving, knowing, etc., and
psychoanalysis addresses individual tactics. But to pursue this
further would open up a whole new --can of worms? No, not that
clich/e. Would open up a whole new set of dendrites, axons, and
synapses.
Norman N. Holland
University of Florida
nnh@nervm.nerdc.ufl.edu
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WORKS MENTIONED - [line 708]
Guedon, Jean-Claude, "Why are Electronic Publications Difficult to
Classify? The Orthogonality of Print and Digital Media," in Ann
Okerson, ed., _Directory of Electronic Journals, Newsletters and
Academic Discussion Lists, 4th edition_ (Washington, D.C.: Office
of Scientific and Academic Publishing, Association of Research
Libraries, 1994) pp. 17-21.
Lanham, Richard A., _The Electronic Word: Democracy, Technology and
the Arts_ (Chicago and London: University of Chicago, 1993)
Laurel, Brenda, _Computers as Theater_ (Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley,
1991)
Ong, Walter J, _Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the
Word_ (London and New York: Methuen, 1982)
====================================================================
_The Little Magazine_ ANNOUNCEMENT - November 1994 [line 728]
Issue 21 of the literary journal _The Little Magazine_ will be
distributed as a CD-ROM, so we are looking for work which maximizes
the potential of this medium. We encourage contributors to conceive
of their submissions as multi-media "texts" which can incorporate
graphics, audio and hypertext (and so forth). "Straight" texts will
also be considered, especially those concerned with issues relating
to an electronic medium (the attitude need not be positive).
We will produce the journal using a Microsoft Windows system and
Asymetrix Multimedia Toolbook, and will accept submissions on disk
(Macintosh format permissible but not preferred), or via e-mail,
ftp, or DAT. Paper as a last resort! We'd prefer sight and sound
in digitized format, but we can digitize work for you if we have
to. Our conceptual / diagrammatic deadline is January 31, and
technical / final deadline is April 1. Please contact us as soon as
possible if you have work to contribute.
_The Little Magazine_
Department of English
University at Albany
Albany, NY 12222
518-442-4398
bh4781@csc.albany.edu
We look forward to hearing from you --
The Editors, _The Little Magazine_ [line 756]
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------------------------ I N F O R M A T I O N ---------------
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About "Supplements":
_EJournal_ continues to experiment with ways of revising, responding
to, reworking, or even retracting the texts we publish. Authors who
want to address a subject already broached --by others or by
themselves-- may send texts for us to consider publishing as a
Supplement issue. Proposed supplements will not go through as
thorough an editorial review process as the essays they annotate.
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About _EJournal_: [line 789]
_EJournal_ is an all-electronic, e-mail delivered, peer-reviewed,
academic periodical. We are particularly interested in theory and
practice surrounding the creation, transmission, storage,
interpretation, alteration and replication of electronic "text" -
broadly defined. We are also interested in the broader social,
psychological, literary, economic and pedagogical implications of
computer- mediated networks. The journal's essays are delivered
free to Internet addressees. Recipients may make paper copies;
_EJournal_ will provide authenticated paper copy from our read-only
archive for use by academic deans or others.
Writers who think their texts might be appreciated by _EJournal_'s
audience are invited to forward files to EJOURNAL@ALBANY.edu. If
you are wondering about starting to write a piece for to us, feel
free to ask if it sounds appropriate. There are no "styling"
guidelines; we try to be a little more direct and lively than many
paper publications, and considerably less hasty and ephemeral than
most postings to unreviewed electronic spaces. Essays in the
vicinity of 5000 words fit our format well. We read ASCII; we look
forward to experimenting with other transmission and display formats
and protocols.
[line 812]
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Board of Advisors:
Stevan Harnad University of Southampton
Dick Lanham University of California at L. A.
Ann Okerson Association of Research Libraries
Joe Raben City University of New York
Bob Scholes Brown University
Harry Whitaker University of Quebec at Montreal
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Consulting Editors - November, 1993
ahrens@alpha.hanover.edu John Ahrens Hanover
srlclark@liverpool.ac.uk Stephen Clark Liverpool
dabrent@acs.ucalgary.ca Doug Brent Calgary
djb85@albany Don Byrd Albany
donaldson@loyvax Randall Donaldson Loyola College
ds001451@ndsuvm1 Ray Wheeler North Dakota
erdtt@pucal Terry Erdt Purdue-Calumet
fac_askahn@vax1.acs.jmu.edu Arnie Kahn James Madison
folger@watson.ibm.com Davis Foulger IBM - Watson Center
gms@psuvm Gerry Santoro Penn State
nakaplan@ubmail.ubalt.edu Nancy Kaplan Baltimore
nrcgsh@ritvax Norm Coombs RIT
r0731@csuohio Nelson Pole Cleveland State
richardj@bond.edu.au Joanna Richardson Bond
ryle@urvax Martin Ryle Richmond
twbatson@gallua Trent Batson Gallaudet
userlcbk@umichum Bill Condon Michigan
wcooper@gpu.srv.ualberta.ca Wes Cooper Alberta
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Editor: Ted Jennings, English, University at Albany
Assistant Editor: Chris Funkhouser, University at Albany
Technical Associate: Jennifer Wyman, University at Albany
Editorial Asssociate: Jerry Hanley, emeritus, University at Albany
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University at Albany Computing and Network Services: Ben Chi, Director
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University at Albany, State University of New York, Albany, NY 12222 USA
