<p> The postmodern worldview wanes as the millennium turns and the Millennial Generation matures; at the same time, we rapidly launch into the digital age. Information technology is developing into a changeable, networked system of devices and interfaces that profoundly shapes our professional, intellectual, and social lives. Online reading and navigation influence epistemology and perception; similarly, engagement with ergodic texts, i. e., print and film texts that require significant effort to traverse, results in enhanced cognition. Prismatic perception is a neologism that describes an emerging mythology of the mind in the information age. This fantasy of omniscient perception is rooted in images of potentiality networked with connecting strands that construct an image of a centerless web, similar to Indra's Net and the World Wide Web. </p><p> Literary theory draws on both art and philosophy and therefore directly reflects an era's defining characteristics. Deconstruction as described by Jacques Derrida serves as a precursor to hypertext theory; these two theories work collaboratively to delineate this emerging era. Reader response theory emphasizes the reader's role and correlates with the expanding participation and power of readers, writers, and creators in digital formats. Recombinant art, i. e., collaged and remixed creations that play and interact with other artists' previous works, proliferates as the culture of free and open sharing rises. </p><p> This dissertation illustrates the concept of prismatic perception with mythological symbols and images of infinity drawn from literature and film, particularly the works of Jorge Luis Borges, the Chinese classic <i> I Ching,</i> Mark Z. Danielewski's novel <i>House of Leaves,</i> and Christopher Nolan's films <i>Memento</i> and <i>Inception. </i> This work examines current issues concerning social aspects of technology, particularly recent controversies over information access. Postmodernism was characterized by the prefixes post- and de-; the prefixes that best suit the emerging era are meta- and re- as people generate, investigate, contemplate, rework, and participate in the vast accumulation of connecting and interacting information and ideas. </p><p> Keywords: Information society; information technology&mdash;social aspects&mdash;forecasting; technology&mdash;social aspects; computers and civilization; Borges, Jorge Luis, 1899-1986; deconstruction; reader-response criticism.</p>

No description available.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Indiana University, Dept. of Folklore and Ethnomusicology, 2008. / Title from PDF t.p. (viewed on May 11, 2009). Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 69-08, Section: A, page: 3267. Adviser: Mary Ellen Brown.

Thèse (M.A.)--Université de Sherbrooke (Canada), 2008. / Titre de l'écran-titre (visionné le 1 février 2007). In ProQuest dissertations and theses. Publié aussi en version papier.

This thesis aims to ‘apply’, as it were, some of Jacques Derrida’s conclusions regarding the age-old distinction between ideal and material to an understanding of animality and how it emerges in texts. I propose the paleonym “arche-animality” to understand the workings of animality in texts. In the field of Literary Animal Studies, some challenging questions concerning animals in texts seem to mirror Derrida’s topics in his early works. On the one hand, we can conceptualise animals as radically different from humans due to their embodiment, but, on the other hand, we can take them to be only differently embodied subjectivities, not unlike the human’s as it is thought to be housed in the body. Both positions are fraught with problems and are, in fact, entangled with the relationship between materiality and ideality. These challenging questions – especially concerning animal embodiment – must be approached with an eye towards paleonymy, the procedure by means of which Derrida was able to propose arche-writing as the origin of both vulgar writing and speech. To demonstrate the appropriateness of paleonymy, I uncover the arche-animal in different texts of different genres and varying degrees of ‘animal presence’: a ‘theoretical’ text (Sigmund Freud’s Totem and Taboo), a film (Darren Arofnosky’s Black Swan), a novel (Clarice Lispector’s The Apple in the Dark), and a poem (Ted Hughes’ ‘The Thought-Fox’).

acase@tulane.edu

acase@tulane.edu

No description available.

No description available.

No description available.