The Digital Affect is an exploration of ways to improve the teaching of reading and writing using digital media and technology. This requires a fundamental reexamination of digital narratives, building on and updating Espen Aarseths seminal work in Cybertext and N. Katherine Hayles recent work in Writing Machines. It also requires a critical appraisal of the technology of the personal computer as an environment in which writers compose an environment that introduces possibilities while imposing constraints that materially influence the writers efforts. This exploration is best undertaken, I argue, from the perspective of literacy studies, not literary theory. Rather than assuming the literary nature of digital narratives, my examination of the literacy requirements and effects of digital media and digital environments allows for the construction of a more nuanced and precise typology and genealogy of digital narrative. Focusing on the hermeneutical demands of digital media and environments reveals a narrative tradition that extends back to the earliest days of oral storytelling and that manifests itself not as a generic or historical formation, but rather as a poetical and rhetorical mode in which the narrative material is fragmented and distributed across media and throughout the virtual space of the story. Probing the hermeneutical act of interpreting digital narratives suggests the operation of what I term the distributed mode of composing narrative, an authorial mode I examine in works as varied as Stuart Moulthrops hypermedia story Reagan Library, Italo Calvinos novel If on a winters night a traveler, Godfrey Reggios film Koyaanisqatsi, and Laurence Sternes novel Tristram Shandy. This attention to the hermeneutical requirements of works composed in the distributed mode reveals two important features: first, the inadequacy of the widely-used term digital literacy to describe the range of activities undertaken by the interpreter of such works; and second, the inextricability and simultaneity of reading and writing during the interpretation of digital and non-digital works alike. Throughout The Digital Affect, I argue that digital media disrupts and reconfigures our standard literacy practices, presenting an invaluable opportunity to make those practices visible and teachable in literature and composition classrooms.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:PITT/oai:PITTETD:etd-04202005-124128 |
| Date | 03 June 2005 |
| Creators | Parent, Richard Elliott |
| Contributors | Stuart Moulthrop, Ph.D., Philip E. Smith, Ph.D., Mariolina Rizzi Salvatori, Ph.D., James E. Seitz, Ph.D. |
| Publisher | University of Pittsburgh |
| Source Sets | University of Pittsburgh |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | text |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Source | http://etd.library.pitt.edu/ETD/available/etd-04202005-124128/ |
| Rights | unrestricted, I hereby certify that, if appropriate, I have obtained and attached hereto a written permission statement from the owner(s) of each third party copyrighted matter to be included in my thesis, dissertation, or project report, allowing distribution as specified below. I certify that the version I submitted is the same as that approved by my advisory committee. I hereby grant to University of Pittsburgh or its agents the non-exclusive license to archive and make accessible, under the conditions specified below, my thesis, dissertation, or project report in whole or in part in all forms of media, now or hereafter known. I retain all other ownership rights to the copyright of the thesis, dissertation or project report. I also retain the right to use in future works (such as articles or books) all or part of this thesis, dissertation, or project report. |
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