Paradox in John Keats' Odes

TOPIC : Paradox in John Keats' Odes

PAPER 5 : The Romantic Literature

STUDENT'S NAME : Gohil Yashpalsinh B.

CLASS : M.A., Sem-2

ROLL NO. : 16

YEAR : 2013

                                                                                             

                                                   
                                     

What is paradox? 

          If we talk about paradox we can say, in literature the paradox is an anomalous juxtaposition of incongruous ideas for the sake of striking exposition or unexpected insight. It functions as a method of literary composition - and analysis - which involves examining apparently contradictory statements and drawing conclusions either to reconcile them or to explain their presence.

Literary or rhetorical paradoxes abound in the works of Oscar Wilde and G. K. Chesterton. Other literature deals with paradox of situation; Rabelais, Cervantes, Sterne, Borges, and Chesterton are recognized as masters of situational as well as verbal paradox. Statements such as Wilde’s “I can resist anything except temptation” and Chesterton’s “spies do not look like spies” are examples of rhetorical paradox. Further back, Polonius’ observation that “though this be madness, yet there is method in’t” is a memorable third.  Also, statements that are illogical and metaphoric may be called "paradoxes", for example "the pike flew to the tree to sing". The literal meaning is illogical, but there are many interpretations for this metaphor.

Complexity often happens in the process of analysis, especially when it comes to the nature of the language of literature. As Brooks says, 

“The language of poetry is the language of paradox.”

Paradox is a characteristic of Keats's poetry and thought. It can be found in the following odes by Keats.

(1) Ode on a Grecian Urn :-

          "Ode on a Grecian " is based on a series of paradoxes and opposites: Written, probably in May 1819, this ode, together with Ode to a Nightingale are generally thought of as Keats’s best.

Look at Stanza II. The stanza begins with an idea which, if taken literally, makes no

sense:

 “Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard

 Are sweeter”(lines 11-12).

          Obviously there can be no “unheard” melodies. However, Keats is creating a paradox in that the pipes on the urn sound “not to the sensual ear” (line 13) but “to the spirit” (line 14). Music ‘heard’ through the imagination can be even sweeter than that heard through the ear. The subject is the youth singing to his girl accompanied by pipemusic. “Sweet” and “soft” establishes the nature of this music. The remainder of the stanza goes on to express the central truth about the urn – the idea that the ecstasies portrayed are frozen forever in poses which suggest the anticipation of desire but which can never be fulfilled. The stanza ends with another paradox in that the lover can never kiss even though so close to winning his goal, but he should be happy nevertheless with the thought that:

“She cannot fade, though thou hast not thy bliss,

For ever wilt thou love, and she be fair!” (lines 19-20)

          Stanza III   continues with the picture created in the second stanza and develops further the paradox which is at the heart of the poem – that perfect joy captured and fixed by art gives more ecstatic pleasure than joy experienced in life as a passing moment and as such is transitory. The subject of the stanza this time is the girl who, frozen in time on the urn, is –

“For ever panting, and for ever young.” (line 27)

          In stanza IV, the scene depicts a procession led by a priest taking the sacrificial cow to the altar. Keats poses the questions of who these people are and to what altar they are leading the beast. The idea of this pagan crowd involved in sacrifice contrast strongly with the two lovers described earlier. Keats does not dwell on this, however, but moves on to imagine a scene not depicted on the urn –

“What little town by river or sea shore,

Or mountain-built with peaceful citadel

                       Is emptied of these folk, this pious morn?” (lines 35-37)

          This raises another paradox in the sense that the town, normally a place full of life, is empty and dead. The idea of the sacrifice also introduces the idea of death.

The fifth stanza serve as a summary of the poem. The poet reconsiders the whole urn reflecting that –

“Thou, silent form, dost tease us out of thought

                      As doth eternity…” (lines 44-45)

          Through this change of viewpoint he presents the urn from a new perspective. He now views the urn as an object, a thing without life and the pictures that it displays as “marble men” and the scene a “Cold Pastoral”. This cold lifelessness of the urn, however, does not tell the whole story. Keats has come to see that the urn does not tell a tale – it is the tale. The urn delivers its final message as a “friend to man” (line 48) and to each generation as it comes along. The final

message –

“Beauty is truth, truth beauty, - that is all

                       Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.” (lines 49-50)

has provoked much scholarly debate and is both cryptic and paradoxical. Beauty to Keats, though, represented an experience rather than a concept and experiences intensely felt can be

considered as truth. Truth, on the other hand, would have to be beautiful in that it must stimulate our deepest feelings in order to be ‘true’. The final affirmation is more to do with how we know rather than what we know – in other words we know through intensely experienced feelings as opposed to rational thought.

 (2) Ode to a Nightingale

          The exact date that this ode was written is in some doubt but it is dated ‘May 1819’ and references suggest that it may have been written in mid-May.

          Ode to a Nightingale is the longest of Keats’s odes and is the most personal in an autobiographical sense. It is worth noting that in classical times the nightingale was a bird associated with poetry and love and set apart from other birds by its beautiful song. In medieval times the bird was associated with the idea of courtly love often figured in poetry and literature generally.

The poem opens with a sense of pain and numbness –

“My heart aches, and a drowsy numbness pains / My sense” (lines 1-2).

          The comparison to “hemlock”, a poisonous herb, and “some dull opiate”, (line 3), reveal this “ache” to be of a particular kind. This seems to be the kind of pain that is more to do with dull powers of receptivity rather than the conventional sense of pain. This is important in understanding the meaning of the poem which is concerned with the way the poet perceives things and the effect that the nightingale has on this perception. However, this is the prelude to a sense of creativity as Keats reveals the reason for this “numbness”. The effect is paradoxical in that it is a reaction to the happiness he experiences through the nightingale’s song. The poet identifies himself with the bird and is happy but the rub is that he is 

“Too happy in thine happiness” (line 6) and so the sense of joy also brings with it a sense of loss. He then describes how he sees the bird as a “Dryad of the trees” (line 7), presiding over “some melodious plot” (line 8).

          In stanza V, it seems that the poet’s identification with the nightingale was only transient and the poet is in darkness. The many beautiful things which surround the poet are left unseen. However, although all this natural beauty may be denied his eye it is not withheld from his imagination. Once again a paradox is introduced as although the poet is in darkness he presents us with an array of all the beautiful flowers, grasses and trees that surround him and that give out their colours and scents evoking a sense of the creative mood that Keats desires.

Note, though, the combined idea of fragrance and death introduced by the phrase “embalmed darkness”. (line 43)

          Stanza VI develops the idea of Stanza V. The poet is still in darkness but he now distances himself to contemplate the effect on himself of the beauty of nature described in the previous stanza as “Darkling I listen” (line 51), to the song of the bird. However, the idea of death suggested by the use of “embalmed” in the previous stanza is enlarged upon as he talks of having “been half in love with easeful Death” (line 52). He is only “half” in love with the idea, though which again suggests a paradox of his desire for both life and death. His apparent death-wish is immediately dismissed as it only “seems…rich to die” while listening in such ecstasy to the song of the nightingale. If he were to die, though, he would no longer be able

to hear the song of the nightingale even though the bird would continue to sing as a kind of requiem to the poet:

“Still wouldst thou sing, and I have ears in vain –

To thy high requiem became a sod” (lines 59-60)

Narrative Voice in Middlemarch

TOPIC : Narrative Voice in Middlemarch

PAPER 6 : The Victorian Literature

STUDENT'S NAME : Gohil Yashpalsinh B.

CLASS : M.A., Sem-2

ROLL NO. : 16

YEAR : 2013

Narrative Voice in the Novel Middlemarch :-

           Throughout Middlemarch the reader is increasingly aware of a highly intelligent narrative voice which allows the female characters to attain a depth that would be impossible to express through even the most careful detailing of the character’s actions and without which would likely produce a novel that was more focused on external events (as novels written by females during Eliot’s time were) rather than the internal machinations of individuals—most notably women.

           We can say that without this narrative voice in Middlemarch by George Eliot, it would be difficult for the reader to discern the level of depth to a character such as Dorothea since as a woman of the Victorian age, her actions alone as expressed through narrative would not be enough to provide the level of depth that the narrative voice allows. Moreover, it seems there is a self-conscious effort by this narrator not to depict the characters and setting in a traditionally “female-authored” way, thus the setting is more developed in the same sense the characters are.

           If we talk about the setting in Middlemarch as related by the narrator reflects the notion of wanting to avoid conventional or worse, romanticized description. Instead of following the romantic and standardized feminine novel’s method of transposing a lightness to the story, the narrator states in one of the important quotes from “Middlemarch” by George Eliot, “In the prosaic neighborhood of Middlemarch, May was not always warm and sunny, and on this particular morning a chill wind was blowing the blossoms from the surrounding gardens on to the green mounds of Lowick churchyard” (273). While the narrator calls this a “prosaic neighborhood” which alludes to romantic ideals common in Victorian fiction by women writers, this narrative beauty is offset by the reality that everything was not always “warm and sunny” thus indicating that life for the characters, unlike the “prosaic” settings of other novels does not depict warn happy days or even the promise of romance—it is chilly and the blossoms fall victim to unforgiving winds.

           This same negation of possible romanticized news is contradicted and immediately put into the “real world” when the narrator describes characters as well. While it might have been simple and conventional for this unorthodox narrator (whom one cannot help but feel is female for some reason, perhaps only because of the authorship) to relate a tale of marital bliss, she (which for the purposes of this paper will be called) first offers a sentence akin to traditional Victorian romances and immediately negates it. Consider her description of Rosamond’s reflections as stated in one of the important quotes from “Middlemarch” by George Eliot, “Rosamond had a gleam of returning cheerfulness when the house was freed from the threatening figure, and when all the disagreeable creditors were paid.  But she was not joyous: her married life had fulfilled none of her hopes, and had been quite spoiled for her imagination” (322). While there is a sudden image of happiness and marital bliss, it dissipates quite quickly by the negation that marriage was in fact not what the character had idealized it to be.

           In many ways, this constant narrative play between the romantic and the reality represents a fundamental theme of the novel—that marriage is the product of disillusionment. Nearly all of the central characters, Rosamond and Dorothea in particular, enter into marriages with a vision of how it will be. Dorothea desperately wishes to be her first husband’s partner in a life of learning and Rosamond fancies that she is marrying into an aristocratic family and that she will be able to convince her husband to leave Middlemarch and suddenly transform into the exotic man she thought he was when she married him. In the end, both characters are disappointed in marriage and find they had been seduced by their own imaginative reflections. While this is the case in terms of plot, this wise and insightful narrator never sets the reader up for the fall. Most of the time her descriptions are based in the real with only traces of the romantic peppered throughout to add narrative appeal.

           This narrative act of taking a potentially traditionally romantic statement and twisting it back into the semblance of reality assaults the reader from the first pages of the novel in which Dorothea is described in typical feminine novel fashion as “And how should Dorothea not marry? —A girl so handsome and with such prospects?” Although the physical descriptions of characters are not of primary importance, here at the introduction of Dorothea we learn that she is very much like the women who are romanticized in other Victorian novels, particularly those of Austen and her contemporaries. It seems cut and dry here at the beginning; the reader is introduced a beautiful young woman with “prospects” yet before there is time to sink into the traditional representation of the female “love story” the reader is told in the same sentence, “Nothing could hinder it but her love of extremes, and her insistence on regulating life according to notions which might cause a wary man to hesitate before he made her an offer, or even might lead her at last to refuse all offers”(11). This clever narrator obviously understands the conventions of the female novel and works to first present the image associated with such “frivolous” texts and immediately offers a thought or image to negate its romantic value. While it may have been possible to convey these ideas about realism through more brief details such as simply stating that Dorothea is a character who is “not to be satisfied by a girlish instruction comparable to the nibbling and judgments of a discursive mouse” her character is rather more developed since she is not simply a smart woman in love, but a woman in love with complex issues that cannot be contained in a mere few “snippets” about her intelligence.

           Many female novelists offered narrators that described some of the inner-workings of their female characters; the descriptions were not so wrought with the complexity of the feminine mind. While it might have sufficed for a Victorian love story’s narrator to relate that a woman had a “troubled heart” this observant narrator takes this one step further, describing, Now she would be able to devote herself to large yet definite duties; now she would be allowed to live continually in the light of a mind that she could reverence.  This hope was not unmixed with the glow of proud delight–the joyous maiden surprise that she was chosen by the man whom her admiration had chosen.

           All Dorothea’s passion was transfused through a mind struggling towards an ideal life; the radiance of her transfigured girlhood fell on the first object that came within its level.  The impetus with which inclination became resolution was heightened by those little events of the day which had roused her discontent with the actual conditions of her life” (280). This richer and more developed narrative strategy of not confining a character to prescriptive codes of behavior or description allows Eliot’s narrator to relate the story outside of the confines of plot, thus moving the novel into the realm of the psychologically real. This realism of thought and character portrayal is effective in allowing women’s characters to be more developed since the number of decisive actions society would permit them to take is rather limited (thus limiting the possibility of a plot for female characters beyond love, family, or the home) but it also allows men’s roles in the novel to be explored more fully.

           Although the case for women’s limited plot potential is more limited than their male counterparts in the novel, the narrator uses the same techniques to illustrate the position of men as well, thus allowing them to move outside of the plot and become more developed. This narrator does a particularly complete job of illustrating the internal turmoil of Lydgate in particular. She depicts him as a balance between the romantic and the real—again, relying on the contrast to make her point about character development in the novel. “But he had deliberately incurred the hindrance, having made up his mind that it was now time for him to adorn his life with the graces of female companionship, to irradiate the gloom which fatigue was apt to hang over the intervals of studious labor with the play of female fancy, and to secure in this, his culminating age, the solace of female tendance for his declining years (221). Here the contrast between the romantic and real is most pronounced since the narrator uses language to indicate the mood as it shifts from one to other. She uses terms of women such as “adorn” and “graces of female companionship” in the same paragraph as “irritate,” “gloom,” and “fatigue” thus indicating a more realistic portrait of human behavior.

           It is important to see the narrator in this novel as necessary to building a sense of the female characters because she obviously wishes to shed the traditional romantic notions of the Victorian feminine novel by presenting women who exist outside of the plot. Again, the plot for women during the Victorian era was limited due to their confined and codified roles in society, thus in order to present a complete picture of female characters it became vital to extend plot to psychological description. By contrasting images that are most associated with traditional female novels of the time, Eliot’s narrator is able to portray the more attractive romantic ideals with the often stark realities of marriage, life, and love. In the end, although there is not the expected heartwarming message about the ultimate redemptive nature of love or marriage, there is the sense that the characters exist somehow in the ordinary lives of all of us in a way that the traditional romantic novel could not make a reader believe. Moreover, by giving women a “soul” through careful and detailed narration, the differences between men and women and their potential compatibility (or lack there of) is more defined since both sexes are given equally complex narrative voice.

Digital Humanities and Computer Assisted Literary Criticism with Case Studies

TOPIC : Digital Humanities and Computer Assisted Literary Criticism with Case Studies

PAPER 7 : Literary Theory & Criticism

STUDENT'S NAME : Gohil Yashpalsinh B.

CLASS : M.A., Sem-2

ROLL NO. : 16

YEAR : 2013

 

          What is (or are) the “digital humanities,” aka “humanities computing”? It’s tempting to say that whoever asks the question has not gone looking very hard for an answer. “What is digital humanities?” essays like this one are already genre pieces. Willard McCarty has been contributing papers on the subject for years (a monograph too). Under the earlier appellation, John Unsworth has advised us “what is humanities computing and what is it not.” Most recently Patrik Svensson has been publishing a series of well- documented articles on multiple aspects of the topic, including the lexical shift from humanities computing to digital humanities. Moreover, as Cynthia Selfe in an ADE Bulletin from 1988 reminds us, computers have been part of our disciplinary lives for well over two decades now. During this time digital humanities has accumulated a robust professional apparatus that is probably more rooted in En glish than any other departmental home.

               

The digital humanities, also known as humanities computing, is a field of study, research, teaching, and invention concerned with the intersection of computing and the disciplines of the humanities. It is methodological by nature and interdisciplinary in scope. It involves investigation, analysis, synthesis and presentation of information in electronic form. It studies how these media affect the disciplines in which they are
used, and what these disciplines have to contribute to our knowledge of computing.

At its core, then, digital humanities is more akin to a common methodological outlook than an investment in any one specific set of texts or even technologies.

1. Literary Studies and Humanities Computing:Modeling, 

    Points of Intersection :-

          Perhaps the best historical model for documenting the accepted points of intersection shared by literary studies and humanities computing is that expressed several decades ago by John Smith in his seminal article, “Computer Criticism.” Within, one finds computing applications for language and literary studies divided into two groups based on their resultant products: one consisting of those “in which
the computer was used to produce through textual manipulation conventional aids for future research (dictionaries, concordances, etc.),” and the other made up of
“those in which the computer was used in the actual analysis of specific works of literature (thematic analyses, stylistic studies, etc.)”. Escaping my quotation above, but clearly evident in Smith’s larger argument, is the founding of each in and on the literary text in electronic form.2 Indeed, and as the humanities computing community has reminded itself a number of times, literary studies is largely defined by its reliance on and its attention to the literary text, broadly construed: the textual artefact and its intellectual contents.3 Not surprisingly, the literary text in the computing-enabled form that our community has explored it has, for some time,
been accepted as the central point in the relationship between literary studies and computing.

          While such a focus has remained constant, not all has been static. Of note is that the idea of the literary text in its ultimate electronic scholarly form – the electronic scholarly edition of historical texts and what we might call the “electronic literature” of contemporary texts – has undergone considerable change, invention, and reinvention since Smith’s work of the late 1970s. Equally significant is the
considerable rise in acceptance of computing approaches within the literary studies community since that time.4 And yet, even with such change in the electronicallycast object of our focus and the increasing acceptance of computing enhanced approaches, a model with the widespread application and utility of that expressed by Smith, a model that might best assist us in broad scoped consideration of
the changing and increasingly positive relationship between literary studies and humanities computing, has rarely been articulated since Smith’s expression over two decades ago; the several exceptional literary-computing theories that have seen expression of late – such as those that have treated hypertext and its embodiment of literary theoretical principles, narrative studies as it relates to the electronic
medium, and other aspects of electronic literary textuality – focus on points of intersection shared by literary studies and computing that are of the utmost importance, to be sure, but operate with a scope considerably less than that of Smith’s
work.

2. Computing Tools and Computer Criticism / High and
    Low Criticism :-

          It is well worth establishing something as basic, and essential, as the foundation of a general model that allows us to examine the intersection of humanities computing
techniques and the pursuits of those in literary studies in a broad way, in an environment typified by changing notions of the literary text and, perhaps, with reference to changing levels of acceptance of computing-influenced work. Such a foundation is most clearly informed by Smith’s work, but that model does not explicitly take into account the relationship among the many types of work carried out in the literary studies community. For this purpose in particular, a model worth presenting alongside Smith’s is one more recently articulated by literary/textual scholar Tim William Machan.

In the introduction to his Medieval Literature: Texts and Interpretation, Machan succinctly expresses a division of literary critical and scholarly work into two chief categories: what he terms “Lower Criticism,” which is chiefly textual and
bibliographical in nature, and “Higher Criticism,” which is typified by interpretive studies. Lower criticism, Machan notes, is most “commonly viewed as the more factual or ‘scientific’; it provides numerical, analytical, and categorical information which is used to define . . . realities” ; higher criticism is often seen as “the spirit which gives life to the letters established by the Lower Criticism; it is the intellectual
and aesthetic activity which, depending on one’s critical viewpoint, reveals, constitutes, or disassembles the meanings of a text” . As one might expect – and as one who works with either knows – the relationship between the two is
mutually influential, for “without the traditional Lower Criticism’s constructing of texts, there can be no focus for the theorizing of Higher Criticism, just as without the traditional Higher Criticism’s interpretation of texts there can be no contexts within which Lower Criticism can identify facts” . In short, each is somewhat distinct, but each also necessarily assists in the definition and development of the
other.

          Recalling the central role of the electronic literary text in the intersection of computing and literary studies, it is important also to note that one such embodiment of that text, the electronic scholarly edition, occupies an important place when we think about that which both Machan and Smith address: respectively, the influence of lower criticism on higher criticism and, further, the influence of
humanities computing tools on higher literary critical concerns in the form of what Smith calls “computer criticism.” In addition to being a flagship of sorts
today for the work of humanities computing in the field of literary studies, electronic editions of several sorts – primarily dynamic (which combine electronic text and text-analysis software such that the text indexes and concords itself) and
hypertextual7 (which use links to facilitate a reader’s interaction with the apparatus that traditionally accompanies scholarly editions) – represent the culmination of decades of humanities computing work that has both supported and directly participated in interpretive studies. Dynamic interaction with a text – a process which is, essentially, enacting accepted lower critical practices upon a text – is a critical process that duplicates the sorts of tasks that Smith outlined as making up much of computer criticism; restated, such interaction is, itself, part of an interpretative process, with the computer enabling the lower-critical tasks to be carried out swiftly and seamlessly

          Truly, it is through the electronic scholarly edition that, today, one can most easily witness the influence of that which is chiefly textual and bibliographical in nature upon that which is more interpretive by nature – as well as the concomitant influence that schools of interpretation exert upon that which is bibliographic in nature; this latter point is best evinced by Schreibman’s paper, second in this collection, and the former given considerable support by Best. Such a meeting and mutual information of high and low critical endeavours in the electronic literary text is implicit in most papers in this collection – as is the observation that the electronic scholarly edition is only one type of such a text; truly, as Schreibman and Best both note in their consideration of aspects of the edition, even this type of electronic literary text is undergoing considerable change, reflecting intended or possible applications well-beyond those of earlier-generation editions. At their very essence, Winder suggests, recent literary critical schools and methodologies have combined with computing technology to force us to reconsider aspects of the literary text and its textuality – aspects not as disparate as one might think, Van Pelt convinces us, from the meaning that we are able to construct from its contents. Indeed, and as treated most directly by the contributions of Soules, Rockwell, and Grigar, new forms of textual narrative and communicative interaction in new electronic literary texts have themselves opened up previously unavailable points of intersection between the humanities computing and literary studies communities.


3. Papers Towards a New Computer-Assisted Literary 

    Criticism :-

          The papers of this collection demonstrate well the broad range of new work in computing-influenced areas of literary criticism. They suggest a number of things both positive and valuable: that trends within the literary studies community at large have expanded that community’s notion of how computing relates to it – both explicitly and implicitly; that, while at times disputed, there is a strong sense of continuity among past work in humanities computing that addresses literary studies and similar work being carried out a present; and that there is a strong sense of continued promise for, and easily apparent value in, work taking place at the intersection of literary studies and computing.

           Expounding and exemplifying the benefits of the electronic edition, Michael Best’s “The Text of Performance and the Performance of Text in the ElectronicEdition” explores the notion of the “performance crux” – a moment, puzzling to the director and actors, that calls for some kind of stage business to justify or explain action – in the surviving texts of many of Shakespeare’s plays. Using the example of such a crux in Romeo and Juliet, he suggests how a modern, multimedia electronic edition can provide tools for the reader or actor to explore the possibilities both of the basic text and the performance that grows from it, ultimately treating the mutual illumination of text and performance in the dramatic electronic scholarly edition.

         In her article, “Computer-mediated Texts and Textuality: Theory and Practice,” Susan Schreibman continues concern with the scholarly electronic edition, beginning  

with the observation that the majority of literary archives in electronic form within have been conceived more as digital libraries than disquisitions that utilise the medium as a site of interpretation – tracing this situation to the underlying
philosophy of texts and textuality implicit in TEI-SGML. In her treatment of electronic textual theory, she urges that our understanding of electronic texts and textuality deepens as advances in technology allow for the realization of presentations and readings of electronic textual materials that could not, previously, be implemented in HTML or SGML. We can, therefore, expect advances in technology
to bring about changes in guiding critical theoretical modes, particularly those that lend themselves to richer expression in a digital environment: reception theory and versioning.

  

          Beginning with the observation that one high literary critical mode, French neostructuralism, is built directly on the achievements of structuralism using electronic means,WilliamWinder’s “Industrial Text and French Neo-structuralism” discusses that mode in the context of its origins in reaction to French post-structuralist theorization and examines a number of exemplary approaches to text analysis in this vein. Further, he considers how computer-assisted accumulation of text-based expertise in the world at large complements this approach, ultimately concluding
that we can anticipate the direction of critical studies to be radically altered by the sheer size of the economic stakes implied by a new kind of text, the industrial text which lies at the centre of an information society.

          Exploring further the cross-fertilization of theoretical approaches and computing is Tamise Van Pelt’s “The Question Concerning Theory: Humanism, Subjectivity, and Computing.” Within, Van Pelt surveys the shift from humanist, to anti-humanist, to posthumanist assumptions in literary critical circles and questions whether today’s computing environments can still be approached through late twentieth century anti-humanist theories or whether electronic texts demand new, media-specific analyses. Current work in new media, she asserts, suggests that
the dominant discourse on the subject – the rational individual of the humanistic enlightenment, which gave way to the constructed subject of the mid-twentieth century (the discourse underlying much contemporary critical theory) – is being challenged by an emergent discourse of the posthuman.

          Marshall Soules, in his “Animating the Language Machine: Computers and Performance,” explores how we consider a recently-emergent type of text – the computer-mediated writing space – as a unique performance medium with characteristic protocols. Drawing on contemporary performance theory, literary criticism, and communication theory, Soules proposes that technologists, academics, and
artists are developing idiomatic rhetorics to explore the technical and expressive properties of the new “language machines” and their hypertextual environments. The role of improvisation, and its cross-disciplinary protocols, provides a further focus in the discussion of computing practice and performance.

          In “Gore Galore: Literary Theory and Computer Games,” Geoffrey Rockwell provides a brief history of another recently-emergent type of text, the computer
game, and asserts that they have not been adequately theorized. Rockwell develops a topology of computer games and a theory, based on Bakhtin’s poetics of the novel, that views them as rhetorical artifacts well-suited for critical study.

          Bookend to this introduction is Dene Grigar’s examination of the genre of adaptive narrative. In her “Mutability, Medium, and Character,” Grigar explores the future of literature created for and with computer technology, focusing primarily on the trope of mutability as it is played out with the new media. In its speculation about the possibilities of this new genre, it explores ways in which we may want to think when developing future theories about literature – and all types of writing – generated by and for electronic environment.