Course Description

Influenced by smart people like Nick Montfort and Jason Rhody, I’ve adjusted my upper-level undergraduate “Computer and Text” to include more of an emphasis on procedural works or “cybertext.” The revised description follows. Yes, they’ll be buying Espen’s book. I still don’t love the term “cybertext,” by the way—while I respect the etymology, it sounds garish to the uninitiated and many students remain distracted by the “cyber” part no matter how carefully we talk about ergodics encompassing both printed and digital texts. I’ve also adjusted the technical component of the course (hence the final paragraph). When I first began teaching this material around 1996 or 1997, learning HTML was a useful value-added. Nowadays I find most students either know HTML, or at least know how to use a WYSIWYG. The real problem though is that the kind of HTML I can teach in a limited time frame—how to put up a basic page with some images and graphic effects—is no longer adequate in an era of CSS, JavaScript, XML, and so forth. While I’d be happy to teach that stuff too, the course would then shift into something else—more of a design or production course. So, the upshot is that our keyboard time will be used more for tactical exercises and McLuhanesque probes rather than for outright production.

ENGL 467: Computer and Text

This course will explore what one recent critic has called cybertexts: works of literature, primarily but not exclusively digital, that are meant to be played, navigated, and manipulated in addition to “read” in the conventional sense. Choose Your Own Adventure books are examples of printed cybertexts with which you might be familiar, though as we will see they only scratch the surface—quite unimaginatively—of what is possible within the form. Specific topics will include: interactive fiction; chatterbots and intelligent agents; MUDs and MOOs; writing and/as code; hypertext, both stand-alone formats and networked on the World Wide Web; literary games and simulations; and emergent literature or “smart” texts. We will read/play/explore works from all of these genres and formats, and our discussions will focus on both identifying the cybertextual traits they have in common as well as discriminating each form’s unique achievements and significance. These discussions will be set within a broader consideration of textuality, including the question of what a text actually is—an old question which digital technologies now ask us to ask anew. You will leave the course with a sense of the literary and digital tradition of cybertext, hands-on experience of some of the most innovative literature being produced today, and (hopefully) some fundamentally new ways of thinking about texts and textuality.

Requirements: class participation, weekly responses, short papers, one longer paper or digital project, mid-term and final exams.

A note on expectations: there are no technical pre-requisites for this course. You do not have to be—nor should you expect to become!—a computer professional. Students seeking only practical instruction in software, programming, or Web design would be best advised to look elsewhere. We will, however, be using a computer-equipped classroom for weekly exercises and experiments to build on our theoretical understandings, and try our hands at producing some cybertexts ourselves.