The Sense of Guilt as the Factor Shaping the Form of Waterland and Out of This World

Zadanie pt. „Digitalizacja i udostępnienie w Cyfrowym Repozytorium Uniwersytetu Łódzkiego kolekcji czasopism naukowych wydawanych przez Uniwersytet Łódzki” nr 885/P-DUN/2014 dofinansowane zostało ze środków MNiSW w ramach działalności upowszechniającej nauk

The challenges of hypertext writers : a case study

This thesis examines the challenges of hypertext writers with respect to six aspects of writing: authority, audience, organization, document design, style and multimedia use. This study is primarily based on the theories presented in the three books-Jay David Bolter\u27s Writing Space, George P. Landow\u27s Hypertext 2.0 and Ilana Snyder\u27s Hypertext. Information is collected by means of structured interviews from Bolter and Snyder. This study reveals that the hypertext medium does pose challenges to writers who are used to writing for the print medium and are new to the hypertext medium. Hypertext environment requires that the writer should either possess multiple, diverse skills or work collaboratively. Primary causes of challenges are newness of the medium and lack of education emphasizing visual literacy. Moreover, the challenges point towards the necessity of a new kind of literacy that includes not only visual literacy, but also multimedia literacy. A new rhetoric that addresses both a document\u27s visual design and structural design is very necessary

Childhood disrupted : Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s unfinished autobiography Before the knowledge of evil

As Mary Jean Corbett in Representing Femininity (1992), Linda Peterson in Traditions of Victorian Women’s Autobiography (1999) and David Amigoni in Life Writing and Victorian Culture (2006) have all noted, Victorian women could write about their lives in several ways: autobiographies, diaries, letters, journals, memoirs and disguised within their fiction. Braddon utilised several of these options, including diaries between the years 1880-1914 and an autobiographical account of her childhood that she tellingly entitled ‘Before the Knowledge of Evil’ (Reel 1).1 She began writing this account in 1914, but after one hundred and eighty-five pages of typescript she had only reached the age of nine; presumably she was going to continue to write her entire life history, but she died before its completion. Autobiographies can be used in several ways, and Braddon’s account will be discussed as an example of Victorian women’s autobiography of childhood; as a snapshot of history in the 1830-40s; as an exploration of the inner psychology of a child; as revealing Braddon’s nostalgia for a time past; and finally to explore how she makes a case for a child’s right to have a childhood

From audiences to publics : convergence culture and the Harry Potter phenomenon

In the mid-nineties, changing business and communication models influenced the way in which cultural industries operated. The spheres of public and private, production and distribution, ownership and access had to be reconsidered and were characterised by convergence culture, a commercial and creative environment based on active participation that offers support for creating and sharing interpretations and original works. Convergence culture has relatively low barriers to artistic expression and civic participation and fosters a sense of community growing around people’s common interests and ideologies. It is also a product of the relationship between communication technologies, the cultural communities that grow around them, and the activities they support.peer-reviewe

Writing beyond the pale : literature, literary theory, and the law of genre

It has sometimes been claimed that certain texts written by literary theorists defy categorisation. Neither critique nor fiction, and not even identifiable as a hybrid of both, such texts resist efforts to identify their generic affiliation. These texts might have been allowed to stand merely as indicators of their creators' whimsy were it not for the fact that their content and form, not to mention their problematic relationship with what literary theorists profess elsewhere, represent a provocation to literary criticism's established approaches and procedures. This paper reviews one such text, namely Jacques Derrida 's The Post Card, and more particularly the section entitled "Envois", in the light of his essay "The Law of Genre". It asks whether texts like "Envois" repay critical scrutiny which speaks of a-genericity and multi-genericity, and assesses their implications for the future of literature and literary criticism.peer-reviewe

Finding Your Way: Navigating Online News and Opinions

This study investigates how young people navigate through a number of hyperlinked online news on a specific topic and how this effects, and is affected by, their opinions. Navigating though non-linear hypertext forces readers to integrate information from different sources and make more decisions about what to read, which is more difficult than reading information presented in a linear format, but might also promote deeper engagement with that material. This study used a combination of participant observation, think-aloud protocols, and semi-structured interviews to investigate these issues as participants navigated through a curated collection of articles about the Canadian Oil Sands. Findings about how participants engage with the material, and how the pathways they create while navigating impact their opinions, are discussed

Print Media vs. Digital Manifest Destiny

Every communications medium reflects and reinforces intellectual habits and content patterns unique to the medium. A digital/internet hegemony is a paradoxical foreclosure on breadth of mind since digital formats do not reflect or reinforce the intellectual habits and content patterns unique to other media, especially books. A credible educational process w ill take appropriate advantage of digital media without allowing its influence to repress breadth of mind

Rhetoric and Digital Media

Critics of computational media can often be seen as being allied with one of two genealogies, that of Marshall McLuhan or that of Friedrich Kittler. McLuhan famously declared that the medium is the message (1964: 7) and expanded the range of cultural messages worth celebrating to include media that might seem to resist interpretation, such as lighting and clothing. McLuhan also distinguished between hot media, such as film, which supposedly provide an audience experience of deep immersion through sequential, linear, and logical arrangements, and cool media, such as comics, which require perception of abstract patterning and a simultaneous decoding of all parts. Like Vannevar Bush, who viewed the computer largely as a storage and retrieval device, McLuhan saw the computer as a research and communication instrument 1995: 295) and compared it to print genres like the encyclopedia or print storage systems like the library.https://scholarworks.wm.edu/asbookchapters/1005/thumbnail.jp