i, a mother / i am other: L'Amér and the Matter of Mater

Nicole Brossard's L'Amèr undercuts and disarms the hegemony of the phallocentric signifier; the text destabilizes any fixed, authoritative relationship of exchange between writer and reader. The syntactical fragments of the text parallel the deconstructive activity of the depicted narrator, who explicitly juxtaposes an act of violence with an act of writing; the violence of the narrator symbolizes the rejection of the inarticulate pain of the hysteric, who harms herself to attract attention. Brossard's text demonstrates that linguistic activity has always been intimately connected with man's oppression of women, and any attempt to do violence to such oppression necessarily entails an attempt to do violence to discourse -- language is the site of struggle. Brossard's text focuses on the material corporeality of writing rather than the efficient production of meaning. The lesbian experience defies the control of phallocentric ideology by imbricating the poetic and the erotic -- the narrator breaks the "sentence," the linguistic prison, in order to synthesize the poetic (the body of the text) and the erotic (the text of the body) into a "cortex": a body language resistant to the violent abstractions of masculine discourse

The Word Entrances: Virtual Realities in Dewdney's Log Entries

Christopher Dewdney's Log Entries explores the solipsism of consciousness by parodying a traditional genre of objective documentation; the text documents consciousness perceiving reality as a side-effect of consciousness and thereby becomes such a side-effect, ultimately calling into question the whole project of objective interpretation. The text operates upon the principle that, if the senses are deceptive, then all knowledge built upon empirical evidence may be nothing more than a fragile web of illusions; it explores the implications of such neurolinguistic solipsism. The text acts as a metaphorical model of perceptual experience; the identity of the male chronicler (if he is a single person) appears to be fragmented, playing various roles interchangeably: both a performer of an experiment and a performer in an experiment. Log Entries can be read as a ciphered text that does violence to itself in order to provide misinformation for a reader who aspires to textual omniscience

Transitional Materialities and the Performance of JavaScript

This article approaches questions around materiality in digital writing practice in terms of performance, sound, and sound-poetry. Using Alan Golding's term 'Transitional Materiality' as a kind of model which connects my own practice-based project 'Sounding.js'. The article also considers the practice of the Language Poets and their exploration of materiality, performance and the sound of language in relation to the propositions of the Italian futurist Filippo Tommaso Marinetti. Other works discussed are Steve McCaffery's 'Carnival' and Christian Bök's 'Cyborg Opera'

Wandel an Hochschulen? Entwicklungen der wissenschaftlichen Weiterbildung im Bund-Länder-Wettbewerb ›Aufstieg durch Bildung: offene Hochschulen‹

Dieser Sammelband nimmt die wissenschaftliche Weiterbildung und die damit verbundenen Entwicklungen an deutschen Hochschulen in den Blick. Die Forschungsarbeiten der wissenschaftlichen Begleitung des Bund-Länder-Wettbewerbs ›Aufstieg durch Bildung: offene Hochschulen‹ adressieren dabei in einem Mix aus quantitativen und qualitativen Zugängen den Bund-Länder-Wettbewerb sowie die nationale Ebene und stellen internationale Bezüge her. Die Beiträge geben erste empirische Antworten u. a. auf Fragen nach den Bedarfen heterogener Zielgruppen, der Verzahnung von Theorie und Praxis, der Lehrmotivation von Lehrenden und dem nachhaltigen Transfer von Projektergebnissen in die Hochschulen. Eine Rahmung erfolgt einleitend durch eine Bestandsaufnahme zu Weiterbildung als hochschulischer Kernaufgabe und eine Zusammenschau zentraler Entwicklungstrends aus neun Jahren Bund-Länder-Wettbewerb sowie abschließend durch Beobachtungen zur internationalen Sichtbarkeit von wissenschaftlicher Weiterbildung und einen Ausblick auf mögliche zukünftige Entwicklungen. (DIPF/Verlag