Stuart Moulthrop - Academia.edu (original) (raw)
Papers by Stuart Moulthrop
A certain confusion may befall us when we praise pioneers, especially while they are still with u... more A certain confusion may befall us when we praise pioneers, especially while they are still with us. This hazard was apparent to the troubadour and know-hit wonder Jonathan Coulton, when he wrote one of the great tunes of popular science, ‘Mandelbrot Set’: Mandelbrot's in heaven At least he will be when he's dead Right now he's still alive and teaching math at Yale The song was released in October 2004, giving it a nice run of six years before its lyrics were compromised by Benoit Mandelbrot's passing in 2010. Even thus betrayed to history, ‘Mandelbrot Set’ still marks the contrast between extraordinary and ordinary lives, dividing those who change the world, in ways tiny or otherwise, from those who sing about them or merely ruminate. The life of ideas, perhaps like ontogeny, works through sudden transformations and upheavals, apparent impasses punctuated by instant, lateral shift. Understanding is catastrophic. Genius finds ‘infinite complexity […] defined by simple rules’, as Coulton also sings, though any such simplicity depends crucially on the beholder. Cosmic rules may have gorgeous clarity to a mind like Mandelbrot's. For the rest of us, the complexities of the universe are more often bewildering. Nothing is more bewildering, of course, than genius.
Bloomsbury Academic eBooks, 2020
Rocky Mountain review, 1987
The MIT Press eBooks, Apr 7, 2017
This chapter is informed by Shelley Jackson’s author traversal of her hypertext fiction, Patchwor... more This chapter is informed by Shelley Jackson’s author traversal of her hypertext fiction, Patchwork Girl, and her subsequent interview. Jackson’s re-working of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein has been well explored, but less has been said of the second influence-text for Patchwork Girl, L. Frank Baum’s Patchwork Girl of Oz. Resonances from that text suggest a radically different way of valuing difference and rebellion, under the sign of the “freak” instead of the “monster.” The chapter relates this difference to structural aspects of the hypertext exposed in Jackson’s traversal and interview, particularly the fragmentary and elliptical part of the design called “Broken Accents.”
Human-computer interaction series, 2022
What is the connection between how computer games work and what they mean? What do we do with gam... more What is the connection between how computer games work and what they mean? What do we do with games and what do they do to us? In its exploration of these questions, Stuart Moulthrop sees Noah Wardrip-Fruin's How Pac-Man Eats (MIT Press, 2020) as helping to urge game studies in a productive new direction: one that critically traces interactions between games and the broader culture in which they're embedded. More specifically, he observes some of the ways Wardrip-Fruin's work links "technē to social purpose", and thereby "re-engages questions of value and justice". This, he contends, is part of what distinguishes this author—"a scientist who is also a socially aware literary writer", as he approvingly puts it—from many of the "anatomists" with whom he founded this developing field.
Proceedings of the 31st ACM Conference on Hypertext and Social Media, 2020
This talk begins with the crazy notion that we might think of hypertext as a signature for the pe... more This talk begins with the crazy notion that we might think of hypertext as a signature for the period 1985-2020. The claim is more plausible technically than culturally, but the talk is perversely addressed to culture. Among other things, the discussion revisits Moulthrop's previous ACM Hypertext keynote in 1998, in which he distinguished between "exoteric" hypertext - the then-novel adaptation of the World Wide Web by Amazon and other online retailers - and "esoteric" applications in things like hypertext fiction and digital art. The talk updates this insight with reference to later developments such as Jill Walker's "feral hypertext" thesis, the rise of social media, and the recognition of computer games as legitimate channels of ideas. While these phenomena have arguably displaced hypertextuality in the popular imagination, Moulthrop points to the major interest in complex narratives, counterfactuals, and multiverses as places where the hypertext aesthetic survives. Turning from aesthetics back to the technical, the talk focuses on Twine, the popular text-gaming application that marries what Alexander Galloway would call the "proctological" openness of web technologies with the structure-mapping affordances of graphical hypertext systems. In some ways portraying Twine as a second coming of hypertext is a clear and perhaps intentional misreading. The talk ends by wondering what this misreading might reveal.
The Digital Imaginary, 2020
In the venerable mode of M. C. Escher, Douglas Hofstadter, and those exquisite Monument Valley ga... more In the venerable mode of M. C. Escher, Douglas Hofstadter, and those exquisite Monument Valley games, we might weave these two essays into a braid, or metaphysical double-wind. In this combination Sharon Daniel may appear the more exacting master, taking on heavy matters of crime and punishment, while David Clark seems at a first more allegro, given to coincidence, free association, and "puncepts. " As the threads cross and re-cross, though, it is Daniel who lands on the side of humanity, focusing on grand mechanics of empathy, while Clark for all his playfulness ambles over to post-humanity and species death. Perspectives shift, the axes go all duck-rabbity, and we find ourselves traversing the ceiling to reach the door. Welcome to the world of new media, whose project may well be to operationalize the last century's paradoxes. This is progress, maybe. In any event, things converge. Different artists, same medium: two digital interventions into what has become of documentary cinema, and thus two serpentine paths along the same pole or tree-branch, perhaps an occasion to discover, uniquely, where sixty-plus years of expressive processing have taken us. What have we learned? We might begin with rejection of a received understanding of narrative. Daniel says: I don't think the way to effectively address those large-scale systemic issues is by telling one person's story of achievement or transformation. It seems to me … in the documentary field now … there is a desire only to fund documentary and interactive documentaries that are [about] basically tragic or transcendent characters. To me this is such a disconnect-like you don't need interactive technologies to tell single character, character-driven narratives.
Electronic Literature as Digital Humanities, 2021
University cites the phrase in her thesis for the Master of Architecture degree. Given that her t... more University cites the phrase in her thesis for the Master of Architecture degree. Given that her thesis was written in 1999, the first occurrence may have been earlier than the Brown talk. See "Visualising Hypertext Narrative,"
CounterText, 2016
This article employs the concept of the fold, in part as developed by Deleuze out of Leibniz, as ... more This article employs the concept of the fold, in part as developed by Deleuze out of Leibniz, as an approach to its own attempt at folding together the discourses of literature and game study. On the game side we consider Portal 2 (2011), and from the literary area, the generative mega-poem ‘Sea and Spar Between’ (2010). Though formally disparate, both texts employ a unit operation of folding, applying to virtual space in the game and to verbal space in the systemic poem. We inquire into how the structure of implication in both cases leads to an irruption of the technological sublime, an encounter with spaces and magnitudes that escape both human and computational reckoning. Drawing on Myers's concept of ‘anti-ness’ as a feature of play, we conclude that further discussion of games and literature, the main concern of cybertextual studies, requires more complex structure than symmetry or zero-sum relations.
Proceedings of the third annual ACM conference on Hypertext - HYPERTEXT '91, 1991
Proceedings of the sixteenth ACM conference on Hypertext and hypermedia, 2005
Proceedings of the the seventh ACM conference on Hypertext - HYPERTEXT '96, 1996
The Yearbook of English Studies, 1990
Notes on contributors Introduction Richard Machin and Christopher Norris 1. Presentation and repr... more Notes on contributors Introduction Richard Machin and Christopher Norris 1. Presentation and representation in the Renaissance lyric: the net of words and the escape of the gods Murray Krieger 3. Speculations: Macbeth and source Jonathan Goldberg 4. Trust and transgression: the discursive practices of Much Ado about Nothing John Drakakis 5. Donne's praise of folly Thomas Docherty 6. Love and death in 'To His Coy Mistress' Catherine Belsey 7. Towards the autonomous subject in poetry: Milton's 'On His Blindness' Antony Easthope 8. Pope among the formalists: textual politics and 'The Rape of the Lock' Christopher Norris 9. Gray's 'Elegy': inscribing the twilight Stephen Bygrave 10. From topos to trope, from sensibility to Romanticism: Collins's 'Ode To Fear' Harold Bloom 11. Sex and history in The Prelude (1805): Books IX to XIII Gayatri C. Spivak 12. Bounding lines: The Prelude and critical revision Jonathan Arac 13. Coleridge and the deluded reader: 'The Rime of the Ancient Mariner' Frances Ferguson 14. Evening star and evening land Geoffrey Hartman 15. Ozone: an essay on Keats Richard Rand 16. Strategies of containment: Tennyson's In Memoriam Rob Johnson 17. Topography and tropography in Thomas Hardy's 'In Front of the Landscape' J. Hillis Miller 18. Yeats in theory Daniel O'Hara 19. The spider and the weevil: self and writing in Eliot's early poetry Maud Ellmann 20. Frost's thanatography Wallace Martin.
Computers and Composition, 1991
In interdisciplinary or discipline-specific writing courses centering on literature, students and... more In interdisciplinary or discipline-specific writing courses centering on literature, students and teachers may find themselves engaged in an uneasy commerce between two very different academic cultures. Much contemporary composition theory describes writing as a process embedded in a social context where knowledgeable peers collaborate on evolving texts (Fulkerson, 1990). Literary theory, on the other hand, attends to completed works by individual authors who have been validated by publication and by their inclusion in a recognized canon or counter-canon (Lanham, 1989). When students in these classes read, they learn to interpret authorized discourses in definitive editions duly disseminated by commercial publishers. When they write, they learn to regard their texts as provisional and spontaneous, open to critique and revision and, with only rare exceptions, never to be published. This polarity becomes all the more pronounced as student writers move from pencil and paper, through word processing, and on to soft copy, a technology in which writing no longer takes the form of fixed inscription but becomes instead a fluid, malleable, easily reproduced stream of electronic information (Balestri, 1988). The realm of print, where writing refers to a product fixed between covers and disseminated from producer to consumer, contrasts sharply with the electronic environment, where writing is understood as a process that necessarily invites change (Bolter, 1991). 8 Computers and Composition Vol. 9, No. 7 But this split between reading and writing need not prove debilitating. When applied imaginatively, the same technology that presently exacerbates division can.result in a new, interactive textuality. At Cornell University in English 165, a first-year writing course on the literature of fantasy, we enabled students to explore this mode of expression both as readers and writers of interactivefiction. Our experience is extremely limited, and we offer here only an anecdotal account, not a systematic investigation of this teaching strategy. But what we and our students discovered in working with interactive fiction suggests that this form of writing helps engage students in an encounter with literature, raising the possibility of a new community of critical and creativediscourse. Thiscommunity, whoseconventionsarenotyet formed, can only be defined by a confluence of literature, composition, and technology. 10 Computers and Composition Vol. 9, No. I
First person: New media as story, performance, and …, 2004
A certain confusion may befall us when we praise pioneers, especially while they are still with u... more A certain confusion may befall us when we praise pioneers, especially while they are still with us. This hazard was apparent to the troubadour and know-hit wonder Jonathan Coulton, when he wrote one of the great tunes of popular science, ‘Mandelbrot Set’: Mandelbrot's in heaven At least he will be when he's dead Right now he's still alive and teaching math at Yale The song was released in October 2004, giving it a nice run of six years before its lyrics were compromised by Benoit Mandelbrot's passing in 2010. Even thus betrayed to history, ‘Mandelbrot Set’ still marks the contrast between extraordinary and ordinary lives, dividing those who change the world, in ways tiny or otherwise, from those who sing about them or merely ruminate. The life of ideas, perhaps like ontogeny, works through sudden transformations and upheavals, apparent impasses punctuated by instant, lateral shift. Understanding is catastrophic. Genius finds ‘infinite complexity […] defined by simple rules’, as Coulton also sings, though any such simplicity depends crucially on the beholder. Cosmic rules may have gorgeous clarity to a mind like Mandelbrot's. For the rest of us, the complexities of the universe are more often bewildering. Nothing is more bewildering, of course, than genius.
Bloomsbury Academic eBooks, 2020
Rocky Mountain review, 1987
The MIT Press eBooks, Apr 7, 2017
This chapter is informed by Shelley Jackson’s author traversal of her hypertext fiction, Patchwor... more This chapter is informed by Shelley Jackson’s author traversal of her hypertext fiction, Patchwork Girl, and her subsequent interview. Jackson’s re-working of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein has been well explored, but less has been said of the second influence-text for Patchwork Girl, L. Frank Baum’s Patchwork Girl of Oz. Resonances from that text suggest a radically different way of valuing difference and rebellion, under the sign of the “freak” instead of the “monster.” The chapter relates this difference to structural aspects of the hypertext exposed in Jackson’s traversal and interview, particularly the fragmentary and elliptical part of the design called “Broken Accents.”
Human-computer interaction series, 2022
What is the connection between how computer games work and what they mean? What do we do with gam... more What is the connection between how computer games work and what they mean? What do we do with games and what do they do to us? In its exploration of these questions, Stuart Moulthrop sees Noah Wardrip-Fruin's How Pac-Man Eats (MIT Press, 2020) as helping to urge game studies in a productive new direction: one that critically traces interactions between games and the broader culture in which they're embedded. More specifically, he observes some of the ways Wardrip-Fruin's work links "technē to social purpose", and thereby "re-engages questions of value and justice". This, he contends, is part of what distinguishes this author—"a scientist who is also a socially aware literary writer", as he approvingly puts it—from many of the "anatomists" with whom he founded this developing field.
Proceedings of the 31st ACM Conference on Hypertext and Social Media, 2020
This talk begins with the crazy notion that we might think of hypertext as a signature for the pe... more This talk begins with the crazy notion that we might think of hypertext as a signature for the period 1985-2020. The claim is more plausible technically than culturally, but the talk is perversely addressed to culture. Among other things, the discussion revisits Moulthrop's previous ACM Hypertext keynote in 1998, in which he distinguished between "exoteric" hypertext - the then-novel adaptation of the World Wide Web by Amazon and other online retailers - and "esoteric" applications in things like hypertext fiction and digital art. The talk updates this insight with reference to later developments such as Jill Walker's "feral hypertext" thesis, the rise of social media, and the recognition of computer games as legitimate channels of ideas. While these phenomena have arguably displaced hypertextuality in the popular imagination, Moulthrop points to the major interest in complex narratives, counterfactuals, and multiverses as places where the hypertext aesthetic survives. Turning from aesthetics back to the technical, the talk focuses on Twine, the popular text-gaming application that marries what Alexander Galloway would call the "proctological" openness of web technologies with the structure-mapping affordances of graphical hypertext systems. In some ways portraying Twine as a second coming of hypertext is a clear and perhaps intentional misreading. The talk ends by wondering what this misreading might reveal.
The Digital Imaginary, 2020
In the venerable mode of M. C. Escher, Douglas Hofstadter, and those exquisite Monument Valley ga... more In the venerable mode of M. C. Escher, Douglas Hofstadter, and those exquisite Monument Valley games, we might weave these two essays into a braid, or metaphysical double-wind. In this combination Sharon Daniel may appear the more exacting master, taking on heavy matters of crime and punishment, while David Clark seems at a first more allegro, given to coincidence, free association, and "puncepts. " As the threads cross and re-cross, though, it is Daniel who lands on the side of humanity, focusing on grand mechanics of empathy, while Clark for all his playfulness ambles over to post-humanity and species death. Perspectives shift, the axes go all duck-rabbity, and we find ourselves traversing the ceiling to reach the door. Welcome to the world of new media, whose project may well be to operationalize the last century's paradoxes. This is progress, maybe. In any event, things converge. Different artists, same medium: two digital interventions into what has become of documentary cinema, and thus two serpentine paths along the same pole or tree-branch, perhaps an occasion to discover, uniquely, where sixty-plus years of expressive processing have taken us. What have we learned? We might begin with rejection of a received understanding of narrative. Daniel says: I don't think the way to effectively address those large-scale systemic issues is by telling one person's story of achievement or transformation. It seems to me … in the documentary field now … there is a desire only to fund documentary and interactive documentaries that are [about] basically tragic or transcendent characters. To me this is such a disconnect-like you don't need interactive technologies to tell single character, character-driven narratives.
Electronic Literature as Digital Humanities, 2021
University cites the phrase in her thesis for the Master of Architecture degree. Given that her t... more University cites the phrase in her thesis for the Master of Architecture degree. Given that her thesis was written in 1999, the first occurrence may have been earlier than the Brown talk. See "Visualising Hypertext Narrative,"
CounterText, 2016
This article employs the concept of the fold, in part as developed by Deleuze out of Leibniz, as ... more This article employs the concept of the fold, in part as developed by Deleuze out of Leibniz, as an approach to its own attempt at folding together the discourses of literature and game study. On the game side we consider Portal 2 (2011), and from the literary area, the generative mega-poem ‘Sea and Spar Between’ (2010). Though formally disparate, both texts employ a unit operation of folding, applying to virtual space in the game and to verbal space in the systemic poem. We inquire into how the structure of implication in both cases leads to an irruption of the technological sublime, an encounter with spaces and magnitudes that escape both human and computational reckoning. Drawing on Myers's concept of ‘anti-ness’ as a feature of play, we conclude that further discussion of games and literature, the main concern of cybertextual studies, requires more complex structure than symmetry or zero-sum relations.
Proceedings of the third annual ACM conference on Hypertext - HYPERTEXT '91, 1991
Proceedings of the sixteenth ACM conference on Hypertext and hypermedia, 2005
Proceedings of the the seventh ACM conference on Hypertext - HYPERTEXT '96, 1996
The Yearbook of English Studies, 1990
Notes on contributors Introduction Richard Machin and Christopher Norris 1. Presentation and repr... more Notes on contributors Introduction Richard Machin and Christopher Norris 1. Presentation and representation in the Renaissance lyric: the net of words and the escape of the gods Murray Krieger 3. Speculations: Macbeth and source Jonathan Goldberg 4. Trust and transgression: the discursive practices of Much Ado about Nothing John Drakakis 5. Donne's praise of folly Thomas Docherty 6. Love and death in 'To His Coy Mistress' Catherine Belsey 7. Towards the autonomous subject in poetry: Milton's 'On His Blindness' Antony Easthope 8. Pope among the formalists: textual politics and 'The Rape of the Lock' Christopher Norris 9. Gray's 'Elegy': inscribing the twilight Stephen Bygrave 10. From topos to trope, from sensibility to Romanticism: Collins's 'Ode To Fear' Harold Bloom 11. Sex and history in The Prelude (1805): Books IX to XIII Gayatri C. Spivak 12. Bounding lines: The Prelude and critical revision Jonathan Arac 13. Coleridge and the deluded reader: 'The Rime of the Ancient Mariner' Frances Ferguson 14. Evening star and evening land Geoffrey Hartman 15. Ozone: an essay on Keats Richard Rand 16. Strategies of containment: Tennyson's In Memoriam Rob Johnson 17. Topography and tropography in Thomas Hardy's 'In Front of the Landscape' J. Hillis Miller 18. Yeats in theory Daniel O'Hara 19. The spider and the weevil: self and writing in Eliot's early poetry Maud Ellmann 20. Frost's thanatography Wallace Martin.
Computers and Composition, 1991
In interdisciplinary or discipline-specific writing courses centering on literature, students and... more In interdisciplinary or discipline-specific writing courses centering on literature, students and teachers may find themselves engaged in an uneasy commerce between two very different academic cultures. Much contemporary composition theory describes writing as a process embedded in a social context where knowledgeable peers collaborate on evolving texts (Fulkerson, 1990). Literary theory, on the other hand, attends to completed works by individual authors who have been validated by publication and by their inclusion in a recognized canon or counter-canon (Lanham, 1989). When students in these classes read, they learn to interpret authorized discourses in definitive editions duly disseminated by commercial publishers. When they write, they learn to regard their texts as provisional and spontaneous, open to critique and revision and, with only rare exceptions, never to be published. This polarity becomes all the more pronounced as student writers move from pencil and paper, through word processing, and on to soft copy, a technology in which writing no longer takes the form of fixed inscription but becomes instead a fluid, malleable, easily reproduced stream of electronic information (Balestri, 1988). The realm of print, where writing refers to a product fixed between covers and disseminated from producer to consumer, contrasts sharply with the electronic environment, where writing is understood as a process that necessarily invites change (Bolter, 1991). 8 Computers and Composition Vol. 9, No. 7 But this split between reading and writing need not prove debilitating. When applied imaginatively, the same technology that presently exacerbates division can.result in a new, interactive textuality. At Cornell University in English 165, a first-year writing course on the literature of fantasy, we enabled students to explore this mode of expression both as readers and writers of interactivefiction. Our experience is extremely limited, and we offer here only an anecdotal account, not a systematic investigation of this teaching strategy. But what we and our students discovered in working with interactive fiction suggests that this form of writing helps engage students in an encounter with literature, raising the possibility of a new community of critical and creativediscourse. Thiscommunity, whoseconventionsarenotyet formed, can only be defined by a confluence of literature, composition, and technology. 10 Computers and Composition Vol. 9, No. I
First person: New media as story, performance, and …, 2004