The Writer's Craft, The Culture's Technology (original) (raw)

2007, Journal of Pragmatics

The Writer's Craft, The Culture's Technology is a collection of articles derived from papers given at the Twenty-Second International Conference of the Poetics and Linguistics Association (PALA) at Birmingham in April 2002, which explored the connections between literary creativity and the new technologies available to text producers and text interpreters in contemporary societies. As the objects of analyses are not only literary productions but also other forms of cultural expression, such as hypertexts, web artworks, newspaper stories, television programs and online book reviews, the book is addressed to those who are interested in the interface between discourse analysis and new digital and multimedia technologies, and on how these new technologies impact the forms and functions of literary canons and other post-modern cultural products. Following a preface by Donald C. Freedman, the series editor, and an introduction by the two editors of this particular volume, the book is divided into four parts. Part I, The Writer's Web, includes four papers loosely connected by a focus on Internet genres. The first essay, ''Anti-Laokoön: mixed and merged modes of image text on the web'', by George Dillon, discusses how relations between text and image (and sound) are being created in contemporary web artworks, and argues for the centrality of the cross-modal link to the reader/viewer's processing of hypertexts. The relevant point argued by Dillon is that hypertext links allow users to create complex signifying structures by weaving together different textual fragments, an indication of the constant transformations in the interpretive rules and frames we use to make sense of the world. The second article, ''Personal web pages and the semiotic construction of academic identities'', by Carmen Rosa Caldas-Coulthard, follows the argument that, in late modernity, public discourses are being colonized by traces of discourses of the private world (Chouliaraki and Fairclough, 1999). In this particular case, the author investigates how web pages of individual staff members, linked to a broader institutional web page, are more and more influenced by discourses of the self, and how new forms of fictionalized identities are being created in the process. The third essay, ''Hypertext, prosthetics, and the netocracy: posthumanism in Jeanette Winterson's 'The Powerbook''', by Ulf Cronquist, also explores the issue of identity in discourse. The initial premise is that in the present technological age, essentialist and biological notions of sex and gender have been left behind, and that we have moved into a world where we are all cyborgs, our bodies representing the final frontier in terms of predetermined identity traits. To illustrate this premise Cronquist investigates an Internet novel, which offers the reader a chance to escape from her/his body, and through this e-novel examines issues of hypertextuality, prosthetics and the change from autocracy to netocracy in the postmodern world. The last essay