Ex-foliations

Ex-foliations

Reading Machines and the Upgrade Path

Terry Harpold
Table of Contents

$25.00 paper
ISBN: 978-0-8166-5102-3

$75.00 cloth
ISBN: 978-0-8166-5101-6

A sophisticated consideration of technologies of reading in the digital age.

“Every reading is, strictly speaking, unrepeatable; something in it, of it, will vary. Recollections of reading accumulate in relation to this iterable specificity; each takes its predecessors as its foundation, each inflects them with its backward-looking futurity.” In Ex-foliations, Terry Harpold investigates paradoxes of reading’s backward glances in the theory and literature of the digital field.

In original analyses of Vannevar Bush’s Memex and Ted Nelson’s Xanadu, and in innovative readings of early hypertext fictions by Michael Joyce and Shelley Jackson, Harpold asserts that we should return to these landmarks of new media scholarship with newly focused attention on questions of media obsolescence, changing user interface designs, and the mutability of reading.

In these reading machines, Harpold proposes, we may detect traits of an unreadable surface—the real limit of the machines’ operations and of the reader’s memories—on which text and image are projected in the late age of print.

“Harpold’s book provides a useful and interesting argument which can aid us greatly in developing a better understanding of textuality in the new media ecology.” —Culture Machine

“Terry Harpold’s book is in itself a demonstration of one of the messages in this ground-breaking work on the digitization of literature. As he very convincingly argues, it is now time to study the electronic text as a form of visual reading and writing, and in this shift the necessity of folding the e-text back to previous forms of print culture in inescapable.” —Image & Narrative

Terry Harpold is associate professor of English, film, and media studies at the University of Florida.

368 pages | 65 b&w photos | 6 x 9 | 2008
Electronic Mediations Series, volume 25

Table of Contents
Read Me First
1. “A Future Device for Individual Use”
2. Historiations: Xanadu and Other Recollection Machines
3. Revenge of the Word: Grammatexts of the Screen
4. Ex-foliations
5. Lexia Complexes
6. Allographs: Windows of afternoon
7. Reading Machines

Acknowledgments
Notes
Bibliography
Permissions and Trademarks
Index

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Ex-foliations *Reading Machines and the Upgrade Path* Terry Harpold Table of Contents		$25.00 paper ISBN: 978-0-8166-5102-3 $75.00 cloth ISBN: 978-0-8166-5101-6
A sophisticated consideration of technologies of reading in the digital age. “Every reading is, strictly speaking, unrepeatable; something in it, of it, will vary. Recollections of reading accumulate in relation to this iterable specificity; each takes its predecessors as its foundation, each inflects them with its backward-looking futurity.” In Ex-foliations, Terry Harpold investigates paradoxes of reading’s backward glances in the theory and literature of the digital field. In original analyses of Vannevar Bush’s Memex and Ted Nelson’s Xanadu, and in innovative readings of early hypertext fictions by Michael Joyce and Shelley Jackson, Harpold asserts that we should return to these landmarks of new media scholarship with newly focused attention on questions of media obsolescence, changing user interface designs, and the mutability of reading. In these reading machines, Harpold proposes, we may detect traits of an unreadable surface—the real limit of the machines’ operations and of the reader’s memories—on which text and image are projected in the late age of print. “Harpold’s book provides a useful and interesting argument which can aid us greatly in developing a better understanding of textuality in the new media ecology.” —Culture Machine “Terry Harpold’s book is in itself a demonstration of one of the messages in this ground-breaking work on the digitization of literature. As he very convincingly argues, it is now time to study the electronic text as a form of visual reading and writing, and in this shift the necessity of folding the e-text back to previous forms of print culture in inescapable.” —Image & Narrative Terry Harpold is associate professor of English, film, and media studies at the University of Florida. 368 pages \| 65 b&w photos \| 6 x 9 \| 2008 Electronic Mediations Series, volume 25 Table of Contents Read Me First 1. “A Future Device for Individual Use” 2. Historiations: Xanadu and Other Recollection Machines 3. Revenge of the Word: Grammatexts of the Screen 4. Ex-foliations 5. Lexia Complexes 6. Allographs: Windows of afternoon 7. Reading Machines Acknowledgments Notes Bibliography Permissions and Trademarks Index