Skip to content. | Skip to navigation

Hypertext and the Female Imaginary

2010
•
Author:

Jaishree K. Odin

Hypertext and the Female Imaginary

Explores the use of hypertext in postmodern electronic and film media by women

In Hypertext and the Female Imaginary, Jaishree K. Odin reveals how media using hypertextual strategies of narrative fragmentation provocatively engage questions of gender or cultural difference. Using feminist and postcolonial perspectives, Odin explores the embodied state of the human reflected in critically aware contemporary narratives and examines how these works consider what it means to be human in the twenty-first century.

Hypertext and the Female Imaginary is a much-needed examination of cultural studies issues as they relate to literary-oriented digital media and are played out in women’s works dealing with hypertext. Jaishree K. Odin has written an extremely valuable book.

—

Dene Grigar, Washington State University, Vancouver

In Hypertext and the Female Imaginary, Jaishree K. Odin reveals how media that use hypertextual strategies of narrative fragmentation provocatively engage questions of gender or cultural difference. Odin addresses hypertext on two levels: as an artistic technique in electronic or film narratives and as a metaphor for describing the complexity of postmodernism in which different cultures, discourses, and media are in continual interaction with one another.

Investigating the work of Trinh T. Minh-ha, Judy Malloy, Shelley Jackson, Stephanie Strickland, and M. D. Coverly, Odin demonstrates how these writers apply hypertextual strategies to subversively convey difference. Through her readings of various transformative hypertext narratives by women writers/artists, she pursues the question of what constitutes empowering descriptions of the world in a technology-mediated culture where the dominant discourse is turning everything into the same.

Using feminist as well as postcolonial perspectives, she explores the embodied state of the human as reflected in critically aware contemporary narratives and examines how these works consider what it means to be human in the twenty-first century.

Hypertext and the Female Imaginary

Jaishree K. Odin is professor of interdisciplinary studies at the University of Hawaii.

Hypertext and the Female Imaginary

Hypertext and the Female Imaginary is a much-needed examination of cultural studies issues as they relate to literary-oriented digital media and are played out in women’s works dealing with hypertext. Jaishree K. Odin has written an extremely valuable book.

—

Dene Grigar, Washington State University, Vancouver

Hypertext and the Female Imaginary

Contents


Preface

Introduction. Contact Zone: Repetition and Difference

1. Discontinuity: In-between Spaces and Itineraries

2. Fragmentation: Gender and Performance

3. Multiplicity: Database and Interface

4. Assemblage: Memory and Difference

5. Technocracy: Imagined Futures and “Reality”


Notes
Bibliography
Index