English 192 Science Fiction ENGL 192 - Summer (B) 2003, Elizabeth Freudenthal
Mon, 9/8
Week 6: Cyberpunk Continued, then Wrapping Up and Beaming Out
Concluding Cyberpunk: Technology and the Body OR, Utopia? No-place, Good-place, Hypertext and Virtual Reality
eXistenZ, dir. David Cronenberg, 1999:
Cronenberg is famous for blending the organic, inorganic, and perverse in films such as Crash (adapted from J.G. Ballard's novel), 1996, and The Fly, 1986.
* Consider different ways technology has been figured as masculine and the body as feminine. Does Allegra Geller challenge that dichotomy? If so, how? If not, why? What about Ted Pikul? Does virtual reality as a technology challenge that dichotomy? How or why?
* How does Allegra compare to Angel from "(Learning About) Machine Sex"? How does Ted compare to other male characters in our works?
An exerpt from "Stitch Bitch" about the mind/body (false) dichotomy:
"The body is a patchwork, though the stitches might not show. It's run by committee, a loose aggregate of entities we can't really call human, but which have what look like lives of a sort; though they lack the brains to nominate themselves part of the animal kingdom, yet they are certainly not what we think of as objects, nor are they simple appendages, directly responsible to the conscious brain. Watch white blood cells surround an invader, watch a cell divide. What we see is not thinking exactly, but it is "intelligent," or at least ordered, responsive, purposeful....The mind, on the other hand, or rather discursive thought, what zen calls monkey-mind and Bataille calls project, has an almost catatonic obsession with stasis, centrality, and unity. Project would like the body to be its commemorative statue or its golem, sober testiment to the minds' values and an uncomplaining servant. But the statue doesn't exist except in the mind, a hard kernel like a tumor, set up in the portal to the body, blocking the light. The project of writing, the project of life, even, is to dissolve that tumor. To dismantle the project is the project. That is, to interrupt, unhinge, disable the processes by which the mind, glorying in its own firm grip on what it wishes to include in reality, gradually shuts out more and more of it, and substitutes an effigy for that complicated machine for inclusion and effusion that is the self."
Technicalities:
In hypertext studies, the word for a screen of text and image is a lexia. Lexias are connected by links. Shelley created Patchwork Girl on an early hypertext writing application called Storyspace; many foundational and earyl hypertexts were created on Storyspace, which was developed by hypertext artists for this precise purpose. Shelley later departed from the Storyspace environment after Web technology became more advanced and ubiquitous, particularly since Storyspace does not support sophisticated graphics, images, music files or more creative linking.
Patchwork Girl and Intertextuality as a Technology:
* Intertextuality as a key characteristic of postmodern literature, as well as cyborg identity; what are some connections between the idea of intertextuality and the cyborg?
* The Patchwork Girl of Oz (1913), by Frank L. Baum, tells the story of young munchkin Ojo's adventures with a rag doll that a reclusive magician, Dr. Pipt, animated using his brand-new invention, the Powder of Life. Pipt intended to use the doll as a servant for his wife Margolotte, who built the life-size rag doll. But Ojo secretly doctors the doll's brains so that when she drinks the Powder of Life she turns the old sorcerer and his wife to marble, and then helps Ojo on his quest for an antidote.
* The crazy quilt: links between texts (or patches, or body parts) as texts themselves AND quilting historically as an almost exclusively feminine art form
* The graveyard: how is a graveyard like a quilt? A story? A journal? A broken accent? How is a body like a quilt, a graveyard, a story or a text?
* Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, or a Modern Prometheus (1818/1831)
* How does the technology of reading this work supplement, complement, or challenge your interpretations of the above issues?
* How does technology in general supplement, complement or challenge these issues?
* How does the female monster differ from the 1818/1831 male monster?
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pictures by: Bo Kinloch
