Contemporary Experimental Narratives
ENGL 146EN - Fall 2003, Rita Raley
Tue, 11/18
Digital Narratives
"Lexia to Perplexia presents the reader-user with difficulty, entanglement, abstraction, confusion, unreadability, even obfuscation. Rather than moving into clarity and visual focus with each link, the text assemblage gains a greater opacity and density and moves from signal to noise. To achieve this effect, it utilizes punctuation that intrudes upon the word ('Exe.Termination'), embedded commands and command structures ('PER[(p)[L(EX)]]ia'), and a creolized, mechanized language characterized by syntactical and semantic errors. In that it moves from encryption to an even greater encryption, the central trope of the text assemblage is interference, the mechanism by which chaos is produced and the text paradoxically emerges. In this sense, the text partly thematizes decomposition, incompleteness, the gap, a mode of perception not yet achieved, the mechanical and operational failures of code, and digital texts that do not 'work.'"
- Rita Raley, "Reveal Codes: Hypertext and Performance," Postmodern Culture 12:1 (2001)
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