Hi all,

Here is a very tentative possible schedule for my part of the workgroup project (it's a personal project, too, and a part of my scholarship and pedagogy). Liz Bailey (from Cyberculture and Critical Theory) offered to help me with it. I'd also welcome help from any of you if you were interested.

Workgroup Project Schedule:

My part of the “Textualities” workgroup project (a suite of 5 complementary versions of textuality), with inter-group collaboration from Liz Bailey (if she has time and is still interested) and help from any other interested members of the textuality workgroup or other groups.

Project: Transforming Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49 into a computer game (or “cybertext” in Aarseth’s terms) whose purpose is to allow students to change the significance, motivation, and potentially the outcome of events in this novel through their interpretative choices. Cf. my presentation at the “Literary and Technology” panel (and the accompanying dissertation chapter) for the rationale of this pedagogical project.

Workgroup project will develop resources for pedagogy/scholarship in our 5 respective areas. These may include:
annotated bibliography
various assignments
Web portal to textuality
Brief theoretical statement with examples
Multimedia (clips, scans)
Hypertextual links between pages illustrating common themes; hypertextual choices between our competing definitions of textuality

The variety of definitions for textuality/textualities:
*Bibliography: physical instantiation of the text/work; Platonic/ideal
*Reception: Experience of reading as navigation or transformation: how readers move through a work and change it with the perspectives they bring
*DEATH of the Text: there is NO text
*Intentionality: where lies authority?
*Intertextuality: irreducibility of many texts into one
*The text is a network of possible interpretations that present multiple choices, yet within that network there may be fragmentary intimations of the real or the transcendent
*Biblography folds into reception
*The problem of the critical edition
*dynamic interplay between the one and the many; movement between the one and many

Among the choices listed by Tom, Monday or Wednesday 1-2 works best for me.
Kyle

I have no ideas for projects thus far, but perhaps opening a thread will trigger the flow of ideas.
Kyle

OK. So I was feeling guilty about forgetting to post for a few days, but seeing the bare forum, that cloud has lifted.

As I mentioned in our discussion, my interest in "textualities" stems largely from the intersection of entertainment media, which result in the formation of "texts" that exceed the boundaries of the original sources. For example, the "text" of Dracula (i admit, I'm taking an example from my own work) consists of a massive, highly amorphous, flexible cultural discourse, of which the novel by Bram Stoker, a litany of films on vampirism or the character of Count Dracula specifically, radio plays, works of sociology claiming the validity of vampire legends and the existence of vampires, as well as various other iterations (you could include Count Chocula cereal) contribute and produce a larger text available for analysis. The Sherlock Holmes discourse could fit this categorization as well.