By Corey Christman Article published October 4, 2005
N. Katherine Hayles, Hillis professor of literature at the University of California at Los Angeles, will give a free, public talk titled “Narrating Bits,” on Oct. 6 at 4 p.m. in the Grace Coolidge Room, Waterman Building.
Hayles, whose works include How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics; Writing Machines; and the forthcoming My Mother Was a Computer, explores the relationship between narratives and databases, people and computer screens, while looking at literature, science, and technology in the 20th and 21st centuries.
In one of the courses she taught at UCLA, “Art and Literature in the Digital Domain,” Hayles asked questions like “More and more canonical literary texts are available in electronic form; what is the difference between reading these texts on screen and reading them in print? In addition, many canonical texts are now available on CD-ROM, where the text is enhanced by sound, video, and images; how does our reading and understanding of these texts change when they are hyper-mediated? In contemporary literature, a new genre of interactive fiction is appearing that depends for its effects on electronic media; how does the construction of narrative change when the text presents the reader with multiple reading paths?”
More information about Hayles is available on her Personal Website. Her UVM visit is sponsored by the Humanities Department and the Phi Beta Kappa Society.
