Lecture XIV.-- The Electronic Frontier and Women of the Web

The Electronic FrontierWomen of the Web:  

 

 

In this class session we move into the Twenty-first Century, so to speak, with a look at the new electronic writing.  

This class session introduces us to an entirely new view of women writers.  During much of the time we have been discussing the proliferation of women writers, the world, itself was changing everywhere, due to new technology.  Just as we saw alterations in society as a result of the industrial revolution, so the recent century has resulted in the emergence of a culture that scarcely resembles any of the periods we have studied previously.  Yet, throughout the 20th century, the issue of women and technology continued to perplex.  Did women have the same access to technology that men did?  For the most part, the answer was no.  Women tended to avoid classes in math and science, or do poorly.  In the arts, while men, supported by institutions and private grants, were deeply involved in Art and Technology, women were more lightly represented.  This all began to change with the advent of the personal computer and the fact that, for many women, it was now possible to engage in the latest technology at home, with off-the-shelf products.  In this session, and in the on-line lecture session that you will do the week of April 26, we will investigate the women who are entering into the exciting new world of electronic literature.

     


    from Stephanie Strickland's and M.D. Coverley's 

    Errand Upon Which We Came

    A partial listing of women who have done in-hand electronic literature:  

    Laurie Anderson (Door Where Carol Merril is Still Standing)

    Arnold, Mary Kim (Lust)

    M.D. Coverley (Califia)

    Nancy Buchanan (The Idea of Home)

    Cramer, Kathryn (In Large and Small Pieces)

    Jane Yellowless Douglas (I Have Said Nothing)

    Greco, Diane (Cyborg: Engineering the Body Electric)

    Carolyn Guyer (Quibbling, MotherMillennia)

    Shelley Jackson (Patchwork Girl)

    Adriene Jenik (Mauve Desert)

    Deena Larsen (Marble Springs)

    Judy Malloy and Cathy Marshall (Forward, Anywhere)

    Stephanie Strickland (True North)

    Electronic Texts are characterized by, among other features: 

    Simultaneity

    Multiplicity of Voice

    Layers of History

    Image and Sound as Text

    Freedom of interest for the Reader

    Shape of Reality

    These qualities are very important in the history of women's writing because they address the issues that women have been, in many cases, struggling to express in different ways in traditional print works.  If you look, for example, at the story trajectory in fiction by Toni Morrison and Louise Erdrich, you will see an absence of the type of "rising action, falling action" that we recognize as the Aristotelian model common in narrative fiction.  In a very real sense, the rising and falling action model is not very close to the way that women, in any case, experience life.  Women are often multi-tasking, and they are following several lives at difference phases of growth, perhaps involved with their parents and grandchildren at the same time.  Life, in that case, does not have the feel of a rise to a central climax, but rather the feel of a biorhythm, some aspects peaking, some in decline, at any one time.  We saw the treatment of Sula and Nel in Sula, where the biorhythm effect was a major organizational method of the plot, and we see much the same kind of pattern in Louise Erdrich's work.  In Joan Didion's work, we see another kind of representation of reality.  Instead of events having one cause, identified as "good" or "bad," we have several events that precipitate crisis, and often this crisis does not "resolve" itself in "act Five."  Rather, the crisis comes right at the beginning, and we follow the reverberations throughout the narrative.  In Virginia Woolf, we noted that works like Mrs. Dalloway and To the Lighthouse were attempts at changing our fictional experience of time and duration - the emphasis on moment-by-moment observation and the delaying of key events placing a special emphasis on the way reality might be experienced in fiction.  All of these linear-text ambitions find a strangely welcome in hypertext fiction.

    Deena Larsen

    The history of Electronic Textuality is relatively short, and there are still not too many works that have been produced for in-hand media such as CD-ROMs and floppy disks.  However, women were there in the beginning and continue to play a prominent role in electronic literature.  

    Although there is some argument about what is the very first hypertext, one good candidate is Deena Larsen's Marble Springs.  Although this work is best viewed as a stand-alone application using Storyspace, you can read a sampling of the work at the Eastgate Systems page.  Marble Springs aptly illustrates the idea behind spatial hypertext.  A narrative poem, this piece tells the tale of the residents of a "real" place, Marble, Colorado, in an interactive structure.

     

    In the About the author, Deena says about herself:

    The author, or the writer within these writings, lived in Marble Springs when the town bloomed. Knowing that these words, this secret webbing of her life, this journey to the depths of those around her must remain hidden, she carefully wiped away any trace of her existence. All that remains here now are crumbling scraps of paper, a few quilt blocks, a cut-nib pen long gone dry. Speculations. Perhaps she graduated from an Eastern women's college, moved around here and there, scrabbling for adventure outside the States. She might have reveled in the short bright summers of this tiny mountain town. In the day, she would ride out into the scrub country. At night, she would write. Or perhaps she sought a cure for tuberculosis in the intoxicating air, the dark roots, of the Rocky Mountains.  Or a gossip, pouring out the lives of those around her for anyone to view.  Or a witch woman, hiding her thoughts, believing that a life hadn't been lived until it had been written down.  Or perhaps the wind, tired of bending conifers on the tall slopes.  

    Above, is the "Map" of the Town from Marble Springs.  Readers can click on any one of the sites to follow the stories of the various characters.

     

Shelley Jackson 

Patchwork Girl represents another approach to the possibilities inherent in hypertext fiction.  In Shelley Jackson's story, the narrator conjures an image of the Patchwork Girl of Oz and Frankenstein's Monster.  Readers click on the stitched-together body parts to discover the live story of a "constructed" woman. 

Carolyn Guyer

Quibbling, by Carolyn Guyer, is one of my favorite examples of text-only hypertext using Storyspace software.  In this stunning piece, Guyer threads together several voices across time - in a labyrinth of human questioning.  Although we are not going to be looking at works on the Web until next week, you will surely want to explore another Guyer work, Mother Millennia, when you have a chance.  This piece takes advantage of the collaborative and global aspects of electronic writing - collecting stories of mothers from across the globe.

Carolyn Guyer is the author of Quibbling. She is coordinator of HiPitched Voices, a
women's hypertext collective which, in 1994, initiated an ongoing collaborative writing
project in its own wing of the Hypertext Hotel. Her earlier hypertext, Izme Pass
(Writing on the Edge, 1991), was co-authored with Martha Petry. 

She is currently working on another collaborative hypertext co-authored with
Rosemary Joyce and Michael Joyce, woven of Aztec creation myths and postmodern
mystique. Guyer has a visual arts background in a wide range of media, and her writing
a continual corollary to her visual work. Hypertext has reversed the balance and she is
now blindly groping, along with everyone else, for a new aesthetic in the combination
of text and visual imagery, or as she would have it: 

"an understanding of the differences between graphical and textual
images/narratives and how they merge in human experience."

A little of her thinking about hypertext, electronic culture, and possible human futures
can be found in the first FEED Dialog on the subject of "Electronic Text" in which she
participated along with Bob Stein, Michael Joyce, and Sven Birkerts . Guyer lives on
the Hudson River amid the Catskill Mountains in New Hamburg, NY. 

and now, on to Califia.

Continue with Lecture XIV.

 

 

Literature 45  - Women in Literature :  

Marjorie C. Luesebrink, MFA


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