"Every reading is, strictly speaking, unrepeatable; something in it, of it, will vary. Recollections of reading accumulate in relation to this iterable specificity; each takes its predecessors as its foundation, each inflects them with its backward-looking futurity." In Ex-foliations, Terry Harpold investigates paradoxes of reading's backward glances in the theory and literature of the digital field.
In original analyses of Vannevar Bush's Memex and Ted Nelson's Xanadu, and in innovative readings of early hypertext fictions by Michael Joyce and Shelley Jackson, Harpold asserts that we should return to these landmarks of new media scholarship with newly focused attention on questions of media obsolescence, changing user interface designs, and the mutability of reading.
In these reading machines, Harpold proposes, we may detect traits of an unreadable surface-the real limit of the machines' operations and of the reader's memories-on which text and image are projected in the late age of print.
- ISBN10 0816666407
- ISBN13 9780816666409
- Publish Date 14 May 2014 (first published 10 December 2008)
- Publish Status Active
- Publish Country US
- Imprint University of Minnesota Press
- Format eBook
- Pages 364
- Language English