Description
Book SynopsisTo date, most criticism of print and digital technotexts – literary objects that foreground the role of their media of inscription – has emphasized the avant-garde contexts of a text’s production. The Baroque Technotext opens new perspectives on this important and innovative literary canon, analysing the role of baroque and neo-baroque aesthetics in the emergence and possible futures of technotexts. Combining the insights of poststructuralist theory of the baroque, postcolonial theory of the neobaroque, and insightful critique of the prevailing modernist approaches to technotexts, The Baroque Technotext reframes critical debate of contemporary experiments in literary practice in the late age of print. Analyses of works from authors including Jonathan Safran Foer, Chris Ware and David Clark are matched with reflections on other media texts – film, visual art and interface design – that have adopted baroque aesthetic tropes.
Table of Contents
Introduction: An Anamorphic Projection of the Title
Reconciling Literary Study with Materiality
Technotexts as a Focus
Technotexts Beyond Modernism
Baroque as the Other Focus
Baroque Reason as Modernity’s Madness
Prologue
Choice
Monads: A Harmonic Subjectivity for Technotextuality
Mirrors
Mise en Abyme: Mirrorish Dimensions Down to the Code
Illusion
Trompe L’Oeil: Blending Media and Synesthetic Knowing
Surface
Minoring: Baroque Cosmology and Criticizing from Within
Code
Collections and Navels: The Horror Vacui of the Database
Coda
References
Index
