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Hayles, N. Katherine
January 26th, 2007 under Faculty

Professor of English and Design/Media Arts, UCLA
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N. Katherine HaylesKatherine Hayles has been a major influence in the fields of electronic textuality and literature, new media studies, literature and science, and modern and postmodern American and British fiction. Her How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature and Informatics (Univ. of Chicago Press, 1999) was named one of the best 25 books of 1999 by Village Voice and was the winner of the Rene Wellek Prize for Best Book in Literary Theory for 1998-1999, American Comparative Literature Association, and of the Eaton Award for the Best Book in Science Fiction Theory and Criticism, 1998-99. Her other books include Writing Machines (MIT Press, 2002); Chaos Bound: Orderly Disorder in Contemporary Literature and Science (Cornell Univ. Press, 1990); and The Cosmic Web: Scientific Field Models and Literary Strategies in the Twentieth Century (Cornell Univ. Press, 1984). Forthcoming is Coding the Signifier: Rethinking Semiosis from the Telegraph to the Computer and a book on complexity and emergence theory. Among her other professional activities, Hayles has been President of the Society for Literature and Science and on the Executive Committee of the Modern Language Assoc. Literature and Science Division; the Editorial Board of Comparative Literature Studies; Board of Consultants, Science-Fiction Studies; Editorial Board of Configurations: A Journal for Literature, Science, and Technology; and Board of Directors of the Electronic Literature Organization.


 Links:      Home page | Society for Literature and Science | Electronic Literature Organization

 Quote:   
Literature in the twenty-first century is computational. Almost all print books are digital files before they become books; this is the form in which they are composed, edited, composited, and sent to the computerized machines that produce them as books. They should, then, properly be considered as electronic texts for which print is the output form. The computational nature of twenty-first century literature is most evident, however, in electronic literature, literature that is “digital born,” created on a computer and meant to be read on it. More than being marked by digitality, such works are actively formed by it. For those of us interested in the present state of literature and where it might be going, electronic literature raises complex, diverse, and compelling issues.

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To explain this more precisely, just as Bloom acknowledges in Omens of Millennium that the very prescience of the Gnostic texts would not have allowed them to disappear entirely (and for their persistence, it must be noted, he is joyful), the prescience of Frankenstein similarly renders it a dangerous text to be used and/or abused. Frankenstein’s prescience resides in Mary Shelley’s brilliant dialectic of reality-based faith and scientific dreams. Simultaneously, this dialectic demands attention and theorization and it denies the possibility of polemical resolution. Thus, Shelley astonishingly narrates a meta-prognostication on the formula of science fiction as the imaginative production which can lead to reproductions inside and outside of texts even as she is installing the spark of life into the first of its species. From this critical perspective, even the most conservative efforts to ossify Frankenstein into a technophobic cultural cliché will, like Victor’s pastoral optimism in trying to forget about the creature amidst the sublime Alpine landscape, not succeed in bringing forth the good spirits (whether God or a sacred “Nature”) they summon. Rather, every cautionary invocation of Frankenstein cannot help but give more life, as both Harold Bloom and that rebellious replicant Roy Baty are both fond of saying, to precisely the abhorrent productions and reproductions they desperately wish to kill.
From “Dismembering the Cautionary Cliché: Re-reading the Warnings in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein”
Andrew Hageman
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