UC New Media Research Directory
Swanstrom, Elizabeth
January 27th, 2007 under Grad Students

Transliteracies Project Research Coordinator; Graduate Student, Comparative Literature Department, UC Santa Barbara
Home page

Elizabeth SwanstromElizabeth Swanstrom is a doctoral candidate in comparative literature at UC Santa Barbara. Her research interests include twentieth-century Latin-American and American literatures, the literature of the fantastic, history of science, media theory, and science-fiction film and literature. Swanstrom is a member of the development and editorial team of The Agrippa Files: An Online Archive of Agrippa (a book of the dead). In addition to her academic work, she writes short fiction and serves as co-editor for the online literary journal Sunspinner. She is currently working on a dissertation that examines the relation between network technologies and subjectivity in literature and art.


 Links:      Home page | “Wax Blocks, Data Banks, and File #0467839: The Archive of Memory in William Gibson’s Science Fiction” | The Agrippa Files | Sunspinner

 Quote:   
After his final flatline in William Gibson’s Neuromancer, McCoy Pauley, a cyberspace cowboy with a southern drawl and a penchant for surviving brain death, undergoes a radical transformation. His cognitive processes, personality quirks, ICE-cutting skills, and memories are all recorded on a ROM cassette and stored as file #0467839 in the basement library of the sense/net archives. The McCoy Pauly / Dixie Flatline’s reconfigured technological nature provides us with a new way to imagine the archive of memory, revealing not only the manner in which we perceive it, but how might understand it in the future, allowing us to imagine a physical metaphor for the psychical apparatus that evolves from Freud’s description of it in “A Note Upon the Mystic Writing Pad.”

InterActions: UCLA Journal of Education and Information Studies



Search
New on the Site
Recent Commentors
Random Quote/Image
Computer scientists are starting to pay attention to both the impact of society on their work and the impact of their work on society. From the Transliteracies perspective, how then can technology affect and be affected by the application of reading?
Admin