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
Interactive work calls into existence an I who makes things happen. It is not so much that digital modes exclude the physical body as that they require a constant negotiation of the relationship between the real and imaginal selves.
Admin