OutsideTheText

Classes for Spring 07 (University of Texas at Dallas)

• StoryTelling for New Media(ATEC 4346):With the rise of digital literacy, what was once marginal “geek” culture has come to dominate the social landscape. While storytelling used to take place via a relatively narrow set of channels, born digital narratives are now opening up new structural possibilities (hypertext, blog fiction, YouTube shows, digital games). Criticism has ranged from outright dismissal (“nothing has changed”) to hyperbolic (“nothing will ever be the same”). Regardless of where one takes up position along this spectrum, the now ubiquitous potential of the digital text raises two crucial questions: What/How much changes in the digital text? And perhaps more importantly, how does this move to the digital text affect us as readers? In class we will ask these questions (along with a host of others) of a variety of narrative forms. In order to adequately address these issues, we will read creative works from a variety of genres (novels, hypertext, digital games, web fiction), while supplementing our approach through the reading of critical texts. Students will produce critical and creative work for class.
• Digital Narratives-ATEC 6V81:We are in a culture moment which, for lack of a better term, I would describe as being in a “change-over.” That is, we are slowly but surely moving from storytelling structures which are supported by analog means (book and film) to narratives which are supported by digital ones (digital games, web fiction, distributed narratives). By reading a variety of literary and critical texts we will seek to understand what it means to be in this change, to understand both what possibilities these new narrative forms open up and which ones they foreclose. For example: Are there new paradigms of knowledge formation and literary work enabled by digitally networked structures? What should we make of the difference between non-linear and linear narratives? Does it even make sense to talk of non-linear narratives? What should we make of the increasingly short time allowed these narratives? Are images supplanting words, or are images still relegated to the regime of text?