Reading Writing Interfaces: From the Digital to the Bookbound

Description

In Reading Writing Interfaces, Lori Emerson examines how interfaces-from today's multitouch devices to yesterday's desktops, from typewriters to Emily Dickinson's self-bound fascicle volumes-mediate between writer and text as well as between writer and reader. Following the threads of experimental writing from the present into the past, she shows how writers have long tested and transgressed technological boundaries.

Lori Emerson is assistant professor of English, as well as the founder and director of the Media Archaeology Lab at the University of Colorado at Boulder.

"This is the first book to bridge the fields of media archaeology and literary studies, specifically poetry and poetics. It offers new readings-and sometimes a first reading-of important texts, it performs historical spadework that adds to the existing narratives of how the personal computer has evolved, and it contributes to current critical conversations by making the category of interface central to its explorations of textual materiality." -Matthew G. Kirschenbaum, author of Mechanisms: New Media and the Forensic Imagination "Emerson's book is not only fascinating because of the richness of its close-readings or the thought-provoking frictions that it creates between historically, technologically, culturally, ideologically very diverse authors and practices. Its most appealing aspect is the political stance it takes towards its material."-Image (&) Narrative "Reading Writing Interfaces draws our attention back to the materiality of digital languages, reveals the underlying processes of writing, and makes visible the interfaces through which we read/write our world."-The Literary Platform "A useful contribution to the understanding of the digital."-CHOICE "With cogent analyses of both analogue and digital literature, Emerson renders legible the historical and contemporary instantiations of the interface that have been masked from the user by the sleek celebratory language of marketing."-Jacket2 "This works succeeds in accomplishing the rare goal of being pioneering and engaging."-International Journal of Communication