Online Magazine of the Visual Narrative - ISSN 1780-678X
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Online Magazine of the Visual Narrative - ISSN 1780-678X |
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Network Vistas: Folding the Cognitive Map |
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Author: Dave Ciccoricco Abstract (E): Although Frederic Jameson's account of postmodern hyperspace and his accompanying aesthetic of cognitive mapping have found a place in the genealogy of digital literature, Jameson's concept does not adequately articulate the dynamic topology of network space. Rather, digitally networked narratives call for a means of textual comprehension and orientation that moves beyond the "panoptical impulse" of cognitive mapping itself. This paper traces the cross-disciplinary origins and appropriations of "cognitive mapping"; then, building on recent work in cognitive narratology, it reconsiders the relationship of cognitive map and digital network. The paper concludes by constructing an analogy for hypertextual orientation that (1) provides an alternative to the cartographic paradigm of literary criticism and (2) accounts for the temporal dimension of a narrative unfolding in network space. Abstract (F): Les analyses de l’hyperespace postmoderne et de la cartographie cognitive proposées naguère par Frederic Jameson ont joué un rôle majeur dans la mise en place de la littérature numérique. Toutefois, la notion jamesonienne de cartographie ne rend pas vraiment compte de la topologie dynamique d’un espace mis en réseau. La logique spatiale des récits numériques réclame au contraire des outils de compréhension et d’orientation qui dépassent l’impulsion panoptique de la cartographie cognitive. Dans cet article, on essaie d’abord de retracer les origines et les réemplois interdisciplinaires du concept de cartographie cognitive, puis de réexaminer, à partir de récents travaux en narratologie cognitive, les relations entre la carte cognitive et réseau numérique. L’article finit par repenser la notion d’orientation hypertextuelle de manière à 1) offrir une alternative au modèle cartographique utilisé en critique littéraire, et à 2) mieux rendre compte de la dimension temporelle du parcours narratif dans un espace mis en réseau. Keywords: cognitive map, digital network, narrative fiction, hypertext, textual orientation
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I.The field of hypertextual studies has appropriated the concept of the "cognitive map" as a means of visualizing the space of digital networks and, more specifically, reading hypertext narratives. Often it has been anchored in the context of Frederic Jameson's aesthetic. Jameson's disorienting visit to the Bonaventure Hotel in Los Angeles has served as a paradigmatic articulation of "postmodern hyperspace" - an articulation that has found a place in the genealogy of hypertext narrative (referred to here also as "network narrative" to denote a work of fiction that takes the form of a digital network). Jameson's concept, however, does not adequately articulate the dynamic topology of network space. In fact, narratives in networked environments do not underscore Jameson's notion of a disorienting postmodernist landscape. Rather, they call for a means of textual comprehension and orientation that moves beyond the "cartographic paradigm" of cognitive mapping itself. Cognitive psychology tells us that we index our current location in any given place by maintaining a cognitive map of learned environments - synthesized and stored as "spatial knowledge" in the region of our brain called the hippocampus. Psychologist Edward Tolman took the first steps toward understanding this phenomenon in the 1940s by observing that rodents in a maze, when necessary, could draw on a learned understanding of their environment.[1] The image of rodents, unrelenting consumers that they are, might have suited Frederic Jameson (1991) as he hammered out his "logic of late capitalism." But in negotiating mazes of a more global variety, Jameson derives his often-cited aesthetic of cognitive mapping from geographer Kevin Lynch. In his Image of the City (1960), Lynch investigated the "imageability" of modern cities by studying the mental maps made by their inhabitants (2).[2] Jameson extends Lynch's trope of civic legibility to link urban experience and narrative directly. He equates "our physical trajectories" to "virtual narratives or stories, …dynamic paths and narrative paradigms which we as visitors are asked to fulfill with our own bodies and movements" (83).[3] We can read Jameson's well-known account of his visit to the Bonaventure Hotel in Los Angeles as the story of his failure to tell a story, for the hotel confounds his notion of narrative space. "Emptiness is here absolutely packed," he writes, "You are in this hyperspace up to your eyes and your body" (82). But Jameson ultimately directs his analogy not at physical architectures whose coordinates defy ordinary perception, but rather at social or informational architectures that were never subject to the same design rules. His aesthetic of cognitive mapping, notwithstanding the hotel anecdote, takes as its primary object not a definable topography, but rather the topological connectivity of a network. Jameson's hyperspace pre-dates the World Wide Web. But because both narrative and network intersect, at least implicitly, in Jameson's cognitive map, and his essay explicitly mentions the less determinate but more spectacular notion of "hyperspace," it is no surprise that theorists applied the idea to an understanding of hypertext. Some cited Jameson's political project directly. Stuart Moulthrop (1989) saw in hypertext's distributed model of textuality a movement toward a "politically relevant" art and a viable "pedagogical political culture"; what he conceived of as the "topographical" space of hypertext could in fact work toward realizing the social space implied by Jameson's cognitive map (266).[4] Sociologist Sherry Turkle (1995) saw hypertextual networks as the objects with which we could image the complexity of Jameson's postmodern world, just as the "turbine, smokestack, pipes, and conveyer belts of the late 19 th century and early 20 th century" were to a newly industrialized society. According to Turkle, "a decade after Jameson wrote his essay, postmodernism has found its objects" - objects with which we could realize the spatial consciousness of the cognitive map (44-45).[5] In line with the early patriarchs of hypertext, such as Vannevar Bush and Theodore Nelson, who saw hypertext as an externalization or at least augmentation of the workings of the human mind, others referred to the maps provided by some graphical interfaces themselves as "cognitive maps" (Koskimaa 2000, Douglas 2001).[6] The terminological appropriation surfaced in a more diluted sense in the claim that "hypertext," as John Tolva states, "externalizes the cognitive mapping of disconnected word groups that is pre-requisite for the sense of space in modernist literature, what we might call non-computerized hypertext" (69).[7] These theorists adopted the view of hypertext as a kind of connect-the-dots of Modernist textuality, conflating the spatial form articulated by Joseph Frank (1945)[8] with the topological structure of network textuality. Significantly, the conflation is encouraged, however misleadingly, by the fact that linguistic models of textual comprehension, such as those developed Teun van Dijk and W. Kintsch[9], render semantic connectivity in the same way that graphical tools render the topological connectivity of hypertextual nodes. For example, referring to van Dijk's model of textual comprehension, Rolf Zwaan writes, "As the model processes the entire text, it constructs a network of coherent propositions. This network may be visualized as a graph, such that the nodes are propositions and the connected lines indicate shared referents" (27).[10] The visualization described by Zwaan evokes the directed graphs commonly used to represent hypertextual structure, such as the Storyspace overviews familiar to many first generation hypertextualists. Thus, rather than source the concept directly to Jameson's aesthetic, some critics internalized a generic understanding of the cognitive map, and with it the assumption that such graphical overviews (whether text editors for writers or navigational tools for readers) externalize some portion of the cognitive process of writing and reading. II.David Herman (2000) and Marie-Laure Ryan (2003) have taken steps to clarify the relationship of the cognitive map and textuality, tilling the fertile field of cognitive narratology that combines discourse analysis, cognitive psychology, and literary criticism. Herman refers to a visualization of the spatial relationships in a narrative text or, more specifically, "a process of cognitive mapping that assigns referents not merely a temporal but a spatiotemporal position in the storyworld." Ryan, similarly, defines the cognitive map as "a mental model of spatial relations" (215).[11] They direct their theoretical tack, however, predominantly toward mapping the territory of the represented story world, a task that shares itself with the project of mapping the hypertextual structure. Indeed, David Herman is correct when he states that
The textual or narratological factors in Herman's enumeration help determine how we know what we know about the people, places, and things in the story; that is, they produce perspective on the storyworld. But in a network narrative, the interface produces perspective - or rather a plurality of perspectives - on the structure of the text itself. After all, not only does the form of a network narrative require conceptualization, the conceptualization always to some degree creates the form. At the same time, equating a rendering of hypertextual structure to the process by which the "map creates the territory" - with Baudrillard's cultural critique in tow - points to an oversimplification. In his well-known discussion of the Lascaux caves in France, for instance, where an exact replica was built several hundred meters from the original as to protect it, Baudrillard describes the scenario whereby the simulation loses dependence on an original: "It is possible that the memory of the original grottoes is itself stamped in the minds of future generations, but from now on there is no longer any difference: the duplication suffices to render both artificial" (9).[12] In a network text, if maps continually create and recreate a territory, then such representations do not displace or supplant an original territory - as in Baudrillard's model of the simulacrum. The concept of territory itself, in the strict sense of a spatially locatable area, region, or terrain, does not apply to the abstract spatiality of network topology (until, of course, we arbitrarily impose one, as with the spatial logic of the World Wide Web, where we are Internet Explorers™ traversing a Netscape™ - as Mireille Rosello describes it, "a body circulating among fixed, immobile roads").[13] Furthermore, contrary to Ryan and Herman's stated focus, empirical evidence suggests that mapping the spatiality of the storyworld - a topographical mapping per se - is not a common or at least a primary form of "mapping" (in the generic sense) when reading fiction. Zwaan's research shows that readers of print texts rarely maintain an "accurate map of spatial relations" in the represented storyworld unless they are given specific instructions to read for such clues.[14] In conducting her own experiment on the "construction of narrative space" analyzing maps of Gabriel García Márquez' Chronicle of a Death Foretold (1982) drawn by high school students, Ryan herself makes clear that it "takes a specific agenda - such as the present project - to attempt a systematic reconstruction of the 'textually correct' map of a fictional world" (217); and readers "read for the plot and not for the map, unless they are literary cartographers" (238). For Ryan, literary cartography is a means of "immersion" in the fictional world. A cognitive map of a network narrative, then, can refer to either the represented world or the link-node structure of the network. But more generally - albeit not less accurately - it can refer to a global understanding of the text's themes and meanings, which is closer to what Teun van Dijk and W. Kintsch call a text's "macrostructure." An articulation of reading comprehension that has undergone countless revisions and criticisms by linguists and cognitive theorists after (and including) van Dijk and Kintsch, a macrostructure involves the filtering of sentences and/or semantic propositions through the "gateway" of short-term memory, and the subsequent arrangement of information into long-term memory. In such models, reading comprehension involves processing "microstructures" toward the formation of a manageable, storable "macrostructure." Theorists Davida Charney (1994) and Jhondan Johnson-Eilola (1991) have undertaken studies of the macrostructure model of reading comprehension in relation to reading hypertextual documents.[15] Their contributions serve as an early corrective for some of the "liberation theologies" of hypertext rhetoric. Contrary to the assertion that hypertext technology "liberates" the reader from linearity, we know that we always read linearly and sequentially even if (1) the text presents information in a non-chronological fashion, and (2) the reader chooses the order of that sequence. But Charney and Johnson-Eilola go further by drawing on empirical research that show readers of hypertexts process network texts in much the same way as they would a text in print; that is, they store information in hierarchies even if they are reading in a user-determined order. In other words, readers cognitively prioritize semantic material. Charney adds that since the mind cannot import textual structures all at once into long-term memory, the resemblance of a hypertextual structure to long-term memory is irrelevant; in turn, the claim that hypertexts are more natural reading environments because of their resemblance to neural networks is not valid. Some theorists of digital textuality have fused spatial models of textual coherence with theories of information space, updating the print-based model of macrostructure in other ways. Nancy Kaplan and Stuart Moulthrop (1994), for example, make a clear delineation between the "architectonic" and "semantic" space of textual networks. They equate the architectonic space of the network text with a graphical display - the space of the screen - which often imitates physical space, where architecture involves manipulating stable objects according to "the rules of geometry and perspective" (207).[16] Unlike their conception of architectonic space, Kaplan and Moulthrop's semantic space is not a "built structure," by which they mean it is not observable in physical space, on a computer screen. However, its resemblance to the cognitive structure "built" during the act of reading makes it comparable to the macrostructure described by van Dijk. Semantic space is "deeply connected to the production of meaning [and] interpretation" and in contrast to architectonic space, which is more often invoked in the context of writing, "emerges more clearly in the act of reading or reception" (207). Similarly, van Dijk's macrostructure implies the processual act of a reader assembling then interlinking propositions as she moves toward a global comprehension of a text. But if semantic space recalls van Dijk's model of textual comprehension, the comparison is not an exacting one, for the dynamic movements of the network make semantic space more complex and more difficult, if not impossible, to visualize or represent. Again, van Dijk's model can be "visualized as a graph, such that the nodes are propositions and the connected lines indicate shared referents," a description that appears to be mirrored in the directed graph representations of hypertextual structure. Kaplan and Moulthrop, however, emphasize that the architectonic space "can never adequately model semantic space (the narrative dimensions of the story)" (209). When compared to print texts, Moulthrop and Kaplan's essay suggests that the complexity of hypertexts, where one always finds a "surplus of meaning," makes it more difficult to "map" meaning. But both their model and van Dijk's account for the problems inherent in mapping out, in physical space, what is ultimately a subjective, cognitive structure (many revisions to the macrostructure model, for instance, attempt to account for a reader's preexistent knowledge base). At the same time, Kaplan and Moulthrop's observation proves instructive as we move toward an increasingly digitized textuality, for it works against the "literalist" assumption that software tools can in fact externalize or embody cognitive or creative processes. In short, it is not possible to fully represent any topology (neither the connectivity of semantic relations nor that of hypertextual nodes) in a fixed grid of three-dimensions, for grid-based metrics do not account for a system's movement. Recalling a question posed by a mathematician in a research journal, poet Stephanie Strickland in succinct fashion evokes the challenge of topological phenomena: "How and to what extent can a dynamical system be represented by a symbolic one?"[17] Nevertheless, recent essays on cyber-spatiality demonstrate that the conflation of "semantic space" with the structural topology of links and nodes continues to pervade digital discourse. In her recent essay "Cyberspace, Cybertexts, Cybermaps" (2004), Marie-Laure Ryan comprehensively plots four types of space associated with digital texts: (1) the physical space of the fictional world represented by the text; (2) the architecture of the text; (3) the material space occupied by the signs of the text; and (4) the space that serves as context and container for the text.[18] Ryan's third category of "material space" is analogous to Kaplan and Moulthrop's architectonic space; and we can add, both are analogous to the material space of the page foregrounded by Concrete and L-A-N-G-U-A-G-E poetry in print texts. Ryan's first category, which refers to the space of the represented world, and her last, which refers to the spatial environment that a text both situates itself in and links to, are otherwise unproblematic. But her second category of "textual architecture" rehearses the conflation common among theorists who see digital technology as the fulfillment of contemporary literary theory, which is not surprising coming from one who believes that the aspects of theory fulfilled by hypertext "hardly need explanation at all" (101).[19] For Ryan, textual architecture refers to
The problem with Ryan's grammatical construction provides the clue to the problem with her theoretical construction. She compares the adjectival qualities "semantic, phonetic, or thematic" with the nominal qualities of "accessibility" and "contiguity"; the former take a referent - relations - whereas the latter, as nouns, do not, or at least should not. The problem inherent in the non-parallel construction is that all relations already have a degree of both "contiguity" (otherwise they would not be related), and "accessibility" (otherwise we would not know they existed). What is at stake here is the way in which connections are connected and the way in which we access them. This all depends on the materiality of the medium - a materiality that must be approached in its own terms and not those bound by print-based literary theory. Ryan conflates a textual topology, which is in fact the material form of network narrative, with what we can call a semantic topology, which is immaterial in that it consists of meaning produced by the processing of symbols and their inter-relationships. The links and nodes of a network narrative do not constitute an always already deconstructed semantic space - a structure in which all of the "semantic, phonetic, or thematic" connections have been joined by digitally mediated linkages. If this were the case, then a network narrative would amount to nothing more than an authorial schema presented to the reader in lieu of a narrative fiction. Furthermore, Moulthrop and Kaplan's model addresses the issue of composition versus reception, or writer/reader - the issue, essentially, of agency. Ryan's model does not, and the fact that she lacks a corresponding model of agency for her "textual architecture" makes the category unclear: who ultimately is the architect of this space? III.While Ryan's and many other theories have moved beyond unreflective appropriations of the cognitive map, the concept itself cannot be divorced from what we can call the "panoptical impulse": the project of instilling measures (both material and cognitive) to ensure that a more globalizing perspective is gleaned. An alternate model of hypertextual comprehension would better suit what is ultimately an unmappable space. Brian Massumi's essay "Strange Horizon: Buildings, Biograms, and the Body Topologic" provides one possible alternative - a springboard for a spatial rhetoric that is more relevant to the network space of digital narratology. From Massumi's writing on topological space, we can construct an analogy for hypertextual orientation and comprehension that not only provides an alternative to the "panoptical impulse" of literary criticism but also accounts for the temporal dimension of a narrative unfolding in network space. Whereas Jameson loses himself in the architectural tour de force of the Bonaventure Hotel, theorist Brian Massumi gets lost in his own office. Massumi begins his essay with an anecdote of his shock upon realizing that, for two months in his temporary office at the Canadian Centre for Architecture, he was "looking at the wrong street out the window."[20] He explains that from the point at which he went through the side entrance of the building, to the point where he reached his office, his negotiation of the building's winding corridors resulted in a disjunction between where he saw himself and what he saw. That is, he saw himself facing north, and this fact over-rode any visual clues to suggest that the scene outside, framed by the office window, was anything other than a north-facing view:
Massumi explains that while he clearly had no trouble finding the way from the entrance of the building to his office, his memory of the route was not a primarily visual one; he could not have sketched scenes from the corridors or mapped the route with any accuracy: "I was going on a bodily memory of my movements, one of contortion and rhythm rather than visible form" ("Strange Horizon"). This bodily memory forms a mode of orientation that we tend to take for granted, one based not on vision but rather on movement. Proprioception refers to the intuitive awareness of our body in space - it is a sense (some would argue our sixth) that makes sure, for instance, that our feet find their way up or down a staircase without watching each individual step (we habitually revert to visual cues when we come to a landing, where this rhythmic motion is altered). Or it is what allows us to touch the tip of our nose with our eyes closed. These movements rely on corporeal habits instead of cognitive maps, which as Massumi notes, are "built on the visual basis of generic three-dimensional forms [arising from] Euclidean configurations" ("Strange Horizon"). An overt difference between the two modes of orientation is that proprioception is a "self-referential sense, in that what it most directly registers are displacements of the parts of the body relative to each other" whereas "vision is an exo-referential sense, registering distances from the eye" ("Strange Horizon"). As Massumi's anecdote demonstrates, the two modes are not necessarily calibrated to one another; they are, nonetheless, inter-dependent. Proprioceptive orientation, because it relies primarily on movement, cannot be measured or mapped in a static geometry or a (Cartesian) coordinate-based grid. Since such movement defies a grid-based metric, it occurs in abstract or, more accurately, non-Euclidean space. This is the domain of topology, for the shape of a topological figure cannot be separated or considered apart from its movement. Which of these modes of reference is relevant to reading? The answer is neither, and both. Neither if we are speaking biomechanically, for most readers move very little when they move through text.[21] But conceptualizing reading as "moving through a text" has become axiomatic, and it has become just as common to invoke internalized modes of orientation for textual comprehension. Mireille Rosello has said that "reading, interpreting spaces, and drawing maps are activities so intricately intertwined that it is difficult to separate them" (129). Map-making itself, furthermore, implies a conquest of territory, and here it would imply the mastery of a text-as-territory. Such mastery assumes a panoptical perspective, and it is the same view-from-above that dominates textual criticism as a default mode, and understandably so. How else can we critique a work of art unless that work is considered, to some degree, objectively, which is to say, as an object or objective whole? But what happens when the territory itself remains in flux? Even a new map will not remove the disorientation felt upon a return visit. As mentioned earlier, even though he uses a misleading analogy, Jameson called for a form in flux when envisioned his cognitive map as a topological figure.[22] But as such, his cognitive map diverges markedly from Lynch's mental map and Tolman's psychological model, both of which emerge from learned physical environments. Furthermore, his own map over-extends itself in its totalizing aim, seeking a formal analogue for a complex, global array of social and political relations. Nonetheless, if we move from the realm of lived experience back to the realm of the text, the cognitive map as articulated by psychology remains useful as a metaphor for textual comprehension, allowing us to "map" either the represented storyworld or the structural complexities of a text. But since cognitive mapping is not the only - or even primary - mode of orientation in lived experience, it should not provide the only metaphorical analogue of textual orientation. Therefore, we can consider the metaphorical possibilities of proprioception. Given that no centralized representation or overview can adequately represent hypertextual structure, we attend to our conceptual "movement" in a network differently than we would a printed book, which provides a stable axis of orientation in the material sense. In a network, we move through links from one node to another. The activation of links, furthermore, amounts to a series of self-referential movements (if we play on the self-referentiality of proprioceptive experience) - a series that can be recorded or saved in various ways. These movements, however prescribed by the literary machinery, shape the text - not the text as it is, but as each reader discursively brings it into view. The form of the text is perceived, in Michael Joyce's words, "outward from the middle of [a reader's] own movement" (168).[23]
The same mode of reference is by no means exclusive to the digital realm. In fact, we can construct an analogy that aligns the cartographic drive of exo-referential mapping with our sense of the text-from-above, whereas the self-referential mode provides a more intuitive sense of the text-from-within. The text-from-above evokes the text's global coherence, or "macrostructure," whereas the text-from-within evokes the local coherences, or "microstructures" in the text. (The notion of the text-from-within evokes the "internal perspective" discussed by Ryan in the context of the opposition of map and the tour strategies of discourse analysis. As Ryan writes, in the map strategy, "space is represented panoramically from a perspective ranging from the disembodied god's-eye point of view of pure vertical projection to the oblique view of an observer situated on an elevated point." The tour, by contrast, "represents space dynamically from a perspective internal to the territory to be surveyed…The tour thus simulates the embodied experience of the traveler" ["Cognitive Maps" 218]. But again, Ryan remains focused on the perspectives of the spatial relations in the represented world rather than the spatial relations that constitute a hypertextual structure. The difference resides in the fact that a "tour" is more concerned with the perspective of a given character on his or her surroundings, whereas network fictions require that we attend to the "embodied experience" of a reader in or in relation to a text topology). The notion of microstructure invites consideration of other "localities" of meaning when readers engage with network fictions. For example, if the chapter functions as a semantically coherent unit in print narratives, in a network text, readers process the transformation of "node-link-node" as a locus of meaning - a meaning of the transition, Moulthrop notes, that "is always partly in the transition."[24] Beyond the node-link-node are the micro-narrative readings formed from the parts or wholes of hypertextual paths, or what Jim Rosenberg (1996) calls "episodes," which would also reside on the level of hypertextual microstructure. We attend more closely to local coherences in a network text given its inevitably elusive, or perhaps illusive totality. But it is the mobility of a network's material structure that calls for more than a finely detailed map, for "zooming in" will not reveal the meaning in/of the transition. Topology enfolds proprioception; that is, topology is the mode through which we perceive proprioceptive movement. Textual topologies, because they imply constant movement, emphasize a temporal experience that remains underprivileged in the cybercultural rubric, which more often perpetuates the rampant drive to spatialize (as Darren Tofts has said, it's rare you hear anyone mentioning "cybertime"). Topology involves the study of the event before that of the object; in turn, a topological critique values not simply an exposed end-product but also the meanings located in the process of its unfolding. Clearly, graphical overviews, which might afford the most overt analogue to an exo-referential mapping of textual structure, cannot unfold the semantic space of narrative. The concept of proprioceptive movement offers an alternative to the cartographic rhetoric of literary criticism - a counterbalance to the "panoptical impulse" that J. Hillis Miller has described as an inheritance from New Criticism of the first half of last century (17-18).[25] The same desire to account for the organic unity of a work of art, Miller adds, "cannot be detached from its theological basis" (24). Indeed, placing new emphasis on reading the text "from within" does not discount the pleasure of the view "from above," however illusory or incomplete that celestial perspective may be. But it becomes plainly obvious that the god's eye view can no longer hold the same authoritative power in a network narrative. *** References[1] "Cognitive Maps in Rats and Men" was published in The Psychological Review, 55 (4) 1948. Tolman's work planted the seeds of Environmental and Cognitive Psychology. In the 1970s neurobiologists discovered that certain "place cells" in the hippocampus of rodents would fire preferentially when the animals were moving through a given environment, a finding that "located" the cognitive map posited by Tolman (see Geoffrey Aguirre and Mark D'Espisito, "Topographical disorientation: a synthesis and taxonomy," in Brain (1999), 122, (1613-1628). O'Keefe and Nadel's The Hippocampus as a Cognitive Map. Oxford: Clarendon, 1978, and subsequent studies by RGM Morris et al,.1982, 1990, whose "water maze task" showed that rats with hippocampal lesions had impaired ability to locate an escape platform when released from different points in a circular pool, are cited as the landmark literature.) [2] Lynch, Kevin. Image of the City. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1960. [3] Jameson, Frederic. "Postmodernism and the Logic of Late Capitalism" in Postmodernism: A Reader. ed. Thomas Docherty. New York: Columbia U. Press, 1993, p.82. [4] Moulthrop, Stuart. "Hypertext and 'the Hyperreal,'" New York: ACM Press, 1989. [5] Turkle, Sherry. Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1995. [6] Koskimaa, Raine. "Visual Restructuring of Hyperfiction Narratives" in the electronic book review (ebr6) Winter 1997. www.altx.com/ebr/ebr6/ebr6.htm. Douglas, J. Yellowlees. The End of Books - Or Books Without End. Ann Arbor: U. of Michigan Press, 2001. [7] Tolva, John. "Ut Pictura hyperpoesis: Spatial Form, Visuality, and the Digital Word," New York: ACM Press, 1996. [8] Frank, Joseph. "Spatial Form in Modern Literature" in The Sewanee Review 53 (1945). [9] See van Dijk, Teun. Macrostructures: An Interdisciplinary Study of Global Structures in Discourse, Interaction, and Cognition . Hillsdale, N.J.: Lawrence Erlbaum Assoc., 1980 ). [10] Zwaan, Rolf A. Aspects of Literary Comprehension: A Cognitive Approach. Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Co., 1993, p.27. [11] Herman, David. "Narratology as a Cognitive Science" in Image & Narrative 2000, (online at: http://www.imageandnarrative.be/narratology/davidherman.htm. n.p.), and Ryan, Marie-Laure. 2003. "Cognitive Maps and the Construction of Narrative Space" in Narrative Theory and the Cognitive Sciences. ed. David Herman. Stanford: Publications of the Center for the Study of Language and Information, 2003.
[12] Baudrillard, Jean. Simulacra and Simulation. Sheila Glaser (trans). Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1994. [13] Rosello, Mireille. "The Screener's Maps: Michel de Certeau's Wandersmänner and Paul Auster's Hypertextual Detective" in Hyper/Text/Theory. ed. George Landow. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994, p.130. [14] See Zwaan, Chapter 4: "Processing spatial descriptions in fiction." [15] Charney, Davida. "The Impact of Hypertext on Processes of Reading and Writing" in Literacy and Computers. Susan J. Hilligoss and Cynthia L. Selfe. New York: Modern Language Association, 1994. (238-263). Jhondan, Johnson-Eilola. "Trying to See the Garden: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Hypertext Use in Composition Instruction," in Writing on Edge 2:2, (92-111). [16] Kaplan, Nancy and Stuart Moulthrop. "Where No Mind Has Gone Before: Ontological Design for Virtual Spaces." New York: ACM Press, 1994. [17] Strickland, Stephanie. "To Be Both in Touch and In Control" in electronic book review, Spring 1999. [18] Ryan, Marie-Laure. "Cyberspace, Cybertexts, Cybermaps" in Dichtung-digital online at www.dichtung-digital.org/2004/1-Ryan.htm , 2004. [19] Ryan, Marie-Laure. "Cyberspace, Virtuality, and the Text" in Cyberspace Textuality: Computer Technology and Literary Theory. Marie-Laure Ryan ed. Bloomington, Indiana University Press, 1999. [20] Massumi, Brian, "Strange Horizon: Buildings, Biograms, and the Body Topologic," in Chaos / Control: Complexity [chaos theory and cultural production]. digital proceedings. Hofmann, Philipp ed. Hamburg, Lit: 2002. np. [21] However, one can make an argument for an embodied reading of textual networks that is quantifiably absent in the space of print: the ability of the computer mouse to make an analog translation of human movement (the hand of the holder) into graphical space. As Thierry Bardini writes, "It therefore not only allows the user to point at any object on the screen, but also introduces a direct connection between the topographical space of the interface and the human gesture of the user. By extension, the invention of the mouse opens space for any translation of human motion into the electronic space of the computer interface. This point is fundamental in that it allows us to evacuate definitively the notion of cognition as purely intellectual representation, to introduce instead the 'embodied action' in the computer space" (Bardini, "Bridging the Gulfs: From Hypertext to Cyberspace." JCMC, 3(2), Sep. 1997. online at: http://jcmc.huji.ac.il/vol3/issue2/bardini.html ). At the same time, placing too much emphasis of the reader's role in a cybernetic circuit obscures the act of reading itself - and, in turn, the cognitive space required by any narrative. It moves toward the cyborg fantasies of virtual reality that make the VR experience the theoretical norm, rather than the experience reading networks. [22] Jameson demonstrates an intuitive understanding of the problem of topological space in his cultural analysis. On discussing the transfer the terms of Foucault's power politics to his spatial model, he concludes that, "once put that way, Foucault's own figures - the grid, for example - become starkly relativized and cease to be theories as such" (A. Stephanson, "Regarding Postmodernism - a conversation with Frederic Jameson," in Universal Abandon: The Politics of Postmodernism. A. Ross, ed. Minneapolis; University of Minnesota Press, 1988, pp.6-7). [23] Joyce, Michael. Othermindedness: The Emergence of Network Culture. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2000. Earlier on in Of Two Minds (1995) Joyce writes: Hypertext software, which forces us to represent contours of interaction in rectangles and arrows plotted on Cartesian space, fails to account for the gleeful vertigo we feel on first coming to see cyberspace and our ensuing desire to shape even discursive space proprioceptively and sensually, ie as the body knows (Of Two Minds: Hypertext Pedagogy and Poetics. Ann Arbor: U. of Michigan Press, 1995, p.64). [24] Moulthrop, Stuart. "Where to? A review of ForwardAnywhere by Cathy Marshall and Judy Malloy," online at: www.eastgate.com/reviews/Moulthrop.html. [25] Miller, J. Hillis. Fiction and Repetition: Seven English Novels . Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1982. |
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