Books, Blogs & The Terminal City
Imag[in]ing Fiction in an e-text Age: the Vancouver Experiment
Imag[in]ing Fiction in an e-text Age: the Vancouver Experiment
It is fair to question the relevance of novels and short fiction to a culture that now works predominantly on e-text. Dead trees and dried ink seem static and very yesterday by contrast to pixilated hyperlinks, cut-&-paste text, file downloads, and real-time web interaction. The advent of e-media - blogs, email, pda, text messaging, WiFi and laptops - inescapably challenges what was formerly called "the world of books" and forces lovers of stories to re-evaluate and re-present the case for fiction to a new and recharged era. In this course we will do just that. Our city has always been on the bleeding edge of technological change, and we will trace how, in the virtual realities of the course literature, the early name of "Terminal City" retains evolving significance for Vancouver through to the present day. To understand this, we will isolate one niche in the e-media ecology - the blogosphere - and construct a model of its form and function as a comparative reference point for a literary analysis of our works of Vancouver fiction. Blogs - web logs, or small independent online publications - have unique and illustrative similarity to the literary design of the works of fiction chosen here. These points of similarity between blog and book will then allow us to map the outlying area of difference: the awesome universe of literature.
PREREQUISITES: None
REQUIRED TEXTS:
Gerson, Carole, ed. Vancouver Short Stories
Wilson, Ethel The Innocent Traveller
Avison, Margaret Always Now
Coupland, Douglas Hey Nostradamus!
Avison, Margaret Always Now
Coupland, Douglas Hey Nostradamus!
Gibson, William All Tomorrow's Parties
COURSE REQUIREMENTS:
10% Course participation
15% Three seminar writing presentations
20% Group e-Text writing project
20% Mid-term paper (approx. 1500 words and revisions)
35% Final examination
COURSE REQUIREMENTS:
10% Course participation
15% Three seminar writing presentations
20% Group e-Text writing project
20% Mid-term paper (approx. 1500 words and revisions)
35% Final examination
2 comments:
cleverly lucid. kudos.
Thanks for making my anonymous blog about recovery and schizophrenia a little more famous. It may not seem to be anything but a good blog as you say. Behind it hides a real life cyberpunk author. You either did not know that or do now. Cheers to those of you reading this from the backward. Now Vancouver um not much to say about that. Good luck you seem to have an eye for the cyberpunk.
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