Seminar in Textual Studies, Ben Attias, from the World Wide Web.
Ben Attias's course is dedicated to the centrality of text. The readings in the course and other resources referenced at this site provide a varied set of insights into textuality.
Jean Baudrillard, Radical Thought.
Baudrillard's essay separates "thought" (which includes language) from "reality." They have an "insoluble relation." The commandment is supported here by Baudrillard's insistence that the attempt to fuse thought and "the real" results only in hallucination.
Critical Approaches to Cultural Studies, Ron Burnett, from the World Wide Web.
Shaviro's broad-ranging imaginative excursion into the postmodern mentality touches down on the difference between "representation" and "simulation." The difference is grounded in the linguistic situation.
Theory and Practice of Hypertext at the University of Virginia, from the World Wide Web.
Jonathan Culler. On Deconstruction: Theory and Criticism after Structuralism. Ithaca, NY: Cornell U. Press, 1982.
Because of its high profile, DECONSTRUCTION as a theoretical concept poses some categorical issues. Originally we thought to devote an entire commandment to it. However, we now subsume it under the commandment on language. It is preeminently a strategy in linguistic analysis. It became more than that in public discourse because it acted as a political lightning rod for critics of the general postmodern temper.
Culler's readable little book gives us an insight into the complicated state of literary theory in the 1970s and 1980s. It was then that deconstructionism emerged on the tide of poststructuralism. Though the book is a bit dated because of its somewhat journalistic approach to the cross currents of literary theory, it remains interesting and helpful in placing deconstructionism.
George Landow. Hype/Text/Theory. We include the entire topic of hypertext under the rubric of language/textuality. Landow lays a definitive foundation for this strategy in this book and in Hypertext: The Convergence of Contemporary Critical Theory and Technology.
Brian McHale. Postmodernist Fiction. McHale places "text" in a critical framework of "alternative ontologies."
Donald Revell. Interview. Revell, a postmodernist poet, sees language as the only living medium available. He compares its use by modernist and postmodernist writers and expresses a Lyotardian aversion to its totalizing powers.
The Engine of Theory. In an ESSAY from THE PROGRAMME, we talk about the postmodern dynamics of creating reality with language.
Of Fishing in the Electronic Sea. In TALK SEVEN from THE PROGRAMME, we refer to George Landow's advice to critics faced with the convergence of critical theory and electronic information technology, which is making hypertext a new medium in an intertextual environment.
Linksmanship: maxims on the art of hypertext. This ESSAY from THE PROGRAMME lays down some guiding principles in the making of hypertext. It emphasizes that the purpose of hypertext is to make meaning through the linking process. It ends with a theoretical note on the potential power of hypertext to recapture a poetics of ambiguity.
Books vs. electronic text, Robert Gassel. A reader balances the virtue of books against the growing use of electronic text.