_______ _______ __ / _____/ /__ __/ / / / /__ / / ____ __ __ __ ___ __ __ ____ / / / ___/ __ / / / __ \ / / / / / //__/ / //_ \ / __ \ / / / /____ / /_/ / / /_/ / / /_/ / / / / / / / / /_/ / / / \_____/ \____/ \____/ \____/ /_/ /_/ /_/ \__/_/ /_/ November, 1994 _EJournal_ Volume 4 Number 3 ISSN 1054-1055 There are 843 lines in this issue. An Electronic Journal concerned with the implications of electronic networks and texts. 3032 Subscribers in 37 Countries University at Albany, State University of New York EJOURNAL@ALBANY.edu CONTENTS: [This is line 19 ] Editor's Note [Begins at line 49 ] The Holland _et al_ Exchanges [ at line 86 ] Announcement: _The Little Magazine_ on CD-ROM [ at line 728] Information about _EJournal_ - [at line 759] About Subscriptions, Contents and Back Issues About Supplements to Previous Texts About _EJournal_ People [at line 814] Board of Advisors Consulting Editors ========================================================================= ***************************************************************** * This electronic publication and its contents are (c) copyright * * 1994 by _EJournal_. Permission is hereby granted to give away * * the journal and its contents, but no one may "own" it. Any and * * all financial interest is hereby assigned to the acknowledged * * authors of individual texts. This notification must accompany * * all distribution of _EJournal_. * ***************************************************************** EDITOR'S NOTE - [line 49 ] This issue is made up of "conversations" with Norman Holland about his essay "Eliza Meets the Postmodern" in V4N1 (April, 1994) of _EJournal_. Two readers sent essays directly to us, more or less as extended letters-to-the-editor. After many iterations of reply- retort- response, we all agreed to publish one of the sets of exchanges, the one begun by Doug Brent. Four readers sent e-mail directly to Professor Holland. He and three of them graciously agreed to let _EJournal_ present their correspondence almost verbatim, trying to capture the spontaneity of their exchanges. After much correspondence, we have chosen the Harpold and Sikillian exchanges with Norm Holland to make up the rest of this issue. Professor Holland has suggested the sequence of presentation. The spontaneity we sought has been dampened by delays. It took us longer than it should have to establish and follow the procedures we felt obliged to set up. Through it all, everyone has been remarkably patient. We are especially grateful to Professor Holland, the person with an intellectual investment in every snippet of text that follows, for his patience as well as for his promptness in responding to every communication. In spite of the lag, we think the exchanges were well worth recording, and the procedure appears to warrant repeating. As we creep toward html markup and access to _EJournal_ via WWW, we will try to expand this issue's interspersed linearity in the direction of convenient cross referencing. [Jennifer Wyman has prepared html versions of several issues, and she is working on an experimental home page.] ==================================================================== THE HOLLAND _ET AL_ EXCHANGES - [line 86 ] Professor Holland has orchestrated the several messages as follows - Doug Brent's response to "Eliza,", sent to _EJournal_, 14 April 1994 [l. 118] Holland's reply to Brent [l. 219] Michael Sikillian's message to Holland, 27 May 1994 [l. 276] Holland's reply to Sikillian [l. 323] Terry Harpold's message to Holland, 22 May 1994 [l. 340] Holland's reply to Harpold [l. 383] Harpold (again), 26 October 1994 [l. 403] Holland to Harpold II [l. 450] "Intermezzo, Interjection, or Intervention" by Holland [l. 472] Doug Brent's second reply, (via _EJournal_) 10 September 1994 [l. 487] Holland's reply to all the above (mostly Brent) [l. 592] Works Mentioned [l. 708] ----------------------------------------------------------------------- DOUG BRENT TO _EJOURNAL_ - 14 April 1994 [line 118] I find Norman Holland's essay, "Eliza Meets the Postmodern," immensely interesting for a large number of reasons, but I am particularly pleased to see an author with Holland's experience in literary criticism call into question some facile assumptions about the "postmodern" character of hypertext. I think that he has put his finger on a key point. Those who make vast claims for the power of certain kinds of text to "do" certain things must be constantly on guard against the temptation to attribute to the text activities that are actually acts of reading. Constructivist views of reading have been around for so long now that they shouldn't have to be restated, but somehow or other they keep getting forgotten (even sometimes by reader-response critics who should know better, as for instance Iser who keeps talking about the "repertoire" of the text when he really means the repertoire of the reader). I am not sure that I agree with Holland's definition of a postmodernist text as one that actually does things on its own as opposed to offering choices to the reader. This seems a highly selective account of postmodernism. But the word "postmodernism" has attracted to itself such a plethora of competing and ambiguous definitions that the term is almost not worth using; certainly it's not worth spending a lot of time arguing about. Whether or not the distinction can be labelled "modern" versus "postmodern," I think that Holland does us all a service by distinguishing between forms of "text" which, hyper or not, require the reader to do all of the work in constructing their meaning, and forms of artifical intelligence that really do participate in their own construction. I would, however, like to take issue with Holland's argument that hypertext is unlikely to alter radically the experience of reading simply because it does not do anything that cannot be done by conventional means. In one sense he is quite right. A book with copious footnotes and cross-references is a primitive form of hypertext. A reader sitting in a library moving from source to source can be seen as constructing another primitive form of hypertext, in this case (as Holland cogently argues) under even more direct control of the reader. But I disagree with Holland when he discounts the extent to which the ease of doing something changes the nature of the experience. [line 160] Take, for instance, the difference between manuscript and typographic culture. In one sense the printing press does little that a manuscript copyist cannot do; it just does it faster, more economically, and on a greater scale. But scholars from Eisenstein to Ong have argued persuasively that the printing press created a profound revolution in Western culture --in effect, created modernism-- simply because those differences of scale are so very great. The printing press created the illusion of the autonomous text, the phenomenon of copyright and the ownership of knowledge, the critical mass of ideas that resulted in the Renaissance. By virtue of its ability to create exactly repeatable copies, it enabled indexing --useless when every copy had different pagination-- which in turn allowed knowledge to be retrieved on a scale unimaginable in a manuscript culture. It created what McLuhan calls a "break boundary": a point at which a phenomenon acquires a scale that causes it to turn into, not a pumped-up version of same thing, but another kind of thing altogether. This is the claim that is applied to hypertext. Those who make it are not talking about simple hypertext documents confined to a single disk or CD-ROM, with multiple but highly finite pathways from one unit of information to another. They are talking about the rapidly-growing webs of information such as those appearing on World-Wide Web, in which the links between pieces of information are potentially infinite. This technology is now in a stage of craft literacy, more difficult for the average person to access than the hieroglyphic script that kept literacy from becoming a major influence on society for many centuries. As this form of text becomes as ubiquitous as the book, it will not simply make cross-referencing "easier." It will make it so much easier that it will become a different activity altogether. Text will cross another break boundary. Potential effects include the destruction of the concept of authorship, associational rather than linear indexing, the breakdown of disciplinarity -- well, I needn't go on. Read any hypertext futurist such as Jay Bolter for the complete list. [line 197] Whether we use the label "postmodern" to describe this phenomenon is a very good question. Certainly, as Holland argues, our slack-jawed wonder at the phenomenon should not tempt us to attribute a life of its own to what is after all just text, however complex its interconnections. And as always, we will have to wait fifty years or so before we can look back on this technological revolution and decide whether all or any of the claims made for it are justified. (This is an occupational hazard of futurism.) But I would be willing to bet that a fundamental change in the way we interact with text, a change brought about by a massive increase in the scale of a communications medium, will have far more dramatic effects than simply making it easier to do what we have always done. Doug Brent University of Calgary dabrent@acs.ucalgary.ca ------------------------------------------------------------------------ NORMAN HOLLAND TO DOUG BRENT - [line 220] I am grateful for Professor Brent's graceful and intelligent response to my essay. I think he makes a point well worth making. Not only that, he phrases the distinction I was drawing more elegantly than I did: "between forms of `text' which . . . require the reader to do all the work in constructing their meaning, and forms of artificial intelligence that really do participate in their own construction." Yes, precisely. I am not sure, however, that I intended to say (in Professor Brent's phrasing) that "hypertext is unlikely to alter radically the experience of reading." Undoubtedly, when I read a hypertext fiction like Michael Joyce's _Afternoon_, I have a very different experience from reading the Margaret Atwood paperback currently by my bed. It's just that the differences don't seem to me to cross any boundary between modern and postmodern. Professor Brent goes on to point to the ways printed books altered manuscript culture and to suggest that hypertext will have a like effect on print culture. I think the point is well taken and most intelligently deployed. Unquestionably, by virtue of hypertext's cross-referencing, we will become able --we have already become able-- to read even traditional texts in drastically new ways. Readers' experiences, interactions, and responses are all different. Some of those differences we can already see. Many we are unconscious of. [line 246] While mulling over Professor Brent's's response, there came across my screen another highly intelligent writing. This was "Why Are Electronic Publications Difficult to Classify?" by Professor Jean-Claude Guedon of the University of Montreal. Electronic publishing (this journal, for example, or the LISTs on the Internet) is changing print culture as deeply as print culture changed the functions of handwriting. Notably, e-publishing replaces the one-way diffusion of print culture with feedback and dialogue. Thus, publishing moves from the fixed book toward the "permanent seminar," toward process rather than product. At the same time, the retrievals possible in something like NEXIS correspond to the indexing and cross-referencing of a hypertext CD-ROM. In general, the Internet makes hypertext possible across a global scale. Professor Guedon's point parallels Professor Brent's. Both hypertext and the networks are profoundly changing print culture. Should these changes be seen as marking a breakpoint between modernism and postmodernism? I say not. That was the point of my original article. I recognize, however, the wisdom of Professor Brent's last paragraph. Only time will really settle the question. In the meantime, Professor Brent has elegantly clarified the matter. --Norm Holland University of Florida nnh@nervm.nerdc.ufl.edu ------------------------------------------------------------------------ MICHAEL SIKILLIAN TO NORMAN HOLLAND - 27 May 1994 [line 276] Professor Holland, I'd just like to say "bravo" for a long overdue article. As a multmedia developer, I have followed with some interest (and amusement) the academic ideas of what exactly multimedia is. Especially the idea that it is some vindication of postmodernism or deconstruction as literary theories. More interesting work has been done by Walter Ong (a bit dated, but still valid) in _Orality and Literacy_, and by Richard Lanham in _The Electronic Word_. Lanham makes connections to Quintilian and classical rhetoric. Also Brenda Laurel has some interesting links to Aristotelian rhetoric and dramatic theory in her book _Computers as Theatre_. I have found that my education as a classicist is ironically more relevant than some of the more technological approaches to new media. I am doing some work now on texts in interactive media, specifically with translation. Different types of translations --literal, "modern", free-- can all be related together in an interactive program, much as cubism did with perspective. One of the things that Delaney, Barrett _et al_ point out is that hypertexts are not linear; that they are diffuse. You correctly point out that the average reader --skimming a text, leafing through pages, using commentaries-- does the same thing. I think that the "linear" nature of a traditional text is overstated. Also, another thing you hint at --hypertexts can be used to *concentrate* a reader's experience in a text to a much greater degree than a traditional text can. The goal of interface design is to understand and guide a reader's experience in a concrete direction. Any software package which tells the reader "there are no limits; we cannot presume to know what you want to do" will fail or be unused. That is why usability testing is so important. And that is also what a good print author does. Multimedia and hypertexts are powerful tools; but they are not necessarily the repudiation of the entire textual/ critical tradition; rather they can make it much more efficient. Congratulations again on a fine article. Michael Sikillian 762664.1323@CompuServe.COM Lexigen@world.std.com -------------------------------------------------------------------- NORMAN HOLLAND TO MICHAEL SIKILLIAN - [line 323] I read Michael Sikillian as making the same point as Professor Brent, namely, that the *experience* of hypertext will be different. I find particularly apposite his remark that hypertext with no aim at all will simply not be used. In effect, hypertext can limit a reader to certain connections (while codex can not), *and if hypertext does not,* it will fail. A most interesting observation from what is obviously a highly relevant range of experience. Norman Holland University of Florida nnh@nervm.nerdc.ufl.edu ------------------------------------------------------------------------ TERRY HARPOLD TO NORMAN HOLLAND - 22 May 1994 [line 340] Norm, I've just read with pleasure your "Eliza meets the Postmodern" piece in the recent _EJournal_. I believe that I disagree with you somewhat in the emphasis of your model of the postmodern --I think that textual/ readerly agency is the right question, but I would prefer to consider agency with regard to a dialectic of authority and agency along Lacanian lines: the contingency of the narrative form imposes the reader's confrontation with elementary lack in language (in a parallel formulation, the desire of the Other, as site of language). But I think that you've made a very valuable contribution here: that which is most commonly cited by most proponents of the `hypertext validates/ tests postmodernism' notion --the emphasis on multiplicity, unlimited connection and diversion-- is, in my mind, founded on a decidedly *modernist* understanding of texts as highly complex, profoundly connectionist, but ultimately saturated or closed fields. In my own work, I emphasize the moments of rupture, disconnection, misfortune [%dystuche%] or *failure* in these narratives. The Eliza or OZ paradigms are useful as antidotes to the cartographically-modelled connectionist paradigms of digital text because they introduce elements of inconsistency and a kind of raw contingency that confronts the human participant with the irreducibility of the Real to the Symbolic. These programs don't fully succeed in this --they are too limited in their current forms --but they point the way to a model of textual agency that clearly exceeds the modernist forms. Thanks for the piece. I found it very suggestive. Terry Harpold University of Pennsylvania tharpold@mail.sas.upenn.edu ---------------------------------------------------------------------- NORMAN HOLLAND TO TERRY HARPOLD - [line 383] Thanks for your kind words about "Eliza," Terry. Yes, I think the emphasis on multiplicity, etc., is "modernist," a focus on the text as thing-in-itself that our postmodern theory and our post-1960s psychological knowledge of perception belies. With respect to agency, however, you, like most literary folk, believe that texts have agency or, to put it more simply, can do things, in particular, can impose themselves on our minds. There is no psychological evidence for this, and I have to be adamant about that. Best, Norm Holland University of Florida nnh@nervm.nerdc.ufl.edu --------------------------------------------------------------------- TERRY HARPOLD TO NORMAN HOLLAND - 26 October 1994 [line 403] Norm, Your rejection of the pomo enthusiasm for text-centered agency is well-known, and I won't waste your time trying to disabuse you of the prejudice ;-) But I do think that the locus of agency in digital texts is more complex than we have been accustomed to thinking for printed texts --*because the former are in the digital mode*. This aspect of reading these texts deserves a closer look for that reason. Digital texts are read within mimetic structures (the "interface") that locate them inside the boundaries of human interaction --that is, as objects that appear to be seen *lucidly* and *consistently* through the aperture of software and hardware. The interface in this way depicts a kind of super-narrative: it tells a story, if you will, of user control and user-centered agency, in which the reading of the digital text is framed. But digital media are subject to failures that lie outside of the user's control or purview, and these may fracture the nested boundaries of the narratives that the interface defines, as well as the fiction of user agency that these boundaries promote. A printed text is not likely to collapse catastrophically as you read it, becoming irreversibly illegible. This is not an uncommon event in the digital modes, and therein lies a crucial difference. This is what I meant by my emphasis in my original message on misfortune [%dystuche%] in digital media. When the embedding narrative of interface ("there is a story to tell: here it is; you may read it...") collapses, when the connections break down, when the text becomes unreadable ("there is to tell"), where is agency situated? I think that the question is open, and that's where things get interesting. Regards, Terry University of Pennsylvania tharpold@mail.sas.upenn.edu -------------------------------------------------------------------- HOLLAND TO HARPOLD [line 450] Terry, I see what you mean, but I still don't buy into the idea that a text, even a digital text, is active. How is the tendency of digital texts to crash any different from the alas, all-too-real likelihood that our books on acidic paper will collapse into dust when we pull them from the library shelves? If agency that be, it is an agency any inert matter has. I think there is a better way of thinking about such things, namely, keeping our focus firmly on what the reader is doing and thinking. If the reader thinks the interface guarantees "user control," that's the reader's construction. If the reader thinks, as I do, that my connection to you through the Internet is precarious and complex, that too is the reader's construction. Best, Norm University of Florida nnh@nervm.nerdc.ufl.edu ==================================================================== HOLLAND INTERMEZZO, INTERJECTION, OR INTERVENTION - [line 472] Reading over Doug Brent's, Michael Sikillian's, and Terry Harpold's responses, it seems to me that the colloquy has opened up an issue latent in the essay and perhaps unresolved there. That is, even if we grant that a new technology like hypermedia does not in and of itself *do* anything, don't we need to say that it does open up, invite, facilitate certain kinds of responses or experiences more than others? If so and if those responses are "postmodern," then isn't the text itself in some sense postmodern? In other words, is "postmodernism" in texts or in readers? In a second response, Professor Brent makes this issue very clear. ==================================================================== FROM DOUG BRENT TO NORMAN HOLLAND (via _EJournal_) - 10 September 1994 [line 488] It's hard to disagree with anyone who finds your remarks elegant and wise, and I heartily thank Professor Holland for brightening up what is otherwise a hideous beginning of term. (I mean no sarcasm here--it really is nice to engage in a civil exchange of ideas. In many respects, our ideas are not all that far apart, and this makes civil exchange easy.) But I think there's a little more at stake here than whether hypertext is "modern" or "postmodern." I was really going after Professor Holland's suggestion that hypertext is not much different from other kinds of text, in which I offer the following as evidence: In general, hypermedia simply do electronically what a reader or researcher might do "by hand" in a library. That is, one could interrupt one's listening to Beethoven's Ninth in a music library to consult a score, a biography, or criticism. In a way, hypermedia are simply a variorum or a Norton Critical Edition done electronically. They are by no means as radical a departure from familiar forms as claimed. Holland is quite right that the issue is not what a medium *does*, in the sense that no medium actually *does* anything at all --it makes *us* do something. But paragraphs such as the above seem to me to radically understate the potential of a medium to make us do something different. This is the case I've already made, and I won't remake it. Rather I'll take another look at the "modern/ postmodern" distinction that was really Holland's point before he accidentally pushed my transformative technology button. Perhaps the confusion arises from an unclear notion --unclear in much postmodernist theory, not just Holland's piece-- about what it means for a text to "be" postmodern. Holland is saying, I think, that unless we begin to talk about artificially intelligent "texts," a text can't really "be" modern, postmodern or anything else. It just sits there being what it is, a bunch of marks on a page waiting for us to do something to or for or about it. Postmodernism is a name for an interpretive act, not a type of text. [line 530] But interpretive theories tend to leak back into artistic practice. Many texts in the postmodern era are written in ways that invite postmodern readings --and yes, I think that certain texts invite certain types of readings more than others, and that this is sometimes deliberate on the part of the author. This is the sense, I think, in which hypermedia "are" postmodern. Of course they just sit there doing nothing until the reader activates them. But when activated, they make it vastly easier for a reader to do postmodern sorts of things with them --to inscribe her own meanings in the text literally, not just figuratively, to engage in recursive and associational reading patterns, and --perhaps most important-- to wallow in instability and uncertainty. Linear hardcopy text looks stable, even if it isn't. Hypertext jams its instability up against our bifocals and shouts it in our ears. This is what I meant when I said that the effect of a medium depends not on what it makes *possible* but on what it makes *easy.* Hypertext is "postmodern," not in the sense that it does something new, but in the sense that it makes postmodern "reading" so easy that it is virtually inevitable, and "modern" reading so difficult that it is virtually impossible. I think the discussion would be helped if we clarifed three terms hovering at the edges. "Constructivism," "deconstruction" and "postmodernism" need to be disambiguated. [line 556] I am no expert in postmodernism, but I read it as a much larger set of attitudes than "deconstruction." "Deconstruction," I think, is an activity of a critic, a conscious showing-up of a text performed by a reader anxious to show that it has no stable meaning. Postmodernism is a much larger constellation of ideas, in which deconstruction finds its place, but which is concerned with larger issues of indeterminacy and interaction between text and reader and between text and other text rather than between text and world. "Constructivism" is a term of cognitive science, not a literary term, but it connects with this discussion in that it, too, suggests that "meaning" is not in the text but in the reader. Where constructivism really parts company with deconstruction is that constructivism is concerned with how meaning, unstable or not, is nonetheless built up by people bringing their own schemata to bear on the stimulus of a text. Deconstruction seems determined to leave the reader coughing in the dust, left behind by a text doing its own thing. I think my bias is clear, and I agree with Holland that the notion of a text doing its own thing seems fundamentally incompatible with what we know about how people make and more or less share meanings. I never thought I'd find myself, a confirmed anti-psychoanalytic, agreeing with Norm Holland, but the persistent misunderstandings of reader-response psychology make strange bedfellows. Doug Brent University of Calgary dabrent@acs.ucalgary.ca ------------------------------------------------------------------------ NORMAN HOLLAND'S RESPONSE TO ALL OF THE ABOVE - [line 592] Here again, I find myself in nearly total agreement with Professor Brent. His definition of postmodern ("concerned with larger issues of indeterminacy and interaction between text and reader and between text and other text rather than between text and world") is not mine, but broader. Mine was: "In postmodern art, artists use as a major part of their material *our* ideas about what they are working with." There is no arguing with definitions, however. The question is simply, Which works better?, and only time will tell that. Professor Brent's more discussable point is that there is a sense in which it is reasonable to call hypertext postmodern in that it causes postmodern activities on its reader's part. Thus, although he comes from a reader-active, reader-response position, I would have to say some of his phrasings are unpsychological: "the potential of a medium to make us do something different"; "Certain texts invite certain types of readings"; or "Hypertext jams its instability up against our bifocals." These seem to me to relapse into saying texts *do* things, and, as we both agree, that runs counter to what we know of the psychology of reading. I'd rephrase: "the potential of a medium to reward our doing something different." "Certain types of readings succeed with certain texts, other types of readings don't." "When we read hypertext, we feel instability quivering in our bifocals." In every such case I'd rephrase so as always to keep the reader's activity as the energizing force. But these are minor quibbles. In other phrasings, Professor Brent seems to me to have it exactly and elegantly right: "Postmodernism is a name for an interpretive act, not a type of text." "When activated, [hypermedia] make it vastly easier for a reader to do postmodern sorts of things with them." [line 628] Professor Brent suggests that when readers enjoy these postmodern strategies of interpretion, as understood by critics, that encourages artists to create works that will yield to them. True enough, and this is very clearly happening in all the arts at the moment. Looking backward, however, I would say that visual artists led the way. In that sense visual artists "invented" postmodernism in my sense, either preceding the critics or developing independently. Literary deconstruction came later from an essentially philosophical base. That is, I see Action Painting and Op Art as transitional toward postmodernism, and Rosenquist, Warhol, and Lichtenstein doing definitively postmodern work by the early 1960s. Derrida becomes recognized in 1966-67. Probably the visual artists never heard of him, and he certainly does not mention them. I am sure, though, there are other ways of reading the intellectual history of that fascinating period. In this context, I think there can be little disagreement with Professor Brent's point that the existence of this or that method of interpretation leads artists to create things that can be interpreted that way. That was very obviously true in the period of New Criticism and we see it now in a variety of fields besides literature. [line 653] But what about Professor Brent's point that if a work rewards postmodern reading strategies, it should be called postmodern? "Hypertext," he writes, "is `postmodern' . . . in the sense that it makes postmodern `reading' so easy that it is virtually inevitable, and `modern' reading so difficult that it is virtually impossible." Well, yes, but here again it seems to me Professor Brent is lapsing back into language that attributes to the text attributions of the reader. "It makes." "Hypertext *is* postmodern." Wouldn't his sentence be more precise, if less elegant, if it were: We call hypertext postmodern because we find it easy to read hypertext in a postmodern way and almost impossible to read it in a modern way. The problem becomes particularly clear if we use an even more problematic term than "postmodern," say, Romantic. "This poem is Romantic because it praises the primitive" or some other of the myriad definitions of Romanticism. If we rephrase: "I call this poem Romantic because, as I read it, it praises the primitive," we are no longer ontologizing the attribution "Romantic." We are no longer attempting to create the illusion that we all agree about the poem or defintions of Romanticism or that we are simply reporting on some neutral fact "out there" beyond our fingertips. We are no longer involved in the objectivist fallacy (in George Lakoff's sense) that *the poem* becomes this or that because of something *the poem* does. It will of course be said that my insistence on making explicit who is doing what introduces an infinite regress, total subjectivity, rampant individualism, the autonomous subject, or some other horror. Not so. It simply makes explicit who is doing what. I think Professor Brent agrees with me that the humans are doing things, not the artworks. Then there is the interesting problem of the Eliza-type programs, which which my essay began this discussion; they evoke the illusion that they are doing something. Professor Brent's parting quip at psychoanalysis raises another interesting point. Instead of dismissing psychoanalysis, I believe it meshes with constructivist psychology quite usefully. Psychoanalysis can add to the constructivist model of human nature a way of talking about individual differences. That is, individuality (psychoanalytically understood) is what chooses among the various testings posited in constructivist accounts of perception, knowledge, action, or memory. Constructivist psychology discovers humans' general strategies for perceiving, knowing, etc., and psychoanalysis addresses individual tactics. But to pursue this further would open up a whole new --can of worms? No, not that clich/e. Would open up a whole new set of dendrites, axons, and synapses. Norman N. Holland University of Florida nnh@nervm.nerdc.ufl.edu -------------------------------------------------------------------- WORKS MENTIONED - [line 708] Guedon, Jean-Claude, "Why are Electronic Publications Difficult to Classify? The Orthogonality of Print and Digital Media," in Ann Okerson, ed., _Directory of Electronic Journals, Newsletters and Academic Discussion Lists, 4th edition_ (Washington, D.C.: Office of Scientific and Academic Publishing, Association of Research Libraries, 1994) pp. 17-21. Lanham, Richard A., _The Electronic Word: Democracy, Technology and the Arts_ (Chicago and London: University of Chicago, 1993) Laurel, Brenda, _Computers as Theater_ (Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1991) Ong, Walter J, _Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word_ (London and New York: Methuen, 1982) ==================================================================== _The Little Magazine_ ANNOUNCEMENT - November 1994 [line 728] Issue 21 of the literary journal _The Little Magazine_ will be distributed as a CD-ROM, so we are looking for work which maximizes the potential of this medium. We encourage contributors to conceive of their submissions as multi-media "texts" which can incorporate graphics, audio and hypertext (and so forth). "Straight" texts will also be considered, especially those concerned with issues relating to an electronic medium (the attitude need not be positive). We will produce the journal using a Microsoft Windows system and Asymetrix Multimedia Toolbook, and will accept submissions on disk (Macintosh format permissible but not preferred), or via e-mail, ftp, or DAT. Paper as a last resort! We'd prefer sight and sound in digitized format, but we can digitize work for you if we have to. Our conceptual / diagrammatic deadline is January 31, and technical / final deadline is April 1. Please contact us as soon as possible if you have work to contribute. _The Little Magazine_ Department of English University at Albany Albany, NY 12222 518-442-4398 bh4781@csc.albany.edu We look forward to hearing from you -- The Editors, _The Little Magazine_ [line 756] ------------------------------------------------------------ ------------------------ I N F O R M A T I O N --------------- ------------------------------------------------------------------- ---------------------------------------------------------------------- About Subscribing and Sending for Back Issues: In order to: Send to: This message: Subscribe to _EJournal_: LISTSERV@ALBANY.edu SUB EJRNL YourName Get Contents/Abstracts of previous issues: LISTSERV@ALBANY.edu GET EJRNL CONTENTS Get Volume 1 Number 1: LISTSERV@ALBANY.edu GET EJRNL V1N1 Send mail to our "office": EJOURNAL@ALBANY.edu Your message... --------------------------------------------------------------------------- About "Supplements": _EJournal_ continues to experiment with ways of revising, responding to, reworking, or even retracting the texts we publish. Authors who want to address a subject already broached --by others or by themselves-- may send texts for us to consider publishing as a Supplement issue. Proposed supplements will not go through as thorough an editorial review process as the essays they annotate. --------------------------------------------------------------------- About _EJournal_: [line 789] _EJournal_ is an all-electronic, e-mail delivered, peer-reviewed, academic periodical. We are particularly interested in theory and practice surrounding the creation, transmission, storage, interpretation, alteration and replication of electronic "text" - broadly defined. We are also interested in the broader social, psychological, literary, economic and pedagogical implications of computer- mediated networks. The journal's essays are delivered free to Internet addressees. Recipients may make paper copies; _EJournal_ will provide authenticated paper copy from our read-only archive for use by academic deans or others. Writers who think their texts might be appreciated by _EJournal_'s audience are invited to forward files to EJOURNAL@ALBANY.edu. If you are wondering about starting to write a piece for to us, feel free to ask if it sounds appropriate. There are no "styling" guidelines; we try to be a little more direct and lively than many paper publications, and considerably less hasty and ephemeral than most postings to unreviewed electronic spaces. Essays in the vicinity of 5000 words fit our format well. We read ASCII; we look forward to experimenting with other transmission and display formats and protocols. [line 812] ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Board of Advisors: Stevan Harnad University of Southampton Dick Lanham University of California at L. A. Ann Okerson Association of Research Libraries Joe Raben City University of New York Bob Scholes Brown University Harry Whitaker University of Quebec at Montreal ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Consulting Editors - November, 1993 ahrens@alpha.hanover.edu John Ahrens Hanover srlclark@liverpool.ac.uk Stephen Clark Liverpool dabrent@acs.ucalgary.ca Doug Brent Calgary djb85@albany Don Byrd Albany donaldson@loyvax Randall Donaldson Loyola College ds001451@ndsuvm1 Ray Wheeler North Dakota erdtt@pucal Terry Erdt Purdue-Calumet fac_askahn@vax1.acs.jmu.edu Arnie Kahn James Madison folger@watson.ibm.com Davis Foulger IBM - Watson Center gms@psuvm Gerry Santoro Penn State nakaplan@ubmail.ubalt.edu Nancy Kaplan Baltimore nrcgsh@ritvax Norm Coombs RIT r0731@csuohio Nelson Pole Cleveland State richardj@bond.edu.au Joanna Richardson Bond ryle@urvax Martin Ryle Richmond twbatson@gallua Trent Batson Gallaudet userlcbk@umichum Bill Condon Michigan wcooper@gpu.srv.ualberta.ca Wes Cooper Alberta -------------------------------------------------------------------------- Editor: Ted Jennings, English, University at Albany Assistant Editor: Chris Funkhouser, University at Albany Technical Associate: Jennifer Wyman, University at Albany Editorial Asssociate: Jerry Hanley, emeritus, University at Albany -------------------------------------------------------------------------- University at Albany Computing and Network Services: Ben Chi, Director -------------------------------------------------------------------------- University at Albany, State University of New York, Albany, NY 12222 USA