Scheherazade heard the cock crow and knew that it was morning and stopped speaking.
And the Sultan, eager to hear the end of the story, spared her life for yet
another day.
The idea that everyone has a story and in the retelling, can captivate a sultan
(not to mention saving your ass), has always fascinated me. One of the reasons
I studied English has to do with this desire to know/read/experience the way
people reconstruct themselves and/or their realities through the things they
convey, whether that be on the IRC or in the Norton Anthology. I'm a sucker
for science
fiction though, because as a genre, it has the most to do with everything
I enjoy about literature (Oh no, the L word). You have to realize, there are
very few genre conventions for science fiction. You can do whatever the hell
you want and if it works, it WORKS in ways that defy traditional boundaries of
prose. God forbid you might learn something. My desire to push these boundaries
is why I attended UT and worked with people like John
Slatin. He understands the
potentiality in something like hypertext
as *another* way of reading, not always
a better way
granted (though sometimes it is), but a *different* construction of
what constitutes our definition of "text." Questions of interface are not new
to English, after all the book interface is one we are well practiced in and
is rendered transparent because of that practice. But how does our expertise
in text help us with students composing in the new media?
Hey, I got through that without quoting
theory, and I think I deserve some sort of prize. I'm not sure if I'll end up in academia or industry. I guess
it depends upon which is committed to answering these kinds of questions. It's all about interface. . . books are what Walter Ong
called "interfaces of the word," but I'm interested in interfaces to the world.
So that's what I do, I suppose, when I'm not playing volleyball or softball, traveling, teaching user interface courses or reading lousy SF for that matter. You can call
me by a lot of other names, but I prefer cyberfeminist.
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