Tracing a journey from the 1950s through the 1990s, N. Katherine Hayles                  uses the autobiographical persona of Kaye to explore how literature has transformed                  itself from inscriptions rendered as the flat durable marks of print to the dynamic                  images of CRT screens, from verbal texts to the diverse sensory modalities of                  multimedia works, from books to technotexts.Weaving together Kaye's                  pseudo-autobiographical narrative with a theorization of contemporary literature in                  media-specific terms, Hayles examines the ways in which literary texts in every                  genre and period mutate as they are reconceived and rewritten for electronic                  formats. As electronic documents become more pervasive, print appears not as the sea                  in which we swim, transparent because we are so accustomed to its conventions, but                  rather as a medium with its own assumptions, specificities, and inscription                  practices. Hayles explores works that focus on the very inscription technologies                  that produce them, examining three writing machines in depth: Talan Memmott's                  groundbreaking electronic work Lexia to Perplexia, Mark Z. Danielewski's cult                  postprint novel House of Leaves, and Tom Phillips's artist's book A Humument. Hayles                  concludes by speculating on how technotexts affect the development of contemporary                  subjectivity.Writing Machines is the second volume in the Mediawork Pamphlets                  series.

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