🚀 go-pugleaf

Face to face for the first time, Janet H. Murray and Sven Birkerts
continue the debate they conducted last August in Hotwired
http://www.hotwired.com/synapse/braintennis/97/31/index0a.html 
What has become of fiction in our times, and what does the future hold?
What is the fate of reading in an electronic age?

Janet H. Murray, author of Hamlet on the Holodeck: The Future of Narrative
in Cyberspace and Sven Birkerts, author of The Gutenberg Elegies: The Fate
of Reading in an Electronic Age in a public exchange of ideas.

Thursday, November 13th, 7:00pm (please note later than usual time)
Bartos Theater, MIT List Visual Arts Center, 20 Ames St., Cambridge
Info: 617 253.5249 or authors@mit.edu
FREE and open to the public.
Wheelchair accessible. Refreshments served.

In The Gutenberg Elegies (Fawcett Columbine), literary critic Sven
Birkerts argues we are sacrificing literary culture in our haste to
embrace the wonders of the electronic age.  Nothing among the new
information technologies can replace the profound challenges and rewards,
or the intimate experience, of encountering fiction via the printed page. 
From Birkerts� essays on reading emerge a compelling reminder of the vital
role reading fiction plays in �transforming the experience of the daily�
and a bold challenge to re-evaluate the technological journey our culture
is undertaking.  Part autobiography, part polemic, part meditation, The
Gutenberg Elegies provides one of the decade�s most moving and provocative
accounts of �why reading matters, why it is both a delight and a
necessity.� �The Harvard Review 

Janet H. Murray, author of Hamlet on the Holodeck (Free Press) and Senior
Research Scientist at MIT, sees the electronic age differently.  As a
teacher of interactive fiction writing in MIT�s Film and Media Studies
Program, she witnesses the expansion of fiction�s possibilities daily. 
Murray discusses the unique properties and pleasures of digital
environments�the state of immersion, the titillating effect of
cybernarratives that never climax because everything is morphable, the
challenges of constructing tales with infinite possibilities for the next
scene�and argues they are still connected to the traditional satisfactions
of narrative.  Far from dead, she says, fiction is entering a brave new
world via the computer.  �Murray takes us beyond the clever games and
gimmicks ... toward a literature that once more probes the gut questions
of human life.� �Norman H. Holland, author of �The I�

Web resources on Hamlet on the Holodeck
http://www-mitpress.mit.edu/bookstore/authors/hamlet.html
http://web.mit.edu/jhmurray/www/HOH.html

Web resources on The Gutenberg Elegies
http://www-mitpress.mit.edu/bookstore/authors/gutenber.html
http://www.randomhouse.com/catalog/display.cgi?449910091

Join us for this provocative and timely debate between two highly
respected scholars of reading and its relation to culture, of fiction and
its future.

This event is part of authors@mit, a series cosponsored by MIT Humanities
and Dewey Libraries and The MIT Press Bookstore.
http://web.mit.edu/jhmurray/www/HOH.html
Event contact: Jeremy Grainger (jeremias@mit.edu), MIT Press Bookstore 617
253.0301

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