Of A Technological Literature

"In an old part of the city like this, time collapses the picture... Here I am, tightrope walking the twenty-first century, slim as a year..."

A few weeks ago in cyborg week 1, we talked about how technology is changing the way books are written. There are all of these teen books that have adopted the format of chatting and/or texting as a way to tell stories. But way back when, in 2000, a book came out called The PowerBook by Jeanette Winterson. I have a long running love/hate thing for J.W.'s writing but I won't get into that. Of note about The PowerBook (besides the title being an allusion to a laptop) are these two things...

1. The story simultaneously happens at different points in history, the recent past, and shifting versions of the present because it's being crafted by the narrator who is something of an online story conjurer. J.W. uses technology as the premise for condensing then stretching and pulling at time/space/history.

2. The book is structured to be like a computer menu, that is, many of the chapters are named after computer actions such as "SAVE," "QUIT," or "VIEW AS ICON." Each chapter also has its own neat, clean little icon with which it is introduced. The mountain icon for the chapter "SPECIAL" is an outline of a triangle divided by a scalloped line to indicate a cap of snow. One of my favorite chapters "Spitalfields" has for its icon three wavy lines with a weird flame-shape growing out of it!



Submitted by christine on Sun, 12/02/2007 - 12:11am. christine's blog | login or register to post comments | printer friendly version