Books by N. Katherine Hayles

N. Katherine Hayles traces the emergence of what she identifies as the postprint condition, exploring how the interweaving of print and digital technologies has changed not only books but also language, authorship, and what it means to be human.

From the central concept of the field-which depicts the world as a mutually interactive whole, with each part connected to every other part by an underlying field- have come models as diverse as quantum mathematics and Saussure's theory of language. In The Cosmic Web, N. Katherine Hayles seeks to establish the scope of the field concept and to assess its importance for contemporary thought. She then explores the literary strategies that are attributable directly or indirectly to the new paradigm; among the texts at which she looks closely are Robert Pirsig's Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Nabokov's Ada, D. H. Lawrence's early novels and essays, Borges's fiction, and Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow.

Designed to help electronic literature move into the classroom, this book addresses its major genres, the challenges it poses to traditional literary theory, and the complex and compelling issues at stake. It develops a theoretical framework for understanding how electronic literature draws on the print tradition.

Explores how the impact of code on life has become comparable to that of speech and writing: as language and code have grown entangled, the lines that once separated humans from machines, analog from digital, and old technologies from new ones have become blurred. The book gives us the tools necessary to make sense of these complex relationships.

Separating hype from fact, this text investigates the fate of embodiment in an information age. It relates three issues: information as an entity separate from the material forms that carry it; the construction of the Cyborg; and the dismantling of the humanist "subject" in cybernetic discourse.