Playful Intelligence Digitizing Tradition

by Sussman, Henry

• ISBN13: 9781472568823
• ISBN10: 1472568826
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2014-12-18
• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic

Summary

This is a guide, in theory and in practice, to how current technological changes have impacted our interaction with texts and with each other. Henry Sussman rereads pivotal moments in literary, philosophical and cultural modernity as anticipating the cybernetic discourse that has increasingly defined theory since the computer revolution. Cognitive science, psychoanalysis and systems theory are paralleled to current trends in literary and philosophical theory.

Chapters alternate between theory and readings of literary texts, resulting in a broad but rigorously grounded framework for the relation between literature and computer science. This book is a refreshing perspective on the analog-orientated tradition of theory in the humanities – and offers the first literary-textual genealogy of the digital.

Author Biography

Henry Sussman is Visiting Professor of Germanic Language and Literature at Yale University, USA.

Table of Contents

Preface
Introduction
Chapter 1: Reading Kandinsky
Chapter 2: The Digitization of Literature: From The Brothers K. to Joseph K
Chapter 3: The Calculable, the Incalculable and the Rest: Kafka’s Virtual Environment
Chapter 4: Urban Introjections: Berlin Alexanderplatz
Chapter 5: Theory on the Fly: Critical Synthesis under Conditions of and Borrowed Time
Chapter 6: Playful Healing: The Transitions of D. W. Winnicott
Chapter 7: The Figure in the Network: Douglas Hofstadter and the Ethics of Intelligence
Chapter 8: The Phenomenology of Jetlag
Chapter 9: Healing, Systematically
Conclusion
Bibliography
index