Steve Tomasula: The Art and Science of New Media Fiction

Description

Steve Tomasula's work exists at the cutting edges of scientific knowledge and literary techniques. As such, it demands consideration from multiple perspectives and from critics who can guide the reader through the formal innovations and multimedia involutions while providing critical scientific, aesthetic, historical, and technical contexts. This book, the first of its kind, provides this framework, showing readers the richness and relevance of the worlds Tomasula constructs. Steve Tomasula's work is redefining the form of the novel, reinventing the practice of reading, and wrestling with the most urgent questions raised by massive transformations of media and biotechnologies. His work not only charts these changes, it formulates the problems that we have making meaning in our radically changing technological contexts. Vast in scope, inventive in form, and intimate in voice, his novels, short stories, and essays are read and taught by a surprisingly diverse array of scholars in fields ranging from contemporary experimental writing and literary criticism to the history of science, biotechnology and bioart, book studies, and digital humanities. Cover Contents Illustrations Acknowledgments Abbreviations for Steve Tomasula’s Major Works Introduction: Composition, Emergence, Sensation: Science and New Media in the Novels of Steve Tomasula David Banash and Andrea Spain Part One Bodies, Signs, Codes, and Books 1 The Work of Art after the Mechanical Age: Materiality, Narrative, and the Real in the Work of Steve Tomasula Mary K. Holland 2 “The Material is the Message”: Coded Bodies and Embodied Codes in Steve Tomasula’s VAS: An Opera in Flatland Anthony Enns 3 Encoding the Body, Questioning Legacy: Reflections on Intersemiotic Experiments in Steve Tomasula’s VAS: An Opera in Flatland Françoise Sammarcelli 4 Steve Tomasula’s VAS, or What if Novels Were Books? R. M. Berry Part Two Genealogies of Representation 5 Literary Archeologies in Steve Tomasula’s The Book of Portraiture Flore Chevaillier 6 Beyond Human Scale: Steve Tomasula’s The Book of Portraiture N. Katherine Hayles 7 Mining the Gap: Word, Image, and Loss in Tomasula’s The Book of Portraiture Birger Vanwesenbeeck Part Three New Media and the Novel 8 Touch and Decay: Tomasula’s TOC on iPad Kathi Inman Berens 9 Intermediality in Steve Tomasula’s TOC: A New Media Novel: A Semiological Analysis Anne Hurault-Paupe 10 Ontological Metalepses, Unnatural Narratology, and Locality: A Politics of the [[ Page ]] in Tomasula’s VAS & TOC Lance Olsen Part Four Writing Wonder 11 A Book, an Atlas, and an Opera: Steve Tomasula’s Fictions of Science as Science Fiction Pawel Frelik 12 “Do We Not Bleed?” “The Color of Flesh” in a Pop Cyborg World Anne Larue 13 Enumeration and the Form of the Short Story in Steve Tomasula’s Once Human Françoise Palleau-Papin 14 Steve Tomasula’s Work of Wonder Anne-Laure Tissut Afterword: An Interview with Steve Tomasula Contributors Bibliography Index