Repetition and remediation in Richard Powers, Shelley Jackson, and Oshii Mamoru
Item
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Title
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Repetition and remediation in Richard Powers, Shelley Jackson, and Oshii Mamoru
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Identifier
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d_2009_2013:fe733efe5b40:11404
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identifier
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11308
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Creator
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Shin, Hyewon,
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Contributor
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Peter Hitchcock
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Date
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2011
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Language
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English
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Publisher
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City University of New York.
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Subject
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Modern literature | American literature | Asian literature | media | Oshii Mamoru | postmodernism | remediation | Richard Powers | Shelley Jackson
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Abstract
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In Remediation (1999), Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin maintain that the novelty of new media results from its simulation of the formal characteristics found in older media. While this concept envisions divergent historical pathways for media, it risks falling into solipsism without drawing clear chronological borders. Moreover, the logical self-reproduction found in the rhetoric of new media is similar to postmodernism's predicament in challenging History and Modernity, which places new media in the broader context of postmodernist interrogations of origin, rupture, and genealogy. If, as with Modernity, new media at its core questions its own foundation as constituted by the opposition of old and new and rupture versus continuity, what is the value of remediation as the foremost theory of new media in conceptualizing Modernity's contradictions and imagining its exterior? Interrogating the assumption of remediation, this dissertation investigates the transformation of one medium through its appropriation of another medium's formal aesthetics, illustrated in Richard Powers's novel Plowing the Dark (2000), Shelley Jackson's hypertext fiction Patchwork Girl (1995), and Oshii Mamoru's digital animation Ghost in the Shell (1995). I argue that these authors' explorations of the representational limits of their chosen medium through remediation give rise to the value of repetition and renewal, differing from the solipsism demonstrated by new media discourse. I also suggest that the "origins" of art forms---novel, hypertext, and animation---can be obscured through their complex relationships with earlier genres and forms. This dissertation examines Powers's juxtaposition of poetry and virtual reality, facilitation of the printed novel's reformation through conjuring a digital environment, and adoption of the unusual second-person singular point of view to induce readers' immersion into the text. My study of Jackson's hypertext rewriting of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein (1818) reveals how the original novel's use of the epistolary format prefigures the interactive storytelling in Jackson's work. Finally, I delve into Oshii's use of nonperspectival vision simulating Japanese graphic novel, cinema, and Eastern landscape painting, demonstrating alternative spatiotemporal relations to those of Renaissance optics and perspectival realism.
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Type
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dissertation
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Source
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2009_2013.csv
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degree
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Ph.D.
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Program
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English
