Richard Powers, a Humanist-in-Residence at the Center for Advanced Scientific Research, gets involved with a project to train a machine to pass a comprehensive exam in English literature—and with the degree candidate against whom the machine is competing. 25,000 first printing.

A dazzling new novel by the author of Galatea 2.2 and Gain

In a digital laboratory on the shores of Puget Sound, a band of virtual-reality researchers races to complete the Cavern, an empty white room that can become a jungle, a painting, or a vast Byzantine cathedral. In a war-torn Mediterranean city, an American is held hostage, chained to a radiator in another empty white room. What can possibly join these two remote places? Only the shared imagination, a room that these people unwittingly build in common, where they are all about to meet.

Adie Klarpol, a skilled but disillusioned artist, comes back to life, revived by the thrill of working with cutting-edge technology. Against the collapse of Cold War empires and the fall of the Berlin Wall, she retreats dangerously into the cyber-realities she has been hired to create. On the other side of the globe, Taimur Martin, an English teacher recovering from a failed love affair, is picked up off the streets in Beirut by Islamic fundamentalists and held in solitary captivity.

A mesmerizing fiction that explores the imagination's power to both destroy and save, Plowing the Dark recasts the rules of the novel and stands as Richard Powers's most daring work to date.

A magnificent, multifaceted novel about a supremely gifted — and divided — family, set against the backdrop of postwar America

On Easter day, 1939, at Marian Anderson's epochal concert on the Washington Mall, David Strom, a German Jewish émigré scientist, meets Delia Daley, a young Philadelphia Negro studying to be a singer. Their mutual love of music draws them together, and—against all odds and better judgment—they marry. They vow to raise their children beyond time, beyond identity, steeped in song. But their three children must survive America's brutal here and now. Jonah, Joseph, and Ruth grow up during the Civil Rights era, come of age in the violent 1960s, and live out adulthood in the racially retrenched late century. Jonah, the eldest, "whose voice could make heads of state repent," follows a life in his parents' beloved classical music. Ruth, the youngest, chooses a militant activism and repudiates the white culture her brother represents. Joseph, the middle child and the narrator of this generational tale, struggles to remain connected to them both.

The Time of Our Singing is a story of self-invention, allegiance, race, cultural ownership, the compromised power of music, and the tangled loops of time that rewrite all belonging.

It is a tenet of postmodern writing that the subject—the self—is unstable, fragmented, and decentered. One useful way to examine this principle is to look at how the subject has been treated in various media in the premodern, modern, and postmodern eras. Silvio Gaggi pursues this strategy in From Text to Hypertext, analyzing the issue of subject construction and deconstruction in selected examples of visual art, literature, film, and electronic media. Gaggi concentrates on a few paradigmatic works in each chapter; he contrasts van Eyck's Wedding of Arnolfini with the photography of Cindy Sherman and Barbara Kruger; examines fiction that centers on an elusive subject in works by Conrad, Faulkner, and Calvino; and explores the ability of such films as Coppola's One from the Heart and Altman's The Player to emancipate the subject through cinematography and editing.

In considering electronic media, Gaggi takes his argument to an entirely new level. He focuses on computer-controlled media, specifically examples of hypertextual fiction by Michael Joyce and Stuart Moulthrop. Besides recognizing how the computer has enabled artists to create works of fiction in which readers themselves become decentered, Gaggi also observes the impact of literature created on computer networks, where even the limitations of CD-ROM are lifted and the notion of individual authorship may for all practical purposes be lost.

"What line should the critic follow in explicating, unfolding, or unknotting . . . passages? How should the critic thread her or his way into the labyrinthine problems of narrative form?—from chapter I   In this brilliant and engaging book, one of America's leading literary critics explores the intricacies of narrative theory. Using the image of Ariadne's thread, which was given to Theseus to carry into the labyrinth so that he could find his way out, J. Hillis Miller traces out the "line" so often associated with narrative and writing in general. In the process he illuminates the nature of literature as well as the nature of narrative.   Considering a wide range of texts from Western literature over the last two centuries—in particular Meredith's The Egoist, Goethe's Elective Affinities, and Borges's "Death and the Compass"—Miller explores the way rhetorical devices and figurative language interrupt, break into, delay, and expand storytelling. He also illustrates these rhetorical disruptions of narrative logic in his own work. In its four chapters—about the role of line, character, interpersonal relationships, and figurative language in narrative—Miller's study encounters in its own language the problems it discusses, as concepts and words are scrutinized for their diverse meanings and resonances. Demonstrating that every narrative, including this one about the nature of narrative, has divergent lines and multiple motives and uses, Ariadne's Thread tells its story and enacts its subject at the same time.

PAULSON, W. R.: THE NOISE OF CULTURE. LITERARY TEXTS IN A WORLD OF INFORMATION. ITHACA, NY, 1988, xii 196 p. Encuadernacion original. Nuevo.

In this work, Allucquere Rosanne Stone examines the myriad ways modern technology is challenging traditional notions of gender identity. Face-to-face meetings, and even telephone conversations, involuntarily reveal crucial aspects of identity such as gender, age and race. However, these bits of identity are completely masked by computer-mediated communications; all that is revealed is what we "choose" to reveal - and then only if we choose to tell the truth. The rise of computer-mediated communications is giving people the means to try on alternative personae - in a sense, to reinvent themeselves - which, as Stone compellingly argues, has both positive and potentially destructive implications. The book moves between accounts of the modern interface of technology and desire: from busy cyberlabs to the electronic solitude of the Internet, from phone sex to "virtual cross-dressers", from the Vampire Lestat to the trial of a man accused of having raped a woman by seducing one of her multiple personalities. Throughout, Stone wrestles with the question of how best to convey a complex description of a culture whose chief activity is complex description. Writing of creating a "text that breaks rules", serving as a "sampler of possible choices", she employs elements from a wide range of disciplines and genres, including cultural and critical theory, social sciences, pulp journalism, science fiction, and personal memoirs. In the final chapter, Stone threads the various narratives together, a process that best reflects the confused, ambiguous and sometimes contradictory state of gender relations at the close of the mechanical age.

This reissue of Understanding Media marks the thirtieth anniversary (1964-1994) of Marshall McLuhan's classic expose on the state of the then emerging phenomenon of mass media. Terms and phrases such as "the global village" and "the medium is the message" are now part of the lexicon, and McLuhan's theories continue to challenge our sensibilities and our assumptions about how and what we communicate.

There has been a notable resurgence of interest in McLuhan's work in the last few years, fueled by the recent and continuing conjunctions between the cable companies and the regional phone companies, the appearance of magazines such as WiRed, and the development of new media models and information ecologies, many of which were spawned from MIT's Media Lab. In effect, media now begs to be redefined. In a new introduction to this edition of Understanding Media, Harper's editor Lewis Lapham reevaluates McLuhan's work in the light of the technological as well as the political and social changes that have occurred in the last part of this century.

'Professor Ong has managed to synthesize an incredible amount of thought and at the same time has carried some of his earlier ideas still further. Orality and Literacy should become a classic. It is eminently assignable for undergraduate courses' - Professor John Ahern

'No comparable work on this important subject exists. Thanks to the lucidity of its style and presentation of complex thought, this is a work that will be accessible and useful...it will be the standard introduction to this topic for some years to come' - Choice

'Professor Walter Ong's new book explores some of the profound changes in our thought processes, personality and social structures which are the result, at various stages of our history, of the development of speech, writing and print. And he projects his analysis further into the age of mass electronic communications media...the cumulative impact of the book is dazzling. Read this book. Literature will never be the same again. And neither will you' - Robert Giddings, Tribune

'This admirably lucid book...has obvious implications for philosophy, literature, linguistics, sociology, psychology, education, and Biblical studies...I believe this is the best book Ong has published' - Thomas J. Farrell, Cross Currents

Life on the Screenis a book not about computers, but about people and how computers are causing us to reevaluate our identities in the age of the Internet. We are using life on the screen to engage in new ways of thinking about evolution, relationships, politics, sex, and the self. Life on the Screen traces a set of boundary negotiations, telling the story of the changing impact of the computer on our psychological lives and our evolving ideas about minds, bodies, and machines. What is emerging, Turkle says, is a new sense of identity— as decentered and multiple. She describes trends in computer design, in artificial intelligence, and in people's experiences of virtual environments that confirm a dramatic shift in our notions of self, other, machine, and world. The computer emerges as an object that brings postmodernism down to earth.

"To read Heidegger is to set out on an adventure. The essays in this volume—intriguing, challenging, and often baffling to the reader—call him always to abandon all superficial scanning and to enter wholeheartedly into the serious pursuit of thinking....

"Heidegger is not a 'primitive' or a 'romanitic.' He is not one who seeks escape from the burdens and responsibilities of contemporary life into serenity, either through the re-creating of some idyllic past or through the exalting of some simple experience. Finally, Heidegger is not a foe of technology and science. He neither disdains nor rejects them as though they were only destructive of human life.

"The roots of Heidegger's hinking lie deep in the Western philosophical tradition. Yet that thinking is unique in many of its aspects, in its language, and in its leterary expression. In the development of this thought Heidegger has been taught chiefly by the Greeks, by German idealism, by phenomenology, and by the scholastic theological tradition. In him these and other elements have been fused by his genius of sensitivity and intellect into a very individual philosophical expression." —William Lovitt, from the Introduction