My Mother Was a Computer
Digital Subjects and Literary Texts
288 pages
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3 line drawings
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6 x 9
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© 2005
- Contents
- Review Quotes
Table of Contents

Contents
Acknowledgments
Prologue: Computing Kin
Part I. Making: Language and Code
1. Intermediation: Textuality and the Regime of Computation
2. Speech, Writing, Code: Three Worldviews
3. The Dream of Information: Escape and Constraint in the Bodies of Three Fictions
Part II. Storing: Print and Etext
4. Translating Media
5. Performative Code and Figurative Language: Neal Stephenson’s Cryptonomicon
6. Flickering Connectivities in Shelley Jackson’s Patchwork Girl
Part III. Transmitting: Analog and Digital
7. (Un)masking the Agent: Stanislaw Lem’s "The Mask"
8. Simulating Narratives: What Virtual Creatures Can Teach Us
9. Subjective Cosmology and the Regime of Computation: Intermediation in Greg Egan’s Fiction
Epilogue: Recursion and Emergence
Notes
Works Cited
Index
Prologue: Computing Kin
Part I. Making: Language and Code
1. Intermediation: Textuality and the Regime of Computation
2. Speech, Writing, Code: Three Worldviews
3. The Dream of Information: Escape and Constraint in the Bodies of Three Fictions
Part II. Storing: Print and Etext
4. Translating Media
5. Performative Code and Figurative Language: Neal Stephenson’s Cryptonomicon
6. Flickering Connectivities in Shelley Jackson’s Patchwork Girl
Part III. Transmitting: Analog and Digital
7. (Un)masking the Agent: Stanislaw Lem’s "The Mask"
8. Simulating Narratives: What Virtual Creatures Can Teach Us
9. Subjective Cosmology and the Regime of Computation: Intermediation in Greg Egan’s Fiction
Epilogue: Recursion and Emergence
Notes
Works Cited
Index
Review Quotes
Stephen Poole | Guardian
“[My Mother Was a Computer] exhibits an impressively interdisciplinary energy: one minute, Hayles is taking on Stephen Wolfram’s hubristic claim to have invented a new kind of science; the next she is doing some close reading of science fiction, slapping down Deleuze and Guattari for incurable vagueness, or regaling us with the history of the programming language C++. It’s often fascinating.”
Stuart Moulthrop | American Book Review
"Hayles has once again produced a compelling synthesis of highly complex, widely scattered discourses. . . . The achievement is formidable. . . . She is the great American reader."
Michael Filas | RCCS
"Hayles’s work here seems essential: she not only reviews how we got to this stage in our relationship with technology, she also maps a conceptual survival guide for going forward. With complex theoretical concepts such as clustering, the Regime of Computation, and intermediation, Hayles moves us further along the spectrum through which we can constructively understand the terms of posthuman existence without feeling damned to technological extermination by doing so."
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Literature and Literary Criticism: American and Canadian Literature | General Criticism and Critical Theory
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