Type of Document	Thesis
Author	Skinner, Rebecca Furlow
URN	etd-11102008-154545
Title	Reader/Writer/Text: Katherine Hayles and 21st Century Composition
Degree	Master of Arts
Department	English, Department of
Advisory Committee	Advisor Name Title Kathleen Yancey Committee Chair Douglas fowler Committee Member Kristie Fleckenstein Committee Member
Keywords	Digital Materiality Subjectivity Post Epistemology
Date of Defense	2008-11-03
Availability	unrestricted
Abstract READER/WRITER/TEXT: KATHERINE HAYLES AND 21st CENTURY COMPOSITION An examination of three major works by Katherine Hayles: How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature and Informatics (1999); Writing Machines (2002); and My Mother was a Computer: Digital Subjects and Literary Texts (2005). These deal mainly with the materiality of reader/writer/text; formations of identity and subjectivity in the digital age; and with the history of Information theory as it relates to epistemologies of the posthuman. I argue that the key terms: materiality, subjectivity, and epistemology, found in these books, are crucial to understanding the digital revolution, and that Katherine Hayles’ work is invaluable to 21st century Composition studies, as we seek to orient ourselves in the landscape of electronically mediated discourse. To illustrate this I apply these terms as a critical lens to different instantiations of a refereed journal: Computers and Composition (print; Volume 23.1: March 2006)) and Computers and Composition Online (Spring 2006) and show where Hayles’ ideas appear or do not appear across these platforms. I look at the contrast between in these examples of discourse about, and with computer mediated forms. I conclude that Katherine Hayles gives us new ways of seeing these key terms, and that they can be used to understand and explore the digitally networked territories that Composition studies will inhabit in the 21st century, also called the era of the “posthuman.”
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