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Photo by flickr user LearningLark Toward an Interactive Criticism House of Leaves as Haptic Interface Wednesday, February 26, 14

Toward an Interactive Criticism: House of Leaves as Haptic Interface

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Slides from a presentation given at the Louisville Conference published as an article at Hybrid Pedagogy: bit.ly/hapticinterface. "Our critical encounters with a text must be less about knowing and more about a visceral not knowing. An interactive criticism must not take for granted: the refusal to read, the refusal to know, the vague and impressionistic turns of our encounters with a text."

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Page 1: Toward an Interactive Criticism: House of Leaves as Haptic Interface

Photo by flickr user LearningLark

Toward an Interactive CriticismHouse of Leaves as Haptic Interface

Wednesday, February 26, 14

Page 3: Toward an Interactive Criticism: House of Leaves as Haptic Interface

“...the task is to make the dry words retain a trace of the wetness of the encounter” (x)

~ Laura U. Marks, Touch: Sensuous Theory and Multisensory Media

“Text means Tissue” (64).~ Roland Barthes, The Pleasure of the Text

Photo by flickr user LearningLark

Wednesday, February 26, 14

Page 4: Toward an Interactive Criticism: House of Leaves as Haptic Interface

“What I enjoy in a narrative is not directly its content or even its structure, but rather the abrasions I impose upon the fine surface” (12).

~ Roland Barthes, The Pleasure of the Text

Photo by flickr user brianjmatis

Wednesday, February 26, 14

Page 5: Toward an Interactive Criticism: House of Leaves as Haptic Interface

In House of Leaves, Danielewski, refers to this "thing" (the corridor, the Navidson Record, the book itself) that is "beyond the grasp of

my imagination or for that matter my emotions" (27).

Photo by flickr user Lotus Carroll

Texts are Monsters of Affect

Wednesday, February 26, 14

Page 6: Toward an Interactive Criticism: House of Leaves as Haptic Interface

"Combining an unrepresentable topography with an uninhabitable space, the house confronts those who enter its mysterious interiors

with the threat of nothingness that, far from being mere absence, has a terrible ferocious agency" (179).

N. Katherine Hayles, Electronic Literature: New Horizons for the Literary

Photo by flickr user Thomas Hawk

Wednesday, February 26, 14

Page 7: Toward an Interactive Criticism: House of Leaves as Haptic Interface

Photo by flickr user Lotus Carroll

“The monster’s body is a cultural body” (4)

“Monsters are our children. They can be pushed to the farthest margins of geography and discourse, hidden away at the edges of the world and in

the forbidden recesses of our mind, but they always return” (20).Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, “Monster Culture (Seven Theses)”

Wednesday, February 26, 14

Page 8: Toward an Interactive Criticism: House of Leaves as Haptic Interface

“The world is increasingly unthinkable.”~ Eugene Thacker, In the Dust of this Planet

Photo by flickr user wwarby

Wednesday, February 26, 14

Page 9: Toward an Interactive Criticism: House of Leaves as Haptic Interface

Reading House of Leaves ≃

Not Reading House of Leaves

Wednesday, February 26, 14

Page 10: Toward an Interactive Criticism: House of Leaves as Haptic Interface

Analysis and critical thinking are like eating, things lively and voracious, things that drip and reel.

Photo by flickr user jenny downing

Wednesday, February 26, 14

Page 11: Toward an Interactive Criticism: House of Leaves as Haptic Interface

“This is not for you.”

Photo by flickr user dynamosquito

Wednesday, February 26, 14

Page 12: Toward an Interactive Criticism: House of Leaves as Haptic Interface

Our critical encounters with a text must be less about knowing and more about a visceral not knowing. An interactive criticism must not

take for granted: the refusal to read, the refusal to know, the vague and impressionistic turns of our encounters with a text. An interactive

criticism lures us down a text’s endlessly long hallways and loses us there. An interactive criticism is always only half-written.

Photo by flickr user Merra Marie

Wednesday, February 26, 14

Page 13: Toward an Interactive Criticism: House of Leaves as Haptic Interface

bit.ly/hapticinterface

Photo by flickr user anieto2k

Wednesday, February 26, 14