Stuart Moulthrop (born 1957 in Baltimore, Maryland, United States) is an innovator of electronic literature and hypertext fiction, both as a theoretician and as a writer. He is author of the hypertext fiction works Victory Garden (1992), which was on the front-page of the New York Times Book Review in 1993, Reagan Library (1999), and Hegirascope (1995), amongst many others. Moulthrop is currently a Professor of Digital Humanities in the Department of English, at the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee. He also became a founding board member of the Electronic Literature Organization in 1999.
Stuart Moulthrop | |
|---|---|
| Born | 1957 |
| Nationality | American |
| Known for | Electronic literature, Hypertext fiction |
| Notable work | Victory Garden |
| Academic background | |
| Alma mater | Yale University |
| Doctoral advisor | J. Hillis Miller |
| Academic work | |
| Institutions | University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee, Yale University, University of Texas at Austin, Georgia Tech, University of Baltimore |
Education
editBorn in Baltimore, Maryland in 1957, he became an English major at George Washington University after reading Gravity's Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon in 1975.[citation needed] He received his PhD from Yale University in 1986. He taught at Yale from 1984–1990, and then at the University of Texas at Austin and the Georgia Institute of Technology. In 1994 he moved back to Baltimore to teach at the University of Baltimore.[citation needed] As a Professor of Information Arts and Technologies, he formerly taught in the Bachelor of Science in Simulation and Digital Entertainment.[1][2] He also was involved in the Master's and Doctoral programs.
Work in hypertext
editMoulthrop began experimenting with hypertext theory in the 1980s, and has since authored several articles as well as written many hypertext fiction works. His hypertext Victory Garden was featured on the front page of the New York Times Book Review from a review by Robert Coover, and Hegirascope won the Eastgate Systems HYSTRUCT Award.[3] He served as co-editor for Postmodern Culture and is currently listed as part of their editorial collective.[4] He is partnered with Nancy Kaplan, Michael Joyce, and John McDaid in TINAC (Textuality, Intertextuality, Narrative, and Consciousness).[5][6][2]
In 1987, Moulthrop created Forking Paths for an undergraduate writing class as a demonstration of hypertext, appropriating Borges' short story "Garden of Forking Paths". This hypertext acknowledges the possibility of having one source of data link to a group of data, which links to other group of data, and so forth until the viewer decides to exit the pool of information. J. Yellowlees Douglas extensively reviewed this work in her book The End of Books or Books without End?,[7] and notes that this was one of the three hypertexts available in software in 1987.[7] Forking Paths is available on a CDROM included with the anthology The New Media Reader.[8]
Hyperbola: A Digital Companion to Gravity's Rainbow (1989) and Dreamtime 3.1 (1992) are digital works created in HyperCard.[9]
In an analysis of the reception of Moulthrop's hypertext fiction Victory Garden, Dene Grigar found that it has been the subject of over 100 scholarly books, dissertations and articles.[10]
Bell notes that Stuart Moulthrop's Higirascope (1995) explits web technology to set the pace of reading, as each screen was only available for 18 seconds.[11] Markku Eskelinen notes that the second version allowed 30 seconds. [12]
References
edit- ^ "Stuart Moulthrop: The Iowa Review Web". archive.the-next.eliterature.org. Retrieved 2024-02-26.
- ^ a b "#ELRFEAT: Interview with Stuart Moulthrop (2011)". electronicliteraturereview. 2017-08-20. Retrieved 2024-03-25.
- ^ "HY STRUCT and HY TECH Awards". www.eastgate.com. Retrieved 2024-07-12.
- ^ Moulthrop, Stuart (May 1997). "Editor's Introduction". Postmodern Culture. 7 (3).
- ^ Bernstein, Mark (2011-10-13). "Roots Of Electronic Literature". www.markbernstein.org. Retrieved 2024-02-25.
- ^ "Stuart Moulthrop". Eastgate Systems. Retrieved 2024-02-26.
- ^ a b Douglas, J. Yellowlees (2000). The end of books or books without end ? reading interactive narratives. Ann Arbor (Mich.: University of Michigan press. p. 73. ISBN 978-0-472-11114-5.
- ^ Wardrip-Fruin, Noah; Montfort, Nick; Crumpton, Michael (2003). The NewMediaReader. Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press. ISBN 978-0-262-23227-2.
- ^ "The Challenges of Born-Digital Fiction: Editions, Translations, and Emulations: Interfaces of 1989 Edition & 2017 Emulation of Hyperbola". The Challenges of Born-Digital Fiction: Editions, Translations, and Emulations: The Multimedia Accompaniment to the Print Edition. Retrieved 2024-03-24.
- ^ Grigar, Dene (2020). "The Persistence of Genius: The Case for Stuart Moulthrop's 'Victory Garden'". Rebooting Electronic Literature Volume 3: Documenting Pre-Web Born Digital Media. Electronic Literature Lab. doi:10.7273/8mwy-j433. Retrieved 2024-02-25.
- ^ Bell, Alice (2010). The possible worlds of hypertext fiction (Thesis). Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. p. 5. ISBN 9780230542556.
- ^ Eskelinen, Markku (2012). Cybertext poetics: the critical landscape of new media literary theory. International texts in critical media aesthetics. London: Continuum. p. 58. ISBN 978-1-4411-2438-8.