Talking with Antigone
Date
2018-07-25
Authors
Schraefel, Monica M. C.
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Abstract
This project considers the role of conversation in writing by women, specifically,
the role of conversational spaces for women’s construction of self within the symbolic. It
does this through a consideration of narrative structures, modeled by Emily Brontë’s
Wuthering Heights and Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse. It also points towards how
these concerns are situated within the latest textual media, the Internet. It then presents a
model of textual reproduction and representation for online texts informed by the preceding
discussions.
Women in patriarchy can never presume a listener. Consequently, women’s textual
productions very often foreground issues of “am I being heard, can I speak?” The lack of
consideration in Eurocentric male texts/theories of whether or not a speaker is heard is
significant in its absence from any canonical literary theoretical or critical model. By
foregrounding conversation both as an issue specific to women’s writing, and as a
narrative structure particular to women’s writing, this work provides a new site for
pedagogical and critical consideration of writing by women. The chapters in this
dissertation based on Wuthering Heights and To the Lighthouse read these novels from
that site.
Based on the above conversational theory, this thesis provides an historical context
and feminist perspective through which to read women’s relationship to the Net as another
textual medium in which women are foregrounding issues around voice, who can be heard
and how. Historically women have been erased from contributions to computing. This
erasure continues in patterns of text based identity construction in online interaction, where,
again, the silencing of women’s voices is of critical moment.
To address this erasure, this dissertation presents the constructions of a new text
form, ConTexts (conversational texts), which brings feminist perspectives to engineering
practices. Conversational texts differ from standard writing practice and current web
document delivery in two ways. First, ConTexts are polylithic rather than monolithic. That
is, a document is constructed only as the product of an exchange with a user/reader which
results in the combination of appropriate text chunks into a new document. Current
document models simply present prefabricated, monolithic units written for a single
audience. Second, ConTexts incorporate intensional and AI programming, allowing the
text delivery system to become involved in the exchange with the user to process user input
and to create dynamic content (different versions of the text) which results from that
exchange.
Revising the presentation of texts as interactive and polylithic rather than
prefabricated and monolithic is an insight located in this dissertation, derived from feminist
study of conversation as narrative strategy.
The versioning of texts according to user requests is situated and described within
intensional logic programming and demand driven dataflow models. Intensional logic
provides a framework and semantics for describing versions in terms of a version space
and possible worlds. In this dissertation, Intensional HTML is used to demonstrate a
preliminary form of conversational texts because it allows versions of texts to be delivered
through standard web browsers.
That conversation is a formative issue in writing by women is a unique contribution
of this thesis to feminist literary practice and is the organizing principle of this dissertation.
That real conversation is only an issue in women's writing is the main insight of this work.
This dissertation presents the blending of feminist theory with feminist engineering
practice. Its observations and implementation designs point to new directions in both text
reading and creating practices.
Description
Keywords
Composition, Information Systems, British and Irish literature, Womens studies, Rhetoric