Contemporary Europe provides an occasion for meditations on new media which invert those of De Tocqueville, moving beyond democracy in America and, for good or ill, toward technocracy in networked Europe. Prague is as yet, if only in the smoke-wreathed icon of its poet and playwright president, Paris again, the new, perhaps the last, republic of words, a new, perhaps the last, gasp of lit before com. Not just lit but com as well depend upon our ability to interrupt the flow of nextness with a sustaining sense of the ordinary.

Michael Joyce is the author of afternoon, a story, perhaps the most celebrated hypertext fiction written to date and is co-creator of Storyspace software for creating hypertext narrative.

Michael Joyce's talk is part of the CAS and Beckman Institute interdisciplinary initiative Cyberarts: A New Aesthetic? coordinated by Janet Smarr, Program in Comparative Literature and the Unit for Criticism and Interpretive Theory. Running for ten consecutive Wednesdays, this series addresses how computer technologies are affecting the way we think about the arts.

Sponsored by: Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology, Center for Advanced Study

In conjunction with: College of Fine and Applied Arts, Computing and Communications Services Office (CCSO), Department of Computer Science, Department of Educational Psychology, Department of English, Creative Writing Program, Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures, Department of Philosophy, Department of Sociology, Institute of Communications Research, NCSA, Campus Relations, NCSA, Educational Division, Program for the Study of Religion, Program in Comparative Literature, School of Art and Design, Cinematography Program, Unit for Cinema Studies and Unit One