Cyberspace, Virtual Reality, and Critical Theory

Individual Theorists

Theories chiefly about Cyberspace, Virtual Reality, and Artifical Reality

• Jean Baudrillard
  • Baudrillard In Cyberspace
  • William Bogard's The Simulation of Surveillance: Hypercontrol in Telematic Societies
  • Erica Seidel's Mobius Baudrillard
  • Erica Seidel's list of Baudrillard websites
  • Sub-web of Student Essays on Baudrillard
  • Elizabeth Rodwell's satiric Baudrillard's Disneyland Adventure
• Michael Benedikt
• William Peña, Meditations on First Cybersophy

Discussions involving Critical Theory about Self and Identity

• Ian Jones, Subjectivity Begins
• Andres Luco, First Awakenings
• Poststructuralists on Authorship: an overview

Theories chiefly about Cyborgs, Gender, the Body

• Donna J. Haraway and the Cyborg Paradigm
• Digital Technology, Hypertext, Cyborgs and the Disunified Self
• Derridean Blurs and Haraway's Crossings
• The Cyborg Paradigm, Gender Difference, and Multivocality
• Sadie Plant's Zeros + Ones: A Review by Laura Lee
• Tomasz Mazur, "Working out the Cyberbody: Sex and Gender Constructions in Text-Based Virtual Space," (University of Florida)

Theories chiefly about Digital Text and Image

• Digitital textuality
  • Matthew Hutson's Analogue versus Digital
• Hypertext
  • Mark Amerika, Hypertexual Consciousness
  • Rodney Canete's. The Reader in Question: The Process of Text Engagement
  • Michael Di Bianco, Is the Novel Dead Yet?
  • [A review of] Shelley Jackson's Patchwork Girl
  • Comments by members of English 112 on Patchwork Girl
  • George P. Landow, Hypertext and Contemporary Critical theory: Barthes, Bakhtin, Derrida, and Foucault
  • Andres Luco, Hypersign
  • Courtney Kaòhinani Rowe, Idealism
  • Scott Stebelman's Hypertext Bibliography, including on-line materials, at George Washington U.
  • World Wide Web Materials created by members of English 111, Hypertext and Literary Theory, 1995.

Theories of Image and Symbol

• Erica Seidel, Metaphor: From Plato the Postmodernists
• Matthew Hutson's Metaphor (in the Analogue/Digital Web)

Theories chiefly about Media

• Amanda Griscom, McLuhan's message
• Amanda Griscom, No medium becomes extinct
• Leni Zumas (with G. P. Landow), Semio-Surf -- an Ulmerian mystory about TV, video stores, and what have you!
• Steve Cook, Writing as Virus: Hypertext as Meme
• Information Technology Overview

Theories chiefly about Location, Space, Architecture

• Jeffrey Achter, Topoliteracy; or the (Mis)uses of Topology in Literary Criticism and Theory
• Michael Benedikt
• Steve Cook's Alamut: The Eagle's Nest, As Fortress Impenetrable
• William J. Mitchell's City of Bits: Space, Place, and the Infobahn
• Chrys Rowe's comparison of the visions of cyberspace in City of Bits and William Gibson's Neuromancer trilogy
• Karin Wenz's Cybertextpace
• Michel De Certeau in Francesca Wodtke, Cities of This World and Beyond

Relevant Websites

• basilisk
• CTHEORY
• Alt-X
• Mediamatic
• Postmodern Culture
• Hotwired
• Virtual Reality homepage