N. Katherine Hayles
Encyclopedia
N. Katherine Hayles is a postmodern literary critic, most notable for her contribution to the fields of literature and science, electronic literature
Electronic literature
Electronic literature is a literary genre consisting of works of literature that originate within digital environments.-Definitions:N. Katherine Hayles discusses the topic in the online article...

, and American literature
American literature
American literature is the written or literary work produced in the area of the United States and its preceding colonies. For more specific discussions of poetry and theater, see Poetry of the United States and Theater in the United States. During its early history, America was a series of British...

. She is professor and Director of Graduate Studies in the Program in Literature at Duke University
Duke University
Duke University is a private research university located in Durham, North Carolina, United States. Founded by Methodists and Quakers in the present day town of Trinity in 1838, the school moved to Durham in 1892. In 1924, tobacco industrialist James B...

.

Background

Hayles was born in Saint Louis, Missouri to Edward and Thelma Bruns. She received her B.S.
Bachelor of Science
A Bachelor of Science is an undergraduate academic degree awarded for completed courses that generally last three to five years .-Australia:In Australia, the BSc is a 3 year degree, offered from 1st year on...

 in Chemistry
Chemistry
Chemistry is the science of matter, especially its chemical reactions, but also its composition, structure and properties. Chemistry is concerned with atoms and their interactions with other atoms, and particularly with the properties of chemical bonds....

 from the Rochester Institute of Technology
Rochester Institute of Technology
The Rochester Institute of Technology is a private university, located within the town of Henrietta in metropolitan Rochester, New York, United States...

 in 1966, and her M.S.
Master's degree
A master's is an academic degree granted to individuals who have undergone study demonstrating a mastery or high-order overview of a specific field of study or area of professional practice...

 in Chemistry from the California Institute of Technology
California Institute of Technology
The California Institute of Technology is a private research university located in Pasadena, California, United States. Caltech has six academic divisions with strong emphases on science and engineering...

 in 1969. She worked as a research chemist in 1966 at Xerox Corporation and as a chemical research consultant Beckman Instrument Company
Beckman Coulter
Beckman Coulter Inc., is a company that makes biomedical laboratory instruments. Founded by Caltech professor Arnold O. Beckman in 1935 as National Technical Laboratories to commercialize a pH meter that he had invented, the company eventually grew to employ over 10,000 people, with $2.4 billion in...

 from 1968-1970. Hayles then switched fields and received her M.A.
Master's degree
A master's is an academic degree granted to individuals who have undergone study demonstrating a mastery or high-order overview of a specific field of study or area of professional practice...

 in English Literature
English literature
English literature is the literature written in the English language, including literature composed in English by writers not necessarily from England; for example, Robert Burns was Scottish, James Joyce was Irish, Joseph Conrad was Polish, Dylan Thomas was Welsh, Edgar Allan Poe was American, J....

 from Michigan State University
Michigan State University
Michigan State University is a public research university in East Lansing, Michigan, USA. Founded in 1855, it was the pioneer land-grant institution and served as a model for future land-grant colleges in the United States under the 1862 Morrill Act.MSU pioneered the studies of packaging,...

 in 1970, and her Ph.D.
Ph.D.
A Ph.D. is a Doctor of Philosophy, an academic degree.Ph.D. may also refer to:* Ph.D. , a 1980s British group*Piled Higher and Deeper, a web comic strip*PhD: Phantasy Degree, a Korean comic series* PhD Docbook renderer, an XML renderer...

 in English Literature from the University of Rochester
University of Rochester
The University of Rochester is a private, nonsectarian, research university in Rochester, New York, United States. The university grants undergraduate and graduate degrees, including doctoral and professional degrees. The university has six schools and various interdisciplinary programs.The...

 in 1977. She is a social and literary critic.

Career

Her scholarship primarily focuses on the "relations between science, literature, and technology." Hayles has taught at UCLA, University of Iowa
University of Iowa
The University of Iowa is a public state-supported research university located in Iowa City, Iowa, United States. It is the oldest public university in the state. The university is organized into eleven colleges granting undergraduate, graduate, and professional degrees...

, University of Missouri–Rolla
Missouri University of Science and Technology
Missouri University of Science and Technology is an institution of higher learning located in Rolla, Missouri, United States, and part of the University of Missouri System...

, the California Institute of Technology
California Institute of Technology
The California Institute of Technology is a private research university located in Pasadena, California, United States. Caltech has six academic divisions with strong emphases on science and engineering...

, and Dartmouth College
Dartmouth College
Dartmouth College is a private, Ivy League university in Hanover, New Hampshire, United States. The institution comprises a liberal arts college, Dartmouth Medical School, Thayer School of Engineering, and the Tuck School of Business, as well as 19 graduate programs in the arts and sciences...

. She was the faculty director of the Electronic Literature Organization
Electronic Literature Organization
The Electronic Literature Organisation is a nonprofit organization "established in 1999 to promote and facilitate the writing, publishing, and reading of electronic literature." -History:...

 from 2001-2006.

Human and Posthuman

Hayles understands "human
Human
Humans are the only living species in the Homo genus...

" and "posthuman
Posthuman
Posthuman may refer to:*Posthuman, a hypothetical future being whose basic capacities so radically exceed those of present humans as to be no longer human by our current standards...

" as constructions that emerge from historically specific understandings of technology, culture and embodiment; "human and "posthuman" views each produce unique models of subjectivity. Within this framework "human" is aligned with Enlightenment
Age of Enlightenment
The Age of Enlightenment was an elite cultural movement of intellectuals in 18th century Europe that sought to mobilize the power of reason in order to reform society and advance knowledge. It promoted intellectual interchange and opposed intolerance and abuses in church and state...

 notions of liberal humanism
Humanism
Humanism is an approach in study, philosophy, world view or practice that focuses on human values and concerns. In philosophy and social science, humanism is a perspective which affirms some notion of human nature, and is contrasted with anti-humanism....

, including its emphasis on the "natural self" and the freedom of the individual. Conversely, Posthuman does away with the notion of a "natural" self and emerges when human intelligence is conceptualized as being co-produced with intelligent machines. According to Hayles the posthuman view privileges informationa over materiality, considers consciousness as an epiphenomenon and imagines the the body as a prosthesis for the mind . Specifically Hayles suggests that in the posthuman view "there are no essential differences or absolute demarcations between bodily existence and computer simulation..." The posthuman thus emerges as a deconstruction of the liberal humanist notion of "human."

Embodiment and Materiality

Despite drawing out the differences between "human" and "posthuman", Hayles is careful to note that both perspectives engage in the erasure of embodiment from subjectivity. In the liberal humanist view, cognition takes precedence over the body, which is narrated as an object to possess and master. While popular conceptions of the cybernetic posthuman imagine the body as merely a container for information and code. Noting the alinement between these two perspectives Hayles uses How We Became Posthuman to investigate the social and cultural processes and practices that led to the conceptualization of information as separate from the material that instantiates it. Drawing on diverse examples, such as Turing's
Alan Turing
Alan Mathison Turing, OBE, FRS , was an English mathematician, logician, cryptanalyst, and computer scientist. He was highly influential in the development of computer science, providing a formalisation of the concepts of "algorithm" and "computation" with the Turing machine, which played a...

  Imitation Game, Gibson's
William Gibson
William Gibson is an American-Canadian science fiction author.William Gibson may also refer to:-Association football:*Will Gibson , Scottish footballer...

 Neuromancer
Neuromancer
Neuromancer is a 1984 novel by William Gibson, a seminal work in the cyberpunk genre and the first winner of the science-fiction "triple crown" — the Nebula Award, the Philip K. Dick Award, and the Hugo Award. It was Gibson's debut novel and the beginning of the Sprawl trilogy...

 and cybernetic theory
Cybernetics
Cybernetics is the interdisciplinary study of the structure of regulatory systems. Cybernetics is closely related to information theory, control theory and systems theory, at least in its first-order form...

 Hayles traces the history of what she calls "the cultural perception that information and materiality are conceptually distinct and that information is in some sense more essential, more important and more fundamental than materiality." By tracing the emergence of such thinking, and by looking at the manner in which literary and scientific texts came to imagine, for example, the possibility of downloading human consciousness into a computer, Hayles attempts to to trouble the information/material binary
Binary
- Mathematics :* Binary numeral system, a representation for numbers using only two digits * Binary function, a function in mathematics that takes two arguments- Computing :* Binary file, composed of something other than human-readable text...

 and in her words, "...put back into the picture the flesh that continues to be erased in contemporary discussions about cybernetic subjects.”

Selected awards

  • Writing Machines: Susanne Langer
    Susanne Langer
    Susanne Katherina Langer was an American philosopher of mind and of art who was influenced by Ernst Cassirer and Alfred North Whitehead. She was one of the first women to achieve an academic career in philosophy and the first to be popularly and professionally recognized as an American philosopher...

    Award for Outstanding Scholarship
  • How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature and Informatics: René Wellek Prize
    René Wellek
    René Wellek was a Czech-American comparative literary critic. Like Erich Auerbach, Wellek was an eminent product of the Central European philological tradition and was known as a vastly erudite and "fair-minded critic of critics."René Wellek was born and raised in Vienna, speaking Czech and German...

    for the best book in literary theory for 1998–1999
  • Eby Award for Distinction in Undergraduate Teaching, UCLA, 1999
  • Luckman Distinguished Teaching Award, UCLA, 1999
  • Bellagio Residential Fellowship, Rockefeller Foundation, 1999
  • Distinguished Scholar Award, University of Rochester, 1998
  • Medal of Honor, University of Helsinki, 1997
  • Distinguished Scholar Award, International Association of Fantastic in the Arts, 1997
  • "A Guggenheim Fellowship, two NEH Fellowships, a Rockefeller Residential Fellowship at Bellagio, a fellowship at the National Humanities Center and two Presidential Research Fellowships from the University of California."

Books

  • Electronic Literature
    Electronic literature
    Electronic literature is a literary genre consisting of works of literature that originate within digital environments.-Definitions:N. Katherine Hayles discusses the topic in the online article...

    : New Horizons for the Literary,
    2008
  • My Mother Was a Computer: Digital Subjects and Literary Texts, 2005
  • Nanoculture: Implications of the New Technoscience (ed.), 2004
  • Writing Machines, 2002
  • How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature and Informatics, 1999
  • Technocriticism and Hypernarrative. A special issue of Modern Fiction Studies 43, no. 3, Fall 1997 (guest editor)
  • Chaos and Order:Complex Dynamics in Literature and Science. (ed.), 1991
  • Chaos Bound: Orderly Disorder in Contemporary Literature and Science, 1990
  • The Cosmic Web: Scientific Field Models and Literary Strategies in the Twentieth Century, 1984

Book chapters

  • 'The Time of Digital Poetry: From Object to Event,' in New Media Poetics: Contexts, Technotexts, and Theories, Morris, Adalaide, and Thomas Swiss, eds. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2006.
  • 'The life cycle of cyborgs: writing the posthuman.' In The Cyborg Handbook, Gray, Chris Hables (ed.) New York: Routledge, 1996. Also available in Cybersexualities, Wolmark, Jenny (ed.) Edinburgh: Edinburgh Univ. Press, 2000.

Essays


Electronic

  • Narrating Bits: Encounters between Humans and Intelligent Machines, Vectors Journal of Culture and Technology in a Dynamic Vernacular, Volume 1 Issue 1 (Evidence).

External links

The source of this article is wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.  The text of this article is licensed under the GFDL.
 
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