McCarty 2010

McCarty, Willard, ed. Text and Genre in Reconstruction: Effects of Digitalization on Ideas, Behaviours, Products and Institutions. Cambridge: OpenBook Publishers, 2010.

Cybertextuality by the Numbers, by Ian Lancashire (37-69)

cybertextuality "theorizes the authorial process" by bringing together cybernetics, self-testimony, cognitive psychology and computer-assisted text-analysis (37-8)

"Computer text-analysis (stylistic counts and the repeating patterns in textual concordances) detects what even the author cannot perceive bout himsef: it reveals these chunks in the phrasal vocabularies of authors." (38)

text-analysis software, etc

• "Such tools extend the human mind in uttering. By availing ourselves of them, we bcome cyborgic and partake of the character of a cybernetic organism. Authoring of texts is a recursive process in which hand-shakes cycle between a sender who utters something and a receiver who perceives the sent message and feeds back information about it to the sender." (39)

death of the author and other postmodern ideas arise from a "legitimate perception of how unconscious the author is of cognitive creative process, of how mysterious it is" (41

• "from a cybertextual perspective, however, the author is partly alive in the work" (41)

"Cybertextuality asks us to read texts in a new way, to discover within them the stigmata of authoring -- the marks that distinguish its subjection to cognitive limitations. These are partly observed in uttering-feedback cycles as they create evanescent or frozen texts.