Techno-Prosthetic Romantic Futurism

Introduction: Wisdom of the Mix

The essay you're about to read isn't an essay, and the game you're about to play isn't a game. Scholarship morphs in a space without dimensions--or should.

Too many on-line essays re-enact off-line standards of production and performance. But the game has changed.

Scholarship is becoming something other than it's been, jettisoning old school baggage of argument and evidence. New possibilities are emerging: the shock of the random, the wisdom of the mix. What follows exploits a few of those possibilities in pursuit of a virtual future--for Romanticism on the Net.

-- Paul Youngquist, Professor of English, Penn State

Introduction: No More Dead Links

Here, the hyperlink becomes an agent of production: The hyperlink is not reduced to the banal task of performing a physical equivalent--flipping a page or pulling a reference book from the shelf to look up a definition.

Here, "scholarship" is a convergent act of research, writing, file structures, HTML, CSS, and topology designed to be traversed in a non-linear fashion. The artifically of thesis:argument:conclusion is sloughed off--the territory itself becomes thesis, argument, and conclusion.

-- Will Stotler, Tech Consultant to Paul Youngquist

Enter Here

Begin using this essay. (You can always cheat and view the topic tree, if you want the comfortable illusion of a linear structure.) Or, view the essay framework: one and one-point-five; two and two-point-five; three and three-point-five.