This book is written about the author as if someone else is making the observations (a pseudo-autobiographical narrative). From the back book cover: In "Writing Machines", N. Katherine Hayles explores how literature has transformed itself from inscriptions rendered as the flat durable marks of print to the dynamic images of CRT screens, from verbal texts to the diverse sensory modalities of multimedia works, from books to technotexts. Hayles weaves together intellectualized theory and pseudo-autobiographical narrative, the cultures of science and the humanities, and through her collaboration with Anne Burdick, the mandates of writing and design. Hayles inaugurates media specific analysis in literary studies, investigating words that focus on the very inscription technologies that produce them. She analyzes three writing machines in depth: Talan Memmott's groundbreaking web hypertext "Lexia to Perplexia," Tom Phillips's artist's book "A Humument," and Mark Z. Danielewski's postprint cult novel "House of Leaves." Hayles speculates on how technotexts affect the very development of contemporary subjectivity itself. With this polelmical little book, Hayles makes the case that thinking about literature without thinking about materiality isn't really thinking at all." The fore-edge of the book reads WRITiNG in one direction and MACHINES in the other. -- Source of annotation: Marvin or Ruth Sackner.