Professor publishes book on new media literature

UH Mānoa interdisciplinary studies professor Jaishree Odin’s book on new media literature titled Hypertext and the Female Imaginary was recently published by the University of Minnesota Press. 

In Hypertext and the Female Imaginary, Odin reveals how media that use hypertextual strategies of narrative fragmentation provocatively engage questions of gender or cultural difference. Odin addresses hypertext on two levels: 1) as an artistic technique in electronic or film narratives and 2) as a metaphor for describing the complexity of postmodernism in which different cultures, discourses, and media are in continual interaction with one another.

 

Using feminist as well as postcolonial perspectives, she explores the embodied state of the human as reflected in critically aware contemporary narratives and examines how these works consider what it means to be human in the twenty-first century.

 

Odin received a MS in chemistry from India and a PhD in comparative literature from the State University of New York at Stony Brook. She has taught at UH Mānoa since 1990. Odin’s areas of teaching and research include critical theory, cultural studies of science and technology, new-media literature, literary ecology, postcolonial literature, and Kashmiri literature. She has also published on new technologies and their impact on higher education.

 

For more information on the book, visit: http://www.upress.umn.edu/Books/O/odin_hypertext.html.