Cheri Crenshaw's Homepage

"But how, if you are neither Zulu warrior nor Aztec maiden,

do you prepare yourself, all alone, to enter an extraordinary state on an ordinary morning?"

                                   --Annie Dillard, The Writing Life

Welcome to my homepage!  I am a Ph.D. candidate in rhetoric at Texas Woman's University with a projected graduation date of May 2008, my current research is in new media, and I teach composition online and at the local community college in Wichita Falls, Texas.

        My dissertation, entitled "Exploiting Kairos in Electronic Literature: A Rhetorical Analysis," analyzes electronic literature that “remediates,” to use Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin’s term, classic printed literature to electronic publication.  The works analyzed fit the definition of electronic literature posted on the Electronic Literature website, that is, “works with important literary aspects that take advantage of the capabilities and contexts provided by the stand-alone or networked computer.”

       Specifically, the study analyzes Shelley Jackson’s Patchwork Girl; George Hartley’s “Madlib Frost Poem”; Peter Howard’s “Peter’s Haiku Generator”; Edward Picot’s “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird”; and Helena Bulaja’s Croatian Tales of Long Ago. For contrast, the study analyzes John Barth’s “Click,” a printed short story that remediates electronic signifiers.  Five authors participated in personal interviews that greatly expanded the scope of the analysis:  Jackson,  Howard, and Picot as well as two authors from Croatian Tales:  Ellen McAuslan  and Ed Beals.