Welcome to the home page for New Criticism from New Media, a project for English 260, Winter 2008 at UCLA. The analytic focus for this project will be Bruce Sterling's 1998 Distraction: A Novel. While you are here, please browse the following pages and conversations:

Methodology

Learn about our critical approach here.

How to read this wiki

Our suggestions for how to engage this site.

A cheap narratology trick

An essay testing the limits of narratological close reading, and attempting to determine its usefulness in reading a novel about imagined technologies. This page also summarizes much of the plot of Distraction, and would be a good place to start acquiring a working familiarity with the novel.

The "cheap net-trick"

A pending section involving some neat data analysis of a scene underpinned by data analysis.

The world according to DistractionA pending section/gazetteer with the settings of the work explained and discussed.

The project team

Kevin Moore
P.J. Emery