Nationality United States | Name J. Douglas Role Author | |
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Fields Management Communication Alma mater University of Michigan
New York University Books The End of Booksor Books Without End?: Reading Interactive Narratives Education University of Michigan, New York University | ||
Institutions University of Florida | ||
J. Yellowlees Douglas is an author and scholar of hypertext fiction and interactive fiction. She began writing about hypermedia in the late 1980s, very early in the development of the medium.
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Education and teaching
Douglas was born June 25, 1962, in Detroit, Michigan. She did not have a first name apart from the initial 'J.' but found that it was misstated so often that she adopted "Jane' as her first name. She completed her undergraduate studies in English language and literature at the University of Michigan in 1982, where she went on to get an M.A in cinema and literary theory. She received her Ph.D. in English and education from New York University in 1992. Her Ph.D. dissertation, "Print pathways and interactive labyrinths: How hypertext narratives affect the act of reading," was supervised by Gordon M. Pradl. She spent a year as a research fellow at Brunel University in London examining the ways in which hypertext affects the construction of digital technologies. She has worked in the advertising industry, serving as a copywriter for Graham & Gillies Advertising and becoming a partner at Garrison Gibbs Communications.
In academia, Douglas has been the director of the program in professional writing and an assistant professor of English at Lehman College. She is presently Associate Professor of Management Communication in the Warrington College of Business Administration at the University of Florida, where she has also served as director of the William and Grace Dial Center for Written and Oral Communication.
Douglas was a contestant on Jeopardy! on March 8, 2013. In interviews and forum postings about this experience, Douglas revealed that her godmother is the actress Maggie Smith.
Writings
Douglas has written over two dozen articles, short stories, and a book about the development, structure, and uses of hypertext. In a 1991 article—quite early in the development of hypertext as a new literary medium—she argued for hypertext as offering an alternative to an "either/or" view of reality in the form of an "and/and/and" structure. In her 2000 book The End of Books or Books Without End, she examines how interactive fiction works and discusses the current state of hypertext criticism, arguing that hyptertext authors are the natural heirs of early 20th century experimental modernists like James Joyce. In "What Hypertexts Can Do That Print Narratives Cannot", Douglas goes into more detail about how hypertext fiction works as a literary form. Critics have noted acerbity as a characteristic of Douglas's writing as she "makes plain her frustration that hyperfiction works and their writers are still not considered part of the canon."
Douglas is recognized for having discovered a node in Michael Joyce's hypertext novel Afternoon: a story that had no inbound links. In discussions about the novel, the node became known as "Jane's space" because she was the first to remark on its orphan status. She also became implicated in revisions to this node, which originally (1987 edition) featured only a single phrase from Jung, "Man... never perceives anything", but later (1990 edition) included a second line: "and only Jane Yellowlees Douglas has read this line".
Douglas's short story entitled "I Have Said Nothing" is bookended by two car crashes and the resulting deaths. Douglas's goal was to use the fragmentations of hypertext to explore both causality and the enormous gulfs that separate people from one another. Hypertext author Stuart Moulthrop called the story "superb...finely balanced between savagery and sympathy".