James Lasdun’s Give Me Everything You Have. On Being Stalked as a Fusion of Writing Technologies

Abstract

Drawing upon Mary Douglas’s anthropological work Purity and Danger, Jay David Bolter’s Writing Space: Computers, Hypertext, and the Remediation of Print, and (to a lesser extent) Donna Haraway’s “A Cyborg Manifesto,” the article analyses the form and authorship of James Lasdun’s 2013 memoir Give Me Everything You Have. On Being Stalked. The book is Lasdun’s account of his experience of being cyberstalked by his former female student. The article proposes that the memoir be read as a combination of two kinds of texts, indeed a fusion of two writing technologies (the print/book technology and the digital technology) resulting from a collision – or even an involuntary “collaboration” (a concept considered on the basis of its discussion by George P. Landow in his Hypertext 3.0) – of two very different (co-)authors: a more traditional author who is a digital “alien” and a disembodied and viral cyberstalker (a self-proclaimed “verbal terrorist”) who is a native-like digital immigrant. The article examines the book’s hypertextual qualities, proposing that it takes a step further in comparison to the protohypertextuality of experimental authors such as Sterne, Joyce, Borges and Calvino by actually including electronic text within its paper borders – which, in fact, become opened up as a result.

Keywords

• cyberstalking
• transgression
• hypertext
• writing technologies
• virus