Talking with Antigone

This project considers the role of conversation in writing by women, specifically, the role of conversational spaces for women's construction of self within the symbolic. It does this through a consideration of narrative structures, modeled by Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights and Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse. It also points towards how these concerns are situated within the latest textual media, the Internet. It then presents a model of textual reproduction and representation for online texts informed by the preceding discussions.;Women in patriarchy can never presume a listener. Consequently, women's textual productions very often foreground issues of "am I being heard, can I speak?" The lack of consideration in Eurocentric male texts/theories of whether or not a speaker is heard is significant in its absence from any canonical literary theoretical or critical model. By foregrounding conversation both as an issue specific to women's writing, and as a narrative structure particular to women's writing, this work provides a new site for pedagogical and critical consideration of writing by women. The chapters in this dissertation based on Wuthering Heights and To the Lighthouse read these novels from that site.;Based on the above conversational theory, this thesis provides an historical context and feminist perspective through which to read women's relationship to the Net as another textual medium in which women are foregrounding issues around voice, who can be heard and how. Historically women have been erased from contributions to computing. This erasure continues in patterns of text based identity construction in online interaction, where, again, the silencing of women's voices is of critical moment.;To address this erasure, this dissertation presents the constructions of a new text form, ConTexts (conversational texts), which brings feminist perspectives to engineering practices. Conversational texts differ from standard writing practice and current web document delivery in two ways. First, ConTexts are polylithic rather than monolithic. That is, a document is constructed only as the product of an exchange with a user/reader which results in the combination of appropriate text chunks into a new document. Second, ConTexts incorporate intensional and AI programming, allowing the text delivery system to become involved in the exchange with the user to process user input and to create dynamic content (different versions of the text) which results from that exchange.;Revising the presentation of texts as interactive and polylithic rather than prefabricated and monolithic is an insight located in this dissertation, derived from feminist study of conversation as narrative strategy.;The versioning of texts according to user requests is situated and described within intensional logic programming and demand driven dataflow models. Intensional logic provides a framework and semantics for describing versions in terms of a version space and possible worlds. In this dissertation, Intensional HTML is used to demonstrate a preliminary form of conversational texts because it allows versions of texts to be delivered through standard web browsers. (Abstract shortened by UMI.)...