Megawatt

Megawatt is based on passages from Samuel Beckett’s novel Watt, first published in 1953 but written much earlier, when Beckett was aiding the French Resistance during World War II. The novel Megawatt leaves aside all of the more intelligible language of Beckett’s novel and is based, instead, on that which is most systematic and inscrutable. It does not just recreate these passages, although with minor changes the Megawatt code can be used to do so. In the new novel, rather, they are intensified by generating, using the same methods that Beckett used, significantly more text than is found in the already excessive Watt. The novel concludes with a listing of the code that was used to generate it.

(Source: Harvard Book Store)

Technical notes:

Megawatt, a book of 246 pages based on Samuel Beckett's Watt, is generated by 350 lines of Python.

Research Collection that references this work:

Title
From page to web: electronic remixes and appropriations of print literature

Critical writing that references this work:

Title	Author	Year
New Novel Machines: Nanowatt and World Clock	Nick Montfort	2014
Poetry and Stuff: A Review of '#!'	John Cayley	2015
The Computational Sublime in Nick Montfort's ‘Round’ and ‘All the Names of God’	Mario Aquilina	2015

Screen shots:

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https://elmcip.net/node/9975

Record posted by:

Alvaro Seica