Search
The search found 27 results in 0.01 seconds.
Search results
-
Teaching Digital Literature: Didactic and Institutional Aspects
Digital media is increasingly finding its way into the discussions of the humanities classroom. But while we have a number of grand theoretical texts about digital literature we as yet have little in the way of resources for discussing the down-to-earth practices of research, teaching, and curriculum necessary for this work to mature. The book Reading Moving Letters, edited by Roberto Simanowski, Jörgen Schäfer and Peter Gendolla, addresses this need and provides examinations by nine scholars and teachers from different national academic backgrounds. While the first section of the book provides definitions of digital literature as a discipline of scholarly treatment in the humanities, the second section asks how and why we should teach digital literature and conduct close readings in academia and discusses institutional considerations necessary to take into account when implementing digital literature into curricula. The following text is the introduction to section two.
Patricia Tomaszek - 14.09.2010 - 12:33
-
A Four-Sided Model for Reading Hypertext Fiction
I will not pursue the issue of a hypertextual competence (or a multimodal hypertextual competence) here. Rather I would like to take a closer look at literary hypertext and electronic literature itself, and the fact that electronic literature, just like print literature, prefigures different modes of reading. I will insist on the necessity of examining what mode of reading and what kind of responses are prefigured in hypertexts when we make conclusions about hypertext reading. I want to approach the topic by putting weight on how Megan Heyward’s Of day, of night (2002) prefigures the reader's response. The aim of this article is to explore some of the preconditions for reading Of day, of night, and to identify three modes of reading in this hypertext fiction. In addition to these three modes I will argue for a fourth mode of reading hypertext fiction. This mode can be identified in several literary hypertexts, but is less relevant for describing the preconditions for reading Heyward's text. Consequently I will make use of other work to exemplify this mode. Four modes of reading are identified and described. These are semantization, exploration, self-reflection and absorption.
Patricia Tomaszek - 17.09.2010 - 11:09
-
Literary Art in Digital Performance: Case Studies in New Media Art and Criticism
Literary Art in Digital Performance examines electronic works of literary art, a category integrating the visual+textual including interactive poetry, narrative computer games, filmic sculpture, projective art, and other works specific to digital media. In recent decades, electronic art's aesthetic has been driven by new algorithmic, randomized, and emergent processes. Although this new art differs from material art or print literature, the rise of popular fascination with new media has neglected signifcant discussion of how technical mediation impacts contemporary art and literature. Presented as a collection of case studies by leading scholars, the book provides a contemporary optic on this art's forms, problems, and possibilities. Each case study is followed by a post-chapter dialogue where the editor engages authors on the foundational aesthetics of new media art and literature.
Table of Contents
1. Introduction: Juncture and Form in New Media Criticism, Francisco J. Ricardo
2. What is and Toward What End do We Read Digital Literature?, Roberto Simanowski Post-Chapter Dialogue, Simanowski and Ricardo
Eric Dean Rasmussen - 31.01.2011 - 10:01
-
List(en)ing Post
Raley's essay is a careful and descriptive reading of Hansen and Rubin's interactive installation "Listening Post" paying particular attention to complexities of reading a textual work based on live information feeds contributed by an anonymous crowd, a literary work that is perceived as a live embodied experience in a multisensoral "polyattentive" environment.
Eric Dean Rasmussen - 31.01.2011 - 12:04
-
Kissing the Steak: The Poetry of Text Generators
Syntext, developed by Pedro Barbosa and Abílio Cavalheiro in the early 90s (later partially re-versioned on the World Wide Web), is a collection of fifteen computer programs from the 70s, 80s, and 90s that automatically generate various styles of poetry in DOS. Though the texts made by each of the programs are thematically unrelated, through these pioneering works by Barbosa, Nanni Balestrini, Marcel Bénabou, and others, each of the predominant fundamental attributes of text-generators is clearly divulged. Syntext, despite being primitive on the surface, powerfully brings to light the expressive possibilities, versatility, and variation within permutation texts, and provides sufficient evidence upon which a typology of computer poems can be established.
(Source: abstract of conference presentation)
Eric Dean Rasmussen - 31.01.2011 - 15:28
-
Interview with Michael Joyce
Archivist Gabriela Redwine interviewed author Michael Joyce during his visit to the Ransom Center in April 2009. Excerpts from the interview are available as audio files and transcripts. Joyce talks about the reader community around early hypertexts, before they were even published and were just being passed from person to person on floppy disks, about connections between his work and Modernist authors (Stein, Joyce), about lowercase letters not being an obvious requirement to early computer programmers, about e-lit authors having to be their own critics and about the sensation of writing the first line of afternoon and knowing that this was different from conventional literature.
Jill Walker Rettberg - 14.02.2011 - 11:43
-
The Programming Era: Building Literary Networks Through Peer-to-Peer Review
A noted literary scholar, Mark McGurl, has dubbed the postwar period in American literary history “The Program Era.” This phrase alludes to the fact that after World-War II most American literary production occurred in and around creative writing programs. Today, electronic literature continues the trend of literature’s institutionalization within higher education systems. E-lit literalizes the concept of “program” fiction inasmuch as its authors must also be adept at coding and programming. Taking the systematic coupling of literary art and higher-educational institutions as a necessary given, what can we—i.e. the authors, artists, critics, coders, scholars, students, writers and readers thinking at the interface of these social systems—do to create environments in which e-lit can flourish?
Eric Dean Rasmussen - 25.02.2011 - 08:16
-
Figures in the Interface: Comparative Methods in the Study of Digital Literature
This paper, which is part of the collection of essays Reading Moving Letters (see introduction) reflects on what the emerging field of digital literature studies and the more established (but continually evolving) discipline of comparative literature might contribute to one another in terms of defining concepts and methods of literary analysis. My discussion is guided by the tentative proposition that the vexed status of the "national language" for comparative literature can be seen as analogous to the status of the "digital" for scholars undertaking research on computer-based literary texts. Aiming to overcome the ideological strictures of nationalism, many present-day comparatists are returning to the old question "what is literature?" and are placing renewed emphasis on the role of figurative language as a defining feature of literary texts and, consequently, as the appropriate focus of comparative textual analysis.
Jill Walker Rettberg - 25.03.2011 - 15:17
-
Aesthetics of Surface, Ephemeral and Re-Enchantment in Digital Literature: How Authors and Readers Deal with the Lability of the Electronic Device
Whenever the program of a work, created by an artist, is run by a computer, the digital device necessarily plays a role in its updating process: because of the operating systems, the software and the ever changing speed of computers, the digital device may sometimes affect the author’s artistic project, or even make it unreadable on screen. Thus, readers do not know what they should consider as part of the artist’s intentionality, and what they should ascribe to the unexpected changes made by the reading device of their personal computer. Critics who are in keeping with a hermeneutic approach may ascribe certain processes, actually caused by the machine, to the artist’s creativity. What is more, authors lose control over the evolution of their work and the many updates it undergoes. Thus, the “digital” artist is given four options when dealing with the lability of the electronic device, which will be described in this article by close readings of The Dreamlife of letters by Brian Kim Stefans, Revenances by Gregory Chatonsky and La Série des U by Philippe Bootz.
Alexandra Saemmer - 03.07.2011 - 16:03
-
Visionary Landscapes: Literature on the Edge of Time and Space
Introduction to a special issue of Hyperrhiz presenting a collection of essays, artist papers, reviews, and literary works from the Electronic Literature Organization's (ELO) 2008 conference held at Washington State University Vancouver, in Vancouver, Washington [livinginswwashington.net], from May 29 to June 2, which was hosted by Dene Grigar and John Barber.
Dene Grigar - 06.10.2011 - 06:55
