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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
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Digital Poetics or On the Evolution of Experimental Media Poetry
The academic and literature critical discussion on new media poetry or about digital texts swings to and fro, in method and conception between two poles: one is the 'work immanent' approach of structure description and classification, and the other the deduction of abstract media esthetics. At a tangent to this the communication on media, culture and media art has been more or less committed to the priority of technological reasoning since the nineties at the latest. The concern with technology remains a dilemma: Technology has to be taken into account when dealing with concrete structure analyses of works of digital poetry, but some traps lie in wait. Is the knowledge accounted for here really sufficient? I would say that few of those taking part in the discussion who do not actually work in the specific area artistically are capable of programming digital texts (the same may be said of some artists). Another problem is something I have casually termed a new techno-ontology: a ‘cold fascination’ for technological being (also of texts), which flares up briefly with each innovation pressing for the market in the respective field.
Patricia Tomaszek - 14.09.2010 - 14:16
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Writing on Complex Surfaces
Writing in programmable media is theorized in relation to the surface of writing.[1] Within the framework of currently dominant cultural and technological formations, the surface of writing is conceptually simple, and this overdetermines practices of writing. As it is typically conceived, the surface of writing is a flatland plane, a 3rd-dimensionless scroll (however segmented or, indeed, fragmented) on which linguistic symbols, similarly dimensionless, are arrayed. Once language has come to rest on this simple surface, any qualities it may possess of temporality or material depth are bracketed. Programmable media problematize this dominant but simple model, and yet, arguably, its depthless, timeless surface misdirects the composition and publication of writing, even writing that is instantiated in programmable media. In the field of poetics, there are traditions for which the surface of writing is complex. Although rarely made explicit, such approaches to the writing surface have enriched the practices of important writers, particularly poetic writers.
Patricia Tomaszek - 14.09.2010 - 17:21
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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
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Art, Creativity, Intellectual Property and the Commons
Let us begin with a story about art. In this story, art produces aesthetic works of durability and stability — things that “stand up on their own”. The act of artistic production doesn’t come from nowhere; neither is it born in the heads of private individuals. It doesn’t dwell in a social nothingness. Nor does it start with a blank canvas. Any moment of production involves the reassembling and rearranging of the diverse materials, practices and influences that came before it and which surround it. Out of this common pool, art creates aesthetic works with emergent properties of their own. From the social world in which it lives, art creates affect and precept. It forms new ways of feeling, seeing and perceiving the world. It gives back to us the same object in different ways. In so doing, art invents new possibilities and makes available new forms of subjectivity and life. Art is creative and productive.
David M. Berry - 21.09.2010 - 11:11
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The Politics of the Libre Commons
The project of ‘free culture’ is committed to the creation of a cultural space, rather like the ‘public domain’, seeking to complement/replace that of proprietary cultural commodities and privatized meaning. This has been given a new impetus with the birth of the Creative Commons. This organization has sought to introduce cultural producers across the world to the possibilities of sharing, co–operation and commons–based peer–production by creating a set of interwoven licenses for creators to append to their artwork, music and text. In this paper, we chart the connections between this movement and the early Free Software and Open Source movements and question whether underlying assumptions that are ignored or de–politicized are a threat to the very free culture that the project purports to save. We then move to suggest a new discursive project linked to notions of radical democracy.
David M. Berry - 21.09.2010 - 11:16
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On Byways and Backlanes: The Philosophy of Free Culture
We see before us a turning in free culture. This turning, lies between the claims of the ordinary against those of the extraordinary, and suggests that we need to carefully examine our current situation. The ordinary highlights the fact that even in the beginnings of free culture there existed its middle and its end, that its past invaded its present, and even the most extreme attention to the present is invaded by a concern for the future. Whereas the extraordinary highlights the possibility of thinking that brings us out of this life-world and instead opens out and unfolds the way in which we might reveal a different world. This world could be said to be both within capitalism and between capitalisms. Here we might think about the transformation of the economic base from an industrial fordist form of capitalism, to an economy founded on the valorisation of information and code, a postfordist capitalism. Free culture, then, could be said to lie in the interstices, and in so doing could be a rare chance to help to point the way from the lived to the desired.
David M. Berry - 21.09.2010 - 11:22
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Ping Poetics
Sandy Baldwin investigates the manner in which a computer "ping trace" can be classified as a form of digital poetics, and discusses the underlying symbolic practices of both poesis and poetics that encompass coding and computation.
Eric Dean Rasmussen - 21.09.2010 - 11:27
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For Thee: A Response to Alice Bell
In an essay that responds to Alice Bell's book The Possible Worlds of Hypertext Fiction (Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), Stuart Moulthrop uses the lessons of hypertext as both an analogy and an explanation for why hypertext and its criticism will stay in a "niche" - and why, despite Bell's concern, that's not such a bad thing. As the response of an author to his critic, addressed to "thee," "implicitly dragging her into the niche with me," this review also dramatizes the very productivity of such specialized, nodal encounters.
Eric Dean Rasmussen - 03.02.2011 - 11:01
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Rev. of Beyond the Screen. Transformations of Literary Structures, Interfaces and Genres
Rev. of Beyond the Screen. Transformations of Literary Structures, Interfaces and Genres
Eric Dean Rasmussen - 04.02.2011 - 12:43