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The Strategy of Digital Modernism: Young-Hae Chang Heavy Industries's Dakota
from Project MUSE: A prominent strategy in some of the most innovative electronic literature online is the appropriation and adaptation of literary modernism, what I call “digital modernism.” This essay introduces digital modernism by examining a work that exemplifies it: Dakota by Young-hae Chang Heavy Industries. I read this Flash-based work in relation to its literary inspiration: the authors claim that Dakota is “based on a close reading of Ezra Pound's Cantos part I and part II.” The authorial framework claims modernism’s cultural capital for electronic literature and encourages close reading of its text, but the work’s formal presentation of speeding, flashing text challenges such efforts. Reading Dakota as it reads Pound’s first two cantos exposes how modernism serves contemporary, digital literature by providing a model of how to “MAKE IT NEW” by renovating a literary past.
Eric Dean Rasmussen - 14.02.2011 - 10:27
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Digital Poetry Beyond the Metaphysics of 'Projective Saying'
Digital Poetry Beyond the Metaphysics of 'Projective Saying'
Eric Dean Rasmussen - 23.03.2011 - 14:01
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Digital Literature and the Modernist Problem
What is the status of digital literature in contemporary culture? After more than 20 years of production, the audience for digital literature remains small in comparison with the audience for "serious" or popular fiction. Many scholars and practitioners assume that digital literature constitutes a contemporary avant-garde, which does its work of experimentation outside or in opposition to the mainstream. Recent comparisons of digital poetics and early modernist art practices (e.g. by Scott Rettberg and Jessica Pressman) indicate continued interest in this issue. The notion of the avant-garde might seem thoroughly out of date in a consideration of the digital future. Important theorists (e.g. Huyssen, Drucker) have argued that the avant-garde is no longer viable even for traditional media and art practices. On the other hand, the avant-gardes of twentieth-century modernism made claims about the function of art that remain surprisingly influential today, within the art community and within popular culture.
Maria Engberg - 28.03.2011 - 16:47
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The Imaginary Solution
"[A] particular modernism has finally fully arrived, about a decade behind schedule, but making up for lost time. Part of the task of this essay is to docu- ment the emergence of this return and to provide evidence of a ten- dency that plays out across media, indexing and exemplifying one of the defining conditions of its cultural moment. Because these works fall outside the genres and styles likely to be familiar even to many readers of avant-garde literature, this documentation will require a certain degree of descriptive cataloguing (although it is worth noting that the catalogue itself, not coincidentally, is a key component of the works I will itemize). With the series of examples that follow, I further hope to show that this particular trend in contemporary literature is uniquely hinged, not only recovering one of the dreams of its literary past but also looking forward to what may be the nightmare of our digital future.
Jill Walker Rettberg - 05.12.2011 - 13:38
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A poetics
This rich collection is far more than an important work of criticism by an extraordinary poet; it is a poetic intervention into criticism. "Artifice of Absorption," a key essay, is written in verse, and its structures and rhythms initiate the reader into the strength and complexity of the argument. In a wild variety of topics, polemic, and styles, Bernstein surveys the current poetry scene and addresses many of the hot issues of poststructuralist literary theory. "Poetics is the continuation of poetry by other means," he writes. What role should poetics play in contemporary culture? Bernstein finds the answer in dissent, not merely in argument but in form--a poetic language that resists being easily absorbed into the conventions of our culture.
Meri Alexandra Raita - 19.03.2012 - 15:02
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Modernisms: A Literary Guide
The recent enthusiasm for things postmodern has often produced a caricature of Modernism as monolithic and reactionary. Peter Nicholls argues instead that the distinctive feature of Modernism is its diversity. Through a lively analysis of each of Modernism's main literary movements, he explores the connections between the new stylistic developments and the shifting politics of gender and authority.
Meri Alexandra Raita - 19.03.2012 - 15:33
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The Routledge Companion to Experimental Literature
The Routledge Companion to Experimental Literature
Eric Dean Rasmussen - 09.05.2012 - 08:25
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Digital Modernism: Making it New in New Media
What happens to literature, the literary, and the cultural value of both when text moves from page to screen? What can these shifts teach us about the traditions, practices, and discourses that shape the ways in which we read, study, and engage with print and electronic literature? Digital Modernism reads digital literature within a modernist tradition of making it new, a history that is both experimental and canonical. Across literary genres and programming platforms, I examine a shared strategy in some of the most innovative works of electronic literature online. These works adopt, adapt, and allude to the seminal aesthetic practices, principles, and texts of literary modernism. Digital Modernism analyzes these consciously crafted ties to modernism as part of a larger strategy and cultural situation. These works challenge common assumptions about digital literature, such as associations with hypertext and expectations of reader-controlled interactivity. They use modernism to construct immanent critiques about a culture that privileges images, navigation, and interactivity over narrative, reading, and textuality.
Scott Rettberg - 07.01.2013 - 23:18
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Digital Modernism
A prominent strategy in some works of contemporary electronic literature is the appropriation and adaptation of literary modernism, what I call "digital modernism." This paper examines digital modernism as a strategy relevant to rethinking not only the origins of electronic literature but the ways in which we discuss and understand the field of electronic literature in general. I examine Bob Brown's Readies machine (circa 1930), an avant-garde attempt to speed up text and thus transform literature and reading practices, in relation to works of electronic literature by Young-hae Chang Heavy Industries and William Poundstone. These contemporary works employ Flash to create a flashing aesthetic that resonates with Brown's goals for the Readies. Situating electronic literature within this forgotten but distinctly literary history of machine-based textual experimentation exposes the importance of reading today's new, new media literature in relation to the a movement from the early decades of the twentieth century which sought to "make it new" in the new media of its time.
Scott Rettberg - 07.01.2013 - 23:29
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Urbanalities: Modernism, Postmodernism and Digital Literature
Urbanalities, by babel and escha, is described as a ‘short story-poem-comic strip-musical, with randomly generated text’ (ELC, Author Description). It is a relatively accessible, visually and aurally appealing digital work, with strong elements of humour and a dark undertone. Although its technical underpinnings and some of its formal influences (such as the ‘VJ stylings’ mentioned in the ELC introductory note) are contemporary, its themes and expressive use of form are strongly reminiscent of high modernism, notably that of T.S. Eliot, in Prufrock and Other Observations (1917) and The Waste Land (1922). These are the themes of urban alienation, ennui, neurotic constraint or paranoiac anxiety, sexual degeneration or sterility; and a fragmentary form which mimics an vision of a fragmented social realm. The authors themselves signal strong connections to another aspect of modernism, that of Dada, in their description of Urbanalities as ‘A mash-up of Dadaist technique and VJ stylings,’ and in their association with Dada-inspired websites such as www.391.org.
Audun Andreassen - 10.04.2013 - 11:38
