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Posthumanism and Electronic Literature
Posthumanism, according to Cary Wolfe, "names a historical moment in which the decentering of the human by its imbrication in technical, medical, informatic, and economic networks is increasingly impossible to ignore" (xv-xvi). This conference paper brings the framework of posthumanist philosophy to bear on the field of electronic literature, at a critical moment in time wherein our conception of the human, and of literature, are fundamentally questioned through digital technology. I argue that humanist philosophy is explicitly tied to the rise of print literature, via Elizabeth Eisenstein (1979), while posthumanism is linked with digital media (Wolfe 2010) and, by extension, electronic literature. Furthermore, posthumanism interrogates assumptions of autonomy and subjectivity inherited from humanism, and via cybernetics articulates an image of the human as another information-processing machine. Electronic literature's reliance and amalgamation of natural and artificial languages (most noticeable in “codework”) reflects the posthumanist critique of the supposed binaries between human and machine.
Thor Baukhol Madsen - 17.02.2015 - 16:02
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The Endgame or a Wake?: Tropes of Circularity in Literature Then and Now
This paper argues that attending to the tropes of circularity featuring in print-based literature proves to be a useful foil for an analysis of electronic literature. Based on the idea that digital literary mechanisms do not obliviate previous circularity-inducing structuring motifs in analog literature, such as labyrinths, chess, rivers, and clockwork, this argument arrives at a crucial time for literature, which is currently the object of intensified debates on beginnings and ends, especially in the context of digitality and multisensory perception becoming central to some aspects of its processes. Accordingly, circular motion is here analysed in its depiction and actuation across several kinds of literary / literal machines, in reflection also on how sensory perception both mediate and is mediated. If literature is conditional upon a series of unique, though interconnected, mechanisms, it seems reasonable not to discard a certain circularity of the senses that is brought into play there and, indeed, given both thematic and formal substance in analog and digital works.
Diogo Marques - 26.07.2017 - 13:51
