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Hypertext and bigos: On esthetic categories of modern and post-modern Polish fiction that may help us describe electronic literature in yet another way
Bigos is one of the trademark meals Poland can offer to the world of culinary traditions. Fried cabbage, slices of sauseges, vegetables, mashrooms, and almost anything a chef has at hand can be put into one pot and eventually become a delicious, warming up dish. Quite similiar technique can be seen in a certain tradition of novel writing that appeared during the Renaissance and Baroque in Poland, then flourished in XX century post-modern Polish fiction, but actually dates back to the Romans. It is called silva rerum ("a forest of things") and stands for a fragmentary, anti-mimetic, open-ended, essayistic kind of writing, which emphasizes its own status as a process rather than a product. As such, silvae rerum and its examples can form an interesting contribution to the field of electronic writing and hypertext theory. With the latter deriving its tools mostly from avant-garde and poststructuralist esthetics, silvae rerum can stand out as an alternative: it represents open-ended act of simultaneous "reading-writing", yet it comes not from the common fields of reference for e-lit scholars.
Eric Dean Rasmussen - 27.01.2011 - 16:39
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Teaching Digital Literature within a “Research and Teaching Partnership” in a Transatlantic Blended Learning Environment
This paper outlines the practices of teaching digital literature at the University of Siegen in Germany where Peter Gendolla and Joergen Schaefer taught courses on literature in computer-based media for students of both Literary and Media Studies. This paper thus provides an historical synopsis of the didactical transformations the teaching practices have undergone as well as an overview of the University’s profile and its focus on research and teaching literary studies. In 2007, the classroom moved online and held a class transatlantically in cooperation with Roberto Simanowski (Brown University/Providence, RI, USA). The online course approached an experimental Blended Learning concept. The paper introduces the methodological concept of the class “Digital Aesthetics” and discusses using Online Communication Systems in the context of the course of studies: Net Literature.
Eric Dean Rasmussen - 27.01.2011 - 16:52
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Some stylistic devices on media interface
author-submitted abstract: In the past, the “innovations” of electronic poetry often have been circumscribed in rather general terms; today, it seems important to characterize its stylistic, semantic and pragmatic devices with more precision. The traditional “figures of speech” have sometimes been considered as capable of achieving this aim. By denominations like “animated metaphor”, I have tried for example in my book Matières textuelles sur support numérique to describe “phenomena of meaning” in electronic literature, when animation effects enter in meaningful relations with the contents of words or letters. It is however undoubtedly dangerous to use a terminology which have been forged to characterize textual phenomena, whereas the signs of electronic texts are often based on various semiotic systems. In a recent article for the review Protée (which I also presented during the e-poetry seminar in Paris), while describing what I would call “figures of speech on media surface”, I sometimes continue to use traditional taxonomies; in order to avoid too dangerous analogies, I try in other cases to invent a new terminology.
Eric Dean Rasmussen - 27.01.2011 - 16:57
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Intertextuality in Digital Poetry
Despite postmodern and deconstructivist studies in the field, interxtuality is still often viewed as a process of textual closure: in that vision a text refers to an older text, and once we have found the source, the intertextual interpretation is completed.
Riffatterre, for example, seems to suggest this in his article ‘Intertextuality vs Hypertextuality’ (1994). Riffaterre stated here that intertextuality and hypertextuality should be distinguished, since the former is finite, while the latter is infinite. He defines hypertextuality as ‘the use of the computer to transcend the linearity of the written text by building an endless series of imagined connections, from verbal associations to possible worlds, extending the glosses or the marginalia from the footnotes of yesteryear to metatexts’ (Riffaterre 1994: 780) Intertextuality, on the other hand, ‘depends on a system of difficulties to be reckoned with, of limitations in our freedom of choice, of exclusions, since it is by renouncing incompatible associations within the text that we come to identify in the intertext their compatible counterparts’ (ibid: 781).
Eric Dean Rasmussen - 27.01.2011 - 17:01
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The Role of the Reader in Performative Digital Poetry
The object of digital poetry has been claimed to be the process initiated by the user and therefore dynamic. What is processed and made visible on screen is what Philippe Bootz (2007) calls the “texte-à-voir”, what we are given to see and what is only a selection of the underlying artwork. For digital poetry the processes executed by a programming language is the material the artist uses. Following Burgaud (2006) the user is “reading a process”. With the focus on the processes instead of the “object” the description and analysis of digital poetry is facing the problem that what the reader can see on the screen is not enough to understand the art work. Especially the change from a conceptual verbal art read in front of a computer screen mostly by an individual reader to installation art, caves to performances on stage including text, music, and dance and to performances in virtual environments such as Second Life ask for descriptions that are able to deal with the dynamics of those processes.
Eric Dean Rasmussen - 02.02.2011 - 15:09
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Endless Text: New Media Technologies in The Raw Shark Texts
Since the digital revolution of the 1990’s, the ‘end’ of literature has been often proclaimed from both a utopian and apocalyptic perspective. While the former has imagined a release of the literary from the constraints of paper and print, in the animation of letters and words, the latter has lamented the end of reading and writing as ‘we’ know it. However, as clear as the opposition between the hopeful visions of theorists such as George Landow and the nostalgic lament of critics like Steven Birkerts may be, their respective stances are easily disclosed as two sides of the same coin: both the positive and negative presentations of the end of literature build on the subtext that literature ‘is’ something; an inside (a space, or a practice) that is either creatively challenged or threatened from the outside – as if it were a backward country or a country under threat, to be opened up and developed or protected respectively. This paper challenges such a distinction between inside and outside by reading ‘literature’ as an interface of other media technologies.
Eric Dean Rasmussen - 02.02.2011 - 15:42
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Digital Orientalism: Japan and Electronic Literature
Digital Orientalism: Japan and Electronic Literature: Alice Ferrebe
In their 1995 essay ‘Techno-Orientalism: Japan Panic’, David Morley and Kevin Robins examined the contemporary construction of Japan as a potent and threatening Other, inscrutably encroaching upon the West through precocious technological genius and insidious business practices. For Japanophobes, they claimed, ‘the unpalatable reality is that Japan, that most Oriental of Oriental cultures, as it increasingly outperforms the economies of the West, may now have become the most (post)modern of all societies’. Of course, this imagining of Japan as the land of the future (a frequent cyberpunk strategy) stands in contrast to the more traditional Orientalist vision of the nation as a repository for the ancient and exotic – the Japan of an alien, exquisite aesthetic and of arcane martial practices, pre-modern rather than postmodern.Eric Dean Rasmussen - 12.02.2011 - 18:21
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Senghor on the Rocks: A Georeferenced Electronic Novel
author-submitted abstract: Senghor on the Rocks (SOTR) is the first novel that has been extensively illustrated with the help of online satellite imagery. SOTR was written in the form of a classical novel well before we developed the presented online format for publishing. Because of its linear narrative structure, the consistent first?person perspective of the text and the movement that happens throughout the text, it was very well suited for an adaption as an online "geo?novel" based upon Google Maps. The text of the novel was not changed for the online version, but every scene has been geographically referenced and the chapter structure has been adjusted for online reading habits.
Eric Dean Rasmussen - 16.02.2011 - 14:50
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Aesthetic Autonomy and Sensuous Appearing: Two Questions in the Aesthetics of Digital Poetry
In this paper I would like to consider the aesthetics of digital poetry with reference to ideas of aesthetic autonomy and sensuous appearing.
The notion of autonomy, whether of the art-work or of a mode of experience with which it is associated, has been central to the historical development of the idea of the aesthetic itself. Andrew Bowie defines it as ‘the idea that works of art have a status which cannot be attributed to any other natural object or human product’ (Aesthetics and Subjectivity, p. 2). It is an idea which has been seen as ideologically driven, as when Terry Eagleton suggests that ‘the idea of autonomy – of a mode of being which is entirely self-regulating and self-determining – provides the middle class with just the ideological mode of subjectivity it requires for its material operations’. Yet Eagleton also argues that aesthetic autonomy can provide a ‘vision of human energies as radical ends in themselves which is the implacable enemy of all dominative or instrumentalist thinking’, implying that it has potential for avant-garde or critical purposes (Eagleton, Ideology of the Aesthetic, 9).Eric Dean Rasmussen - 08.03.2011 - 16:05
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Rencontre: An Experimental Tool for Digital Literature
For several years, the Paragraph Laboratory, University of Paris 8, has explored new avenues in the field of digital art and literature. In that context, a project is currently ongoing in this lab, in collaboration with the University of Technology of Compiegne and the University of Geneva, supported by the Maison des Sciences de l’Homme Paris Nord. The goal of this project is to design a computer tool for the writing of nonlinear fictions for interactive media and to investigate its impact on both the writing and reading processes.
Eric Dean Rasmussen - 08.03.2011 - 16:33
