Digital Poetry and the Limits of Interpretation (ENGL 5559)

This course will serve as a graduate-level introduction not only to the field of electronic literature generally and digital poetry in particular, but it will also be a kind of laboratory in which we'll experiment with the limits of literary interpretation. How do we account for texts which are dynamic, emergent, constantly shifting and morphing? If description is the best we can hope for, is description then a form of interpretation? It is my hope that, in conjunction with both live and virutal guest lectures by digital poetry practitioners we will together create a working vocabulary for reading works of electronic literature. Our course will be organized into five broad units: 1) digital poetry and the illegible; 2) reading digital poetry into/out of the early twentieth century avant- garde (through movements such as Dada, Futurism, Vorticism, Imagism); 3) reading digital poetry into/out of concrete poetry from the 1950s and 1960s; 4) procedural writing, computer-generated poetry and code-work; 5) contemporary conceptual writing as digital poetry.

(Source: Course Syllabus)