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“Honored by the Error”: The Literary Friendship of Gaddis and Gass

Anyone more than a little familiar with William Gaddis or William Gass likely knows of their long friendship. They first met at the National Book Award ceremony on April 21, 1976—Gass being one of the judges that gave the prize to J R—and when Gaddis was near death in 1998 Bill Gass was one of the last people he wanted to speak to. Unfortunately Gass received the message too garbled and too late, and that final telephone conversation never took place. Throughout their more than twenty-year friendship, they supported each other’s work in myriad ways, both publicly and privately, and they […]
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“A Long and Uninterrupted Decline”: Accumulation, Empire, and Built Environments in William Gaddis’s The Recognitions

The centrality of spiritual and aesthetic themes in William Gaddis’s The Recognitions (1955), combined with its encyclopedic style, has resulted in a general tendency to filter the rest of the novel’s themes through the lens of either religion or art. Thus, critical discussions of Gaddis’s satirical portrayal of “a society too wholly reliant upon exchange value as a definitional principle” (Leise 40) have largely focused on capitalism’s degrading effect on art and religion. This is certainly an essential theme in The Recognitions, but it is only one facet of a broader, multi-levelled critique that anticipates Gaddis’s later works, particularly J […]
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"Trouble with the Connections": J R and the "End of History"

William Gaddis’s J R (1975) anticipates and formally embodies the “end of history.” Popularized in Francis Fukuyama’s 1989 article (and, later, book) of the same name, the “end of history” denotes a post-Cold War landscape in which the “universalization of Western liberal democracy” would inaugurate, in Fukuyama’s view, not merely “the passing of a particular period of postwar history, but the end of history as such” (“End of History?” 4). J R complicates this rosy conclusion, of course, but it does a lot more than that. Published more than a decade before the fall of the Berlin Wall precipitated Fukuyama’s […]
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Episode 6: Gendered AI and Editorial Labour in Digital Culture with Lai-Tze Fan

SR: Welcome to Off Center, the podcast about digital narrative and algorithmic narrativity. My name is Scott Rettberg, and I’m the Director of the Center for Digital Narrative at the University of Bergen. In this podcast, I’ll have conversations with the researchers at the center, as well as other experts in the field, to discuss topics revolving around digital storytelling and its impact on contemporary culture. Today, I’m here with Lai-Tze Fan, and we’ll be talking about gendered voice assistants, as well as Lai-Tze’s experience as a professor, editor, critic, and creator in the field of digital culture. Welcome. LF: […]
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Episode 4: Meme Culture, Social Media, and the January 6th Insurrection with Ashleigh Steele

SR: Welcome to Off Center, the podcast about digital narrative and algorithmic narrativity. My name is Scott Rettberg, and I’m the director of the Center for Digital Narrative at the University of Bergen. In this podcast, I’ll have conversations with the researchers at the center, as well as other experts in the field to discuss topics revolving around digital storytelling and its impact on contemporary culture. Today, I’m here with Ashleigh Steele, a recent graduate of our master’s program in Digital Culture. Today we’re going to talk about Ashleigh’s master’s thesis on meme culture and its connection to the January […]
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Episode 2: Joseph Tabbi on the Electronic Book Review, Research Infrastructure, and Electronic Literature

SR: Welcome to Off Center, the podcast about digital narrative. My name is Scott Rettberg. I’m the director of the Center for Digital Narrative at the University of Bergen in Norway. Today I’m joined with Joe Tabbi. Hi, Joe. JT: Scott, hi. SR: Joe is a Professor of English at the University of Bergen, and he’s leading the Electronic Literature node at the Center. Just maybe to say a little bit about your background before we begin, Joe, you have what I would say is a fascinating and diverse background as a researcher, scholar, and publisher, which we’ll be talking […]
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Classifying the Unclassifiable: Genres of Electronic Literature

This is an appropriate moment to systematically revisit genre theory and re-evaluate its premises and conceptual frameworks in light of emerging literary genres associated with digital technology. Since the mid-eighties of the last century, a new kind of literature that has taken advantage of computational technology began to attract the attention of literary scholars and became the subject of various literary studies. This new literature has come to be known by the designation of electronic literature, as assigned to it by the Electronic Literature Organization (ELO); the first international organization in the field interested in promoting, disseminating, and investigating the […]
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From Datarama to Dadarama: What Electronic Literature Can Teach Us on a Virtual Conference’s Rendering of Perspective.

This article is a reflection on our experiences with co-organizing the Electronic Literature Organization’s (ELO) yearly global conference in 2021, entitled “Platform (Post?) Pandemics”, which was fully virtual due to the Covid-19 pandemic. The article will be focused on how to understand the conference through critical data studies and will propose applying poetics and techniques from electronic literature to develop qualitative interpretations. The conference presented a wide range of literary performances, exhibitions, workshops, presentations of academic papers, and discussions that in different ways addressed (as stated in the call) how with “social media, apps, search engines and targeted advertisements, platformization […]
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Modelit: eliterature à la (language) mode(l)

When addressing the modelit in my title, I might point to its partial derivation from literature via the North American college-jargon abbreviation, lit. This would briefly beg the question of what literature is, in pragmatic and Foucauldian terms: as, for example, a discourse variously determined and policed by implicated constituencies. Whatever literature is, viewed thus, comes to be determined by the discourse-based power and knowledge struggles of these constituencies. In the case of eliterature, the broader constituencies of its students, on the one hand, and its practitioners, on the other, are particularly tightly integrated, for largely historical reasons that might […]
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June 2023: Ascension and Aesthetics, making sense of digital revolutions

Following last month’s essays about the impact of generative AI on digital writing come two articles that further address the evolving states of creativity in a rapidly changing digital world. Stuart Moulthrop’s review of Steve Tomasula’s Ascension explores the work’s cybernetic and apocalyptic dimensions. Moulthrop traces its subterranean, encyclopedic lineage through print fictions like Joyce’s Ulysses, Dos Passos’ U.S.A. trilogy, Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow, DeLillo’s Underworld, David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest, and Zadie Smith’s White Teeth – novels that are, as Edward Mendelson put it, “the products of an epoch in which the world’s knowledge is larger than any one person can encompass.” Mujie Li’s expands on these techniques of […]
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Erroneous Assumptions: Steve Tomasula’s Ascension

I want to stay with the trouble, and the only way I know to do that is in generative joy, terror, and collective thinking. – Donna Haraway Steve Tomasula’s latest novel delivers amply on Haraway’s formula. The book overflows with discovery, both scientific and artistic, a performance that should spark joy for some readers (this one, anyway). It weaves a structure for “collective thinking” that spans generations, disciplines, and personal histories. As for terror, it flirts with a maximum survivable dose. There is a numinous Terror Bird, a never-ending War on Terror, an ominous bead of amber; and above all, […]
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On Digital Aesthetics: Sense-Data and Atmospheric Language

Media Language In which way could the digital be understood as a creative force that engenders a lived experience of writing? The question suggests a way of exploring the digital in writing through a concern of its aesthetics, where aesthetics here means a creative engendering of the experience of being and becoming. The “digital” in recent literature of digital and computational aesthetics refers to the automation of the computational. As M. Beatrice Fazi and Matthew Fuller have indicated, computation “is a systemization of reality via discrete means such as numbers, digits, models, procedures, measures, representations, and highly condensed formalizations of […]
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‘A Shifting Surface World’: The Techno-Graphomania of David Jhave Johnston’s ReRites

The time of tongues is past… and the time of tongues continues to speak with us. This is our voice, only: what of those others, those computational others, whispering their pharmakon into our ears? While we might take solace in our own anthropic prejudice, dismissing such nonsensical communiqués as nothing more than computerized gobbledygook, we might unwittingly miss a chance to study first-hand the babytalk of an embryonic sentience, struggling abortively to awaken from its own phylum of oblivion. 1. INTRODUCTION ReRites is a multi-media project begun by the poet David ‘Jhave’ Johnston in 2017 and completed a year later. […]
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‘More of a performer than a listener’: Reading Hazel Smith’s Ecliptical

Hazel Smith’s latest volume of poems, Ecliptical, engages us in several ways. Attractively produced in both print and electronic formats, the book offers a journey through linguistic, sonic, and visual worlds. The title evokes the ecliptic plane, “the imaginary plane containing the Earth’s orbit around the sun”. For the Earth-bound watcher, in the course of a year, “the sun’s apparent path through the sky lies in this plane” (nasa. gov). The poet’s project is to propel earthly dwellers on paths we cannot immediately discern but must help to carve out. Our role is defined in one of the “bullet point” […]
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Writing as a life form: A Review of Richard Zenith’s Pessoa: A Biography (2021)

I’m nothing. I’ll always be nothing. I can’t want to be something. But I have in me all the dreams of the world. -Álvaro de Campos, from “Tobacco Shop” (1928), All translations of Pessoa by Richard Zenith. To create, I’ve destroyed myself. I’ve so externalized myself on the inside that I don’t exist there except externally. I’m the naked stage where various actors act out various plays. -Vicente Guedes, from the Book of Disquiet (text 299, c. 1918). I’ve made myself into the character of a book, a life one reads. Whatever I feel is felt (against my will) so […]
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Lines of Sight: Thirteen Ways of Looking at a System (Organism, Poem, or Otherwise)

Part 1: Introduction In Ecological Poetics, or Wallace Stevens’s Birds (Chicago, 2020), Cary Wolfe offers a deeply probing and densely theoretical engagement with the poetry of Wallace Stevens. The thesis of this project is deceptively simple: in it, Wolfe asserts that Stevens is an ecological poet. Those familiar with Stevens’s poetry might be tempted to assume that this is because of Stevens’s affinity for describing in detail features of the natural world, including birds, landscapes both domestic and wild, and other attributes commonly associated with an environmental sensibility (however many things this capacious term might mean). Those more familiar with […]
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Hypertextument: reading the new Victory Garden

Victory Garden 2022, one of the latest web reconstructions of e-literary classics made by the Electronic Literature Lab, delivers a promise of yet another 20 years of exploration of this vast hypertext. Created in Storyspace and originally published in 1993 by Eastgate Systems, Stuart Moulthrop’s hypertext fiction achieved a status of a unique, literary evergreen, a wide ranging digital ouvre. The dense network of interconnected text spaces (993 lexias and over 2800 links) delivered an abundance of divergent stories that run in parallel or, sometimes, in contradiction to each other. Add to this some blind alleys and “secret” spaces, and […]
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Review: Conceptualisms: The Anthology of Prose, Poetry, Visual, Found, E- & Hybrid Writing As Contemporary Art, ed. Steve Tomasula. Alabama UP, 2022

Steve Tomasula’s robust new anthology delivers its readers a dazzling variety of aesthetic artifacts, as the list after the title’s colon suggests. The diversity across its 500+ pages and 14+ hours of online content separates Conceptualisms from collections of a more mainstream bent. He has gathered online animations, recorded performances, and interactive platforms along with experimental works of fiction, essays, and poetry; in the collection’s last section, we see a transcript, a legal summary, a grant proposal, and a contract, all of which Tomasula argues can be classed as literature (while also proposing that the entries raise the question of […]
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Platforms,Tools and the Vernacular Imaginary

Vernacular digital expression is the flux of signs that make up everyday networked life: the memes, selfies, bots, loops, emojis, profiles, webcam backgrounds, email signatures and everything else. Unlike what was once called “folk art” in pre-digital cultures, vernacular digital culture will always be intimately connected with the technology companies and network infrastructure that allow digital communication to occur. The types of platforms and tools determine the types of computational and multimedia writing that takes place. “Vernacular” is appropriated here as a more generic term for the delocalized forms of everyday internet expression. In his 1981 Shadow Work, the countercultural […]

Gathering Critical Code Studies Working Group 2020

This special gathering collects reflections of the Critical Code Studies Working Group 2020 (CCSWG ‘20), a biannual meeting to explore the intersections of humanistic inquiry and computer code studies. Coordinated by Mark Marino (USC), Jeremy Douglass (UCSB), and Zach Mann (USC), the 2020 Working Group was held online from January 20 to February 3. It brought together more than 150 participants from around the world to share ideas, populating dozens of discussion threads with hundreds of comments, critiques, and critical readings. The need to attend to code could not be more urgent. Code exerts a regulatory effect over society and […]
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