Taking recent writings-of-internet as test cases, Stuart Moulthrop demonstrates the folly of deploying modernist compositional models, even avant-garde theories of citational and conceptual poetry recently popularized by Kenneth Goldsmith and the Flarf poets, to read born-digital writing. Though it may be fun, it’s ultimately futile to interpret the contingent output of an “interface in process” as a poem existing in a fixed, terminable state. Perhaps, then, interfacing with databases is becoming integral to not just electronic literature and digital poetics but all forms of literary study and practice?
Author: Stuart Moulthrop
Stuart Moulthrop
Stuart Moulthrop is a writer, cybertext designer, and Professor of English at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. His early work, Victory Garden, has been mentioned among the "golden age" of hypertext fiction. Later works, including Hegirascope (1997), Reagan Library (1999), and Pax (2003), pertain more closely to our current age of man-made fibers. Moulthrop is the author of many essays on hypertext and digital culture, including some that have been multiply anthologized and translated.
