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.

Essays by this author

Lift This End: Electronic Literature in a Blue Light

by
Stuart Moulthrop
2013-04-02

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?

PMC editor Stuart Moulthrop responds

by
Stuart Moulthrop
1998-01-15

On the futures of electronic scholarship - an exchange among editors.

Electronic Books?

by
Stuart Moulthrop
2003-07-15

Stuart Moulthrop re-opens the debate on the “electronic book” and its continued marginalization vis-a vis print.

Stuart Moulthrop's response

by
Stuart Moulthrop
2003-05-21

Stuart Moulthrop complicates the idea of self-contained games.

From Work to Play

by
Stuart Moulthrop
2004-05-20

Stuart Moulthrop (re)mediates the interpretation (narrativists) vs. configuration (ludologists) debate by going macropolitical.

Moulthrop responds in turn

by
Stuart Moulthrop
2004-05-22

U.S. cybernetic pragmatisim and practical Net expertise interest Moulthrop (and his auditors) on “second thought.”

From Work to Play (sidebar)

by
Stuart Moulthrop
2004-05-19

Sidebar images, “From Work to Play: Molecular Culture in the Time of Deadly Games.”

Pax, Writing, and Change

by
Stuart Moulthrop
2008-02-29

Stuart Moulthrop argues that Pax answers John Cayley’s question, “What would textual instruments look like?” Moulthrop maintains that one plays this electronic text (in the manner of a musical instrument) as much as one reads it.

For Thee: A Response to Alice Bell

by
Stuart Moulthrop
2011-01-21

Stuart Moulthrop uses the lessons of hypertext as both an analogy and an explanation for why hypertext and its criticism will stay in a “niche” - and why, despite Bell’s concern, that’s not such a bad thing. As the response of an author to his critic, addressed to “thee,” “implicitly dragging her into the niche with me,” this review also dramatizes the very productivity of such specialized, nodal encounters.

See the Strings: Watchmen and the Under-Language of Media

by
Stuart Moulthrop
2011-10-12

Engaged in his own kind of structured play, Stuart Moulthrop uses the concept of “under-language” to explore the boundaries, gutters, masked intentions, and hidden meanings of Moore and Gibbons’ Watchmen, while simultaneously using the graphic novel to provide an equally complex, over-determined rendering of the term.