electropoetics

In "Nature's Agents," Lisa Swanstrom discusses the agency of objects operating within networks. Specifcally, Swanstrom addresses works which allow nature to correspond with humans in a shared environment, posing provocative questions about the idea of agency itself as expressed in an ecology of action.

This essay is excerpted from Swanstrom's monograph, Animal, Vegetable, Digital: Experiments in New Media Aesthetics and Environmental Poetics (under contract to be published by the University of Alabama Press).

Scott Rettberg's essay, "An Emerging Canon?", highlights the potential for macroanalytic approaches to literary study, specifically in the field of electronic literature. Through his study of the richly populated ELMCIP Knowledge Base, Rettberg analyzes the impact that specific works have had within scholarly and creative communities, and enumerates the potential benefits that this work might have for the preservation, study, and understanding of the field.

Maria Engberg reviews two books that describe the dialectical relationship between literary production, digital media, and literary reception from opposite ends of the historical and aesthetic spectrum. "Literary paleontologist" C.T. Funkhouser examines the born-digital poetry of the 1950s (and earlier), while Johanna Drucker writes an eye-witness account of the contemporary encounter between print literature, humanities research, and "speculative computing."

In the following essay, Luciana Gattass discusses the formation of a Brazilian Electronic Literature Collection via analysis of works identified in the ELMCIP Knowledge Base. Positioned between the existence of geographical data and the question of a national literature, Gattass considers the role of the human critic in the age of big data.

In “One + One = Zero,” Marjorie C. Luesebrink discusses “fleeting” messages and their implications for electronic literature. Beginning with a discussion of the popular social media app, Snapchat, Luesebrink considers a series of works of electronic literature that employ tropes of vanishing and inaccessibility to represent forgetfulness, limited perception, and the challenges posed by dynamic environments for contemporary readers. After tracing a path through two decades of digital practice, Luesebrink points to a future in which the vanishing text will continue to be a relevant site for literary innovation.