electropoetics
Digital Creativity as Critical Material Thinking: The Disruptive Potential of Electronic Literature
In this contribution to her co-edited collection, [Frame]works, Saum brings to the digital humanities both makers and theoreticians, gnosis as well as poiesis, school teachers as well as research professors.
Introduction: Electronic Literature as a Framework for the Digital Humanities
Rettberg and Saum introduce a collection of essays, presented at the Summer 2019 [Frame]works conference at the University of California, Berkeley, that bring literary criticism and creativity (equally) to bear on the digital humanities.
Smart Technology Instead of Blood and Soil
A critique of Third Generation, web based electronic literature from a first generation maker and author of "The Moving Word" (2000), Janez Strehovic.
Image from Olia Lialina's Ann Karenin Goes to Paradise
Gardening E-literature (or, how to effectively plant the seeds for future investigations on electronic literature)
In the course of her wide ranging review of Scott Rettberg's Electronic Literature, Anna Nacher offers a glimpse into "semi-peripheral avant-gardes" that are more open than other fields of digital culture to decolonization and not restricted to the Anglophone world.
Appealing to Your Better Judgement: A Call for Database Criticism
On the database itself as a cultural and textual artifact, a site where reading and interpretation combine with quantitative methods.
Something there badly not wrong: the life and death of literary form in databases
Returning to his 2010 essay, “Electronic Literature as World Literature,” Tabbi extends those arguments in light of community built scholarly databases that have since emerged and in contrast to an uncritical tracking of “views, citations, downloads and occasional shared themes” (not to mention an increased precarity of authorship, where one’s scholarly work is basically given away).
For digital practices to be literary, Tabbi argues, our selections need to circulate within various institutional, academic, curatorial, and cultural structures – each of which is devising its own set of relations to the digital. This essay aims to initiate those ongoing conversations and evaluations in the field of born digital, electronic literature. In so doing, Tabbi suggests how acts of close reading can bring scholars into closer contact with one another and also activate the databases where e-lit archives are presently stored, read, curated, and mined for verbal and perspectival patterns. (Which have been described, in broad outline as a kind of distant reading.)
“Decolonize” E-Literature? On Weeding the E-lit Garden
Berens asks: Should the e-literature community include third-generation works in collections, syllabi, databases, prizes? A related question: do third-gen makers have a role in “decolonizing” e-literature? Who or what “colonizes” e-lit? E-literature, like earlier avant gardes, began as a coterie and has become a scholarly field. Using the comparison of a field versus a walled garden, the essay examines critiques of e-literature and variations on field definitions. It ends with two ideas about how to "decolonize" e-literature; about how equity and inclusion work in tandem with decolonization, but are not the same thing; and why decolonization efforts are urgent in the context of pandemic and protests supporting Black lives and racial justice.
Pitching the Poem-essay: Subversive Argument in the Work of Charles Bernstein
Circularity, performativity, authorial intervention, digressions, interruptions, collage, segmentation, prolific examples, line breaks and humor: Hazel Smith brings each of these approaches and stances to bear on Charles Bernstein's poetic essays and essayistic poetry. In the spirit of which, Smith presents her own essay in parallel sections. The main column advances her critical argument, while the second discontinuous column presents a "Deep Text" generated by Roger Dean, who applied the computer platform Python to word sequences from Smith's first column.
image: Charles Bernstein
Poetic Deformance and The Procedural Sonnet
Taking his cue from the first line of Lady Mary Wroth’s 17th Century sonnet sequence, “In this strange labyrinth how shall I turn?” Corey Sparks locates readers in a contemporary, procedural sonnet at the intersection of electronic literature, digital edition creation, gaming, and literary poetics. Sparks includes a photo of a reconstructed medieval labyrinth, taken at St. Fin Barre's Cathedral in Cork, Ireland during his attendance at the 2019 Electronic Literature Organization conference.
In Defense of the Difficult
Torres and Tisseli ask, isn't it ironic how, as we build machines that mimic thought and language in ever more persuasive ways, the very energy that fuels those machines is making us ever more stupid? Further, by resisting the proprietary technologies commonly present in 3rd generation e-literature, the co-authors advance the notion that being peripheral may actually be the role of e-literature.