Digital Ekphrasis and the Uncanny: Toward a Poetics of Augmented Reality
Robert P. FletcherIn this essay, Robert P. Fletcher demonstrates how, while putting together digital and print media affordances, augmented print may evoke in readers a sense of the uncanny. Fletcher also explains how works such as Amaranth Borsuk’s Abra (2014), Aaron A. Reed and Jacob Garbe’s Ice-Bound (2016) or Stuart Campbell’s Modern Polaxis (2014) seem to demonstrate the existence of a never-ending return of the “familiar” in electronic literature.
Debates in the Digital Humanities formerly known as Humanities Computing
Roberto Simanowski, Luciana GattassIn a review that addresses (and exposes) the founding myth of the "digital humanities" (DH), formerly known as "humanities computing,” Roberto Simanowski and Luciana Gattass measure just how much the 99 articles collected by Mathew Gold and Lauren Klein have overturned "academic life as we know it."
Aurature at the End(s) of Electronic Literature
John CayleyAmazon’s Alexa, Apple’s Siri, Microsoft’s Cortana, and Google Now: How will our encounters with these intelligent personal assistants - robots we’ve invited into our homes to speak with and listen to us, who share this data with vectorialist institutions that monitor our networked transactions - alter both human language and our efforts to lead meaningful lives? In a wide-ranging, philosophical essay that exposes various myths of computation while presenting a candid assessment of the rapidly evolving culture of reading, poet John Cayley speculates that literature will be displaced by aurature. Listen up, readers: A major challenge in the programming era will be to develop linguistic aesthetic practices that intervene significantly and affectively in socio-ideological spaces thoroughly saturated with synthetic language that are largely controlled by commercial interests. The time for aesthetic experiments that disrupt the protocols of a still-nascent aurature is now.
This essay was reprinted in part for the Handbook on Electronic Literature (Bloomsbury 2018).
The New, New, New Philology
Matt CohenIn this review of Rethinking the New Medievalism, Matt Cohen ponders the significance of philology's ongoing period of "reflection, [...] refraction, and revisitation." Against the backdrop of contemporary shifts in the humanities, more generally, Cohen sees opportunities for medievalists to intervene, bringing with them both clarity and innovation to fields in a state of fluctuation.
Not a case of words: Textual Environments and Multimateriality in Between Page and Screen
Élika OrtegaIn this essay, Ortega departs from Ulises Carrión’s notion of book as a “spatio-temporal entity” which goes beyond verbal language, in order to demonstrate how hybrid works (or "textual environments") such as Amaranth Borsuk’s Between Page and Screen (2012) may create “new genres and material and poetic expressiveness.” By drawing on Rita Raley’s “TXTual practice,” Ortega also demonstrates how the "material dynamics" displayed by these works decisively contributes to the generation of meaning.
What [in the World] was Postmodernism? An Introduction
David CiccoriccoAn Introduction to the gathering.
“The End”
Brian McHaleThe closing keynote at the Summer 2015 University of Otag0 symposium, "What [in the World] Was Postmodernism," also closes the present collection, here in ebr (December 2016). In December of 2019, McHale's Afterword, Ciccoricco's Introduction and essays by Simon During and Amy Elias will be included in Post-Digital: Dialogues and Debates from electronic book review (Volume 2).
Practicing Disappearance: A Postmodern Methodology
Neil VallellyIn this essay, Neil Vallelly answers the question “What is postmodernism?” by demonstrating how disappearance, as envisaged by Jean Baudrillard, “lies at the heart of postmodern theory.” Vallelly also argues for the critical value of postmodernism’s traces in contemporary literature and suggests the adoption of a "methodology that embraces disappearance."
What is Metamodernism and Why Bother? Meditations on Metamodernism as a Period Term and as a Mode
Alexandra E. DumitrescuAlexandra Dumitrescu’s essay describes the development of metamodernism in New Zealand and presents metamodernism as an interrogation of “modernist uprootedness or postmodern drifting.”
From Master(y) Narratives to Matter Narratives: Jeanette Winterson’s The Stone Gods
Damien GibsonIn an attempt to re-materialize postmodernism, Damien Gibson provides, by drawing on material ecocriticism and on the concept of “narrative agency,” a critical posthumanist reading of Jeanette Winterson’s The Stone Gods.
The Historical Status of Postmodernism Under Neoliberalism
Simon DuringSimon During proposes to unravel the “layered” history of postmodernism in New Zealand. In so doing, the author of this essay treats postmodernism as “an event rather than a period” and describes postmodernism’s development in the epoch of neo-liberalism.
“Not Going Where I Was Knowing”: Time and Direction in the Postmodernism of Gertrude Stein and Caroline Bergvall
Lynley EdmeadesIn an essay spanning modernist and postmodernist poetics, Lynley Edmeades demonstrates how postmodern poetry cultivates “present-ness” by drawing on Lyotard’s concept of “constancy,” Gertrude Stein’s notion of “continuous present” and Caroline Bergvall’s adherence to “non-linearity.”
Nominalisms Ancient and Modern: Samuel Beckett, the Pre/Post/Modernist?
Holly PhillipsWhile describing the work of Beckett as deeply influenced by nominalism, Holly Phillips explores “ineffable permutations of intellectual history” and demonstrates how medieval philosophy has deeply influenced twentieth century literature. Simultaneously, Phillips undermines the idea that nominalism’s dismantlement of universals has finally been accomplished by postmodernism.
The Uses of Postmodernism
Jacob EdmondJacob Edmond argues that while postmodernism might be useless as a theoretical concept or periodization, it nevertheless illuminates changes, both local and global, in the final decades of the twentieth century. Edmond analyzes the uses of postmodernism in the United States, New Zealand, Russia, and China. He shows how the various and even contradictory uses of the term postmodernism allowed it to represent both sides in the unfolding tension between globalization and localism in late twentieth-century culture.
Processing Words, or Suspended Inscriptions Written with Light
Manuel PortelaIn this review, Manuel Portela considers Matthew G. Kirschenbaum's Track Changes in light of a "general computerization of the modes of production of writing."