avant garde

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?

Jhave's wide-ranging history and prospectus alerts us to cognitive, material, and mythic dimensions of the nexus of image and text. By showing how text evolved into image, the essay traces a new malleability, dimensionality, and embodiment of writing. The contemporary image-text is a quasi-object with experimental literary qualities as well as an almost organic media dynamism.

Lance Olsen continues the FC/2 authors' discussion of Carole Maso's AVA and adds some bits on Laird Hunt, Mark Z Danielewski, Judd Morrissey and Lori Talley, and other recent U.S. avant-gardists.

Picking up Lance Olsen's theme of thinking as digestion, Michael Martone chews on what's Avant Garde about Baltimore.

Further on Gertrude Stein, Carole Maso, and the avant garde in U.S. fiction from Lidia Yuknavitch.