electropoetics
Histories of the Future
For Patrick LeMieux, the future of electronic literature is not before us, and instead entails an investigation of the past--of the unknowable territories we collaborate with through e-lit.
Reading the Wind
In his video-poem "Reading the Wind," Dave (Jhave) Johnston identifies the current environment for electronic literature, and in doing so, claims the impossibility of knowing its future.
At the Time of Writing: Digital Media, Gesture, and Handwriting
"At the Time of Writing" considers the role of proprioception and the embodied memory of writing and gesture as a critical component of readerly practices. Anna Gibbs and Maria Angel examine a series of works of born digital literature that use representational techniques to evoke an "ethos of touch" that is critical to the experience of the work. Gibbs and Angel conclude that feeling is key to the process of meaning-making, and that experimental interfaces foreground the importance of the body in literature.
The Politics of Plasticity: Neoliberalism and the Digital Text
In this essay, Davin Heckman argues that works of electronic literature often provide occasions for cultivating attention in a mutable cultural landscape. Through readings of John Cayley, YHCHI, Rob Wittig, and Richard Holeton, Heckman points to a poetics of technical estrangement by which new media is opened up to deliberative reading, and thus presents contemporary readers with the opportunity to develop critical practices appropriate for the conditions of neoliberalism.
Shuffle Literature and the Hand of Fate
Zuzana Husárová and Nick Montfort up the ante for experimental writing by examining the category of "shuffle literature." What is shuffle literature? Simply put: books that are meant to be shuffled. Using formal reading of narrative and themes, but also a material reading of construction and production, Husárová and Montfort show that there are many writing practices and readerly strategies associated with this diverse category of literature.
Digital Manipulability and Digital Literature
Serge Bouchardon and Davin Heckman put the digit back into the digital by emphasizing touch and manipulation as basic to in digital literature. The digital literary work unites figure, grasp, and memory. Bouchardon and Heckman show that digital literature employs a rhetoric of grasping. It figures interaction and cognition through touch and manipulation. For Bouchardon and Heckman, figure and grasp lead to problems of memory - how do we archive touch and manipulation? - requiring renewed efforts on the part of digital literary writers and scholars.
A New “Gospel of the Three Dimensions”: Expanding the Boundaries of Digital Literature in Jörgen Schäfer and Peter Gendolla’s Beyond the Screen
Just when you thought you were used to electronic literature, this critic makes the case for "beyond the screen" with a review of Jörgen Schäfer and Peter Gendolla's book of the same title, focusing on "transformations of literary structures, interfaces and genre."
Critical Code Studies and the electronic book review: An Introduction
Mark C. Marino explains the rationale for the Critical Code Studies Working Group, a six-week experiment in using social media for collaborative academic production. Marino also analyzes the first week's discussion, which focused on debates about what it means to read "code as text."
A [S]creed for Digital Fiction
An international group of digital fiction scholars proposes a platform of critical principles, seeking to build the foundation for a truly "digital" approach to literary study.
Perloff on Pedagogical Process: Reading as Learning
Douglas Barbour reads Marjorie Perloff's Differentials: Poetry, Poetics, Pedagogy as a notable addition to her oeuvre, another grab-bag of pertinent, impertinent, and always provocative readings of both a wide range of works and some of the social/cultural contexts in which we read them.