electropoetics

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.

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."

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."

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.

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.

Søren Pold explores the ways in which Christophe Bruno's Iterature expands the notion of literary form and shows what happens when words are no longer only part of a language.

Chris Funkhouser reads the Electronic Literature Collection Vol. 1 as a crucial document, an effective reflection of literary expression and areas of textual exploration in digital form.

Three recent poetry publications by Nate Dorward's press The Gig are reviewed by Greg Betts; these are not poems so much as environments outside of, perhaps astride, the contingencies of systems.

Stephen Hawkins engages with the "web of counterintuitive, paradoxical, contentious and yet important claims" that he identifies in Gilles Deleuze's Proust and Signs.

Darren Tofts and Lisa Gye introduce the collection of essays, appearing here in the electropoetics thread, from the Alt-x e-book The Illogic of Sense.