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EBR April 2024: Ecocritique, Fandom, Eclipses, and Gaddis, Gaddis, Gaddis

[…]Klink boldly go into the lows and (watermelon sugar) highs of fan fiction, fan culture and fan studies in Off Center‘s “Episode 8: Fanfiction as a Form of Digital Narrativity with Flourish Klink”! (The Barker takes a seat at the desk and shoves her booted feet onto it. The lighting bleaches white. A wall of shadow slowly begins sliding in from stage left.) BARKER: A total eclipse of the art! Steve Tomasula explores how his experience of the 2017 solar eclipse elevated the normal to the sublime in “Total Eclipse: A Rearview Review of Rhythms”! (A spotlight pierces through the darkness […]
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March 2024: Hyper Literary Culture(s)

[…]rises. The Barker stands alone at center stage, but we are aware of a larger editorial team working in the wings.) BARKER: Another month. Another issue. Another mailshot. (Darkness, before a hard, white spotlight pierces the gloom. The Barker stands in sharp relief.) BARKER: Data is power! Stephan Paur illuminates the issues surrounding the (in)formation of identities in Infopower and the Ideology of Extraction! (The lighting shifts, whites becoming a mix of greens and turquoises reminiscent of an affiliate’s branding. The Barker waits, arms crossed.) BARKER: HYPER. LITERARY. CULTURE. (Off stage, someone begins to box a beat. It’s as off-rhythm […]

The Most Curious Career: William Gaddis in Germany

[…]and putting it back together again in order to fully grasp its material being, like the inner workings of a well-crafted clock. As a reader, I probably came well-prepared. Only three years earlier, I had had the privilege of attending the first seminar Hans-Walter Gabler, professor of English Literature at Munich University, offered using his recently published, first-ever critical edition of Ulysses. Naturally, in my early encounters with Gaddis, I deeply sympathized with Steven Moore’s approach as embodied in his Reader’s Guide to William Gaddis’s ‘The Recognitions’ to first and foremost lay bare the literary, cultural, and mythological allusions buried […]
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Gaddis Centenary Roundtable: Para-Academic Venues for Discussing Gaddis and Other Innovative Fiction

[…]silent because my presentation was just so non-academic. You know these are all people who are working on books, they’re working on chapters in an anthology, they’re working on their doctorate, and it was just a really funny contrast. But it occurred to me at that moment “yet here I am,” you know, so there is something that’s causing a bit of a bridge there to academia. I just sat there and I remember thinking in my mind we’re going to get to the end of this and I’m not going to have been asked a single question, whereas the […]
Read more » Gaddis Centenary Roundtable: Para-Academic Venues for Discussing Gaddis and Other Innovative Fiction

Total Eclipse: A Rearview Review of Rhythms

[…]installing innumerable traffic lights, or anonymous programmers, writing billions of lines of code, have shaped ours. The mound builders must have realized that by rising higher, they were not only able to see further, but understand more deeply the fabric of life they were part of. Using Google EarthPro we can get a intimation of why they revered the bird, soaring above them at 38°39’33.64″N 90°04’27.69″W. But instead of just looking at the pictures, look at the Pro data that makes this view possible: Imagery Date 3/13/2022 38°39’33.64″N 90°04’27.69″W elev 0 ft eye alt 3281 ft Image © 2024 Airbus. […]

Episode 8: Fanfiction as a Form of Digital Narrativity with Flourish Klink

[…]feedback loops happening, but it really is a networked thing. And you can see this in the way that groups treat characters like you’ll have fandom, and everybody will converge on an idea of who that character is. And sometimes it’s quite different than what’s in the original work, but because everybody has been writing these stories, they come together as one characterization. FK: The other thing I was going to mention is that it can be tempting to say, well, there’s fan studies and there’s all this stuff and that’s basically social science research. Maybe you could do literary […]
Read more » Episode 8: Fanfiction as a Form of Digital Narrativity with Flourish Klink

Pre-written Business Correspondences and Computer Therapists: William Gaddis’s J R, ELIZA, and Literacies in Conflict

[…]technological change will reshape the future persist, making the case for the continued value of critical literacies, with an emphasis on critical reading of and making with technology from within the humanities, rather than naïve reading practices and technological determinism in the face of emerging technologies. Works Cited Aarseth, Espen J. Cybertext: Perspectives on Ergodic Literature. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997. Aguilera, Earl, and Jessica Z. Pandya. “Critical Literacies in a Digital Age: Current and Future Issues.” Pedagogies 16.2 (2021): 103–10. Burn, Stephen J. “The Collapse of Everything: William Gaddis and the Encyclopedic Novel.” In Paper Empire: William Gaddis […]
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William Gaddis at St. Michael’s College: Memoir and Photograph

[…]American life and letters. He discussed a wide range of topics at St. Michael’s, including critical responses to The Recognitions and J R, the pernicious influence of corporatism on American culture, the Protestant work ethic, the philosophy of pragmatism, the promise and degradation of the American Dream, as well as the legacy of Watergate, the win-at-all-costs ethos of football coach Vince Lombardi, J. Paul Getty’s How to be Rich, James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time, and Bob Rafelson’s film Five Easy Pieces. On December 9th, the lecture was broadcast on Vermont Public Radio. The recording is collected in the American […]
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Gaddis Centenary Roundtable: Translating Gaddis

[…]felt it would be even more difficult to try to convey that in J R than it is in The Recognitions. Working with the dialogues and working with this oral register in a way that wouldn’t sound too informal or even too pedantic, in many ways, was a difficult challenge in Portuguese. Max Nestelieiev: For me, the hardest part was, as I said, rhythm which depends on the length of the words. The other hard part was punctuation and syntax, which also depend on the length of the words and the differences between syntax and punctuation, English and Ukrainian. Yoshihiko […]
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William Gaddis’s Frolics in Corporate Law

[…]fact that the fundamental disputes within copyright law effectively reiterate this hoary literary-critical debate. But the larger problem Gaddis is identifying is that in attempting to clarify experience to enable justice, legal language designed for business contracts fails to make sense of aesthetic experience without deforming it. Oscar cannot elucidate his point in the deposition, easily led into traps the Hollywood studio’s pricey lawyer sets for him. In that sense, corporate law cannot make sense of the heresy of paraphrase because it does not see the profit in the heresy and cannot monetize the particular aesthetic experience represented (and heresied). […]

Ecocritique between Landscape and Data: The Environmental Audiotour

[…](Peters; Parikka, A Geology of Media; Fan; Starosielski) and – with respect to the context in critical data studies – data as an assemblage (Kitchin and Laurialt) of wider cultural techniques of sensing, aggregation – and site-specificity. These helped to also outline techniques of knowledge beyond enumeration as they come to address infrastructures of data and the materiality of the digital (Offenhuber). Here the move from electronic literature on network platforms to the sites and infrastructures through which data, sensing, and inscription are expanded to elemental media becomes core to our argument. To execute this idea, our stories shift between […]
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Faire Exchange No Robbery: Critiques of Anthologies and Contracts in an Unpublished Gaddis Play

[…]threaten’d in this place!” I have plans to explore the Gaddis of contracts further in later critical work, but here, in the limited space of this archive-based piece, let me emphasize the counterintuitive aspects of Gaddis’s criticism of contract law in J R by referring to one of the novel’s most adroit readers. In a 2012 review of J R’s reissue by Dalkey Archive, Lee Konstantinou notes that Gibbs is citing nineteenth-century English jurist Henry Maine’s ideas, in Ancient Law (1861), about the movement from anchoring life in social institutions and their often hierarchical networks (Status) to grounding it in […]
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“Honored by the Error”: The Literary Friendship of Gaddis and Gass

[…]regrettable. Gass continues, “I could see [Gaddis’s] youthful love glowing plainly when our group visited Dostoyevsky’s apartment. The sight of the master’s desk actually wet Willy’s eyes. I envied him. When my eyes moistened, it was only for Bette Davis, and such a shallow show of weakness made me angry with my soul” (196-97). Their opposing opinions on Russian authors stand out because in practically every other way Gaddis and Gass were likeminded literary souls, and perhaps this kindredness is most plainly seen from a distance; that is, by looking at the arc of each man’s entire career. Both writers […]
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An Interview with Rick Moody

[…]more? So when I saw Gaddis’s piece in The New Yorker, I surmised that he had something he was working on, so I thought we should just go out big! At least this is how I was going to sell it to Allen Peacock. Who cares if you overpay, because it’s William Gaddis! Soon after Al went to Gaddis’ agent Candida Donadio. Allen’s boss was Joni Evans, who was married to Dick Snyder, the CEO of Gulf and Western—who owned Simon and Schuster. From what I was told, there was this ripple in the backdrop about the decision to buy […]

“A Long and Uninterrupted Decline”: Accumulation, Empire, and Built Environments in William Gaddis’s The Recognitions

[…]affecting all areas of life in the postwar period. In doing so, the links between Gaddis’s critical project in The Recognitions and in his mid-career novels become clearer, demonstrating an ongoing critical engagement with the effects of unfettered economic growth that undergirds Gaddis’s wide-ranging engagement with the social, economic, and political realities of his time. Works Cited Alberts, Crystal. “Mapping William Gaddis: The Man, The Recognitions, and His Time”. William Gaddis, ‘The Last of Something’: Critical Essays, eds. Crystal Alberts, Christopher Leise, and Birger Vanwesenbeeck, McFarland & Company, 2010: 9-27. Burn, Stephen J. “After Gaddis: Data Storage and the Novel”. […]
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Gaddis Centenary Roundtable – Artists in Non-literary Media Inspired by Gaddis

[…]of course, you seek to make it your own. In that whole tradition, regardless of what genre you are working in, there is often a way of having a kind of inner textual conversation with the artist you are working with. But I think with the mindset that I was entering the piece with, in a sick way, I kind of wanted to just flatten everything, to let the dissonances between the pieces be structural elements that add tension, and to not have too many moments that would call attention to one piece or another. And I think part of […]
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Gaddis Centenary Roundtable: “Teaching Gaddis Today”

[…]focus from Gaddis to the characters. Second, readers need to place individuals in larger aggerate groups and recognize how these groups act like an ecosystem for ideas and values—a blend of history, culture, and economics. Understanding the movement of ideas and values between individuals and aggregate groups help readers find nuanced meaning with regards to how they hold characters responsible for their actions, as well as how culture shapes characters. This dynamic relationship is central to a writer’s craft. In other words, every writer has choices when building a character. The writer can present a character as racist but also […]
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Gaddis Centenary Roundtable – Publishing in the Innovative Tradition: A Conversation

[…]clear to me that that was not at all what the world was like. Marty and I were living in Illinois working at Dalkey, and, yeah, I was just super lonely. I often felt like I had nobody to talk to despite working at one of the coolest presses in America. There was nobody to talk to about books, or the kind of books I liked. I remember reading something from one of my favorite writers saying something like: “If you want to be invited to the party, start a party.” So I said, all right, it’s time to start […]
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"Trouble with the Connections": J R and the "End of History"

[…]Prodigy Went to Market: The Education of J R.” in William Gaddis, “The Last of Something”: Critical Essays, eds. Crystal Alberts et al., McFarland & Company Publishing, 2010: 126–42. Chetwynd, Ali. “Friction Problems: William Gaddis’ Corporate Writing and the Stylistic Origins of J R.” Orbit: A Journal of American Literature, 8.1, 2020. https://doi.org/10.16995/orbit.gaddis.2 Duplay, Mathieu. “Fields Ripe for Harvest: Carpenter’s Gothic, Africa, and Avatars of Biopolitical Control.” in William Gaddis, “The Last of Something”: Critical Essays, eds. Crystal Alberts et al., McFarland & Company Publishing, 2010: 143–59. Ercolino, Stefano. The Maximalist Novel: From Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow to Roberto Bolaño’s 2666, trans. Albert Sbragia. […]
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Vaihinger’s Not So Fleeting Presence: Gaddis, Ballard and DeLillo

[…]Gothic’: Gaddis’s Anti-Pauline Novels.” in William Gaddis, “The Last of Something”: Critical Essays, eds. Crystal Alberts, Christopher Leise and Birger Vanwesenbeeck. McFarland and Company, 2010: 115–125. Stampfl, Barry. “Hans Vaihinger’s Ghostly Presence in Contemporary Literary Studies.” Criticism: a Quarterly for Literature and the Arts 40.3 (summer 1998): 437–454. Thomas, David Wayne. “Gödel’s Theorem and Postmodern Theory.” PMLA 110.2 (March 1995): 248-261. Vaihinger, Hans. The Philosophy of “As if”: A System of the Theoretical, Practical and Religious Fictions of Mankind (1911). trans. C. K. Ogden. Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner, 1924. Vidal, Gore. The Decline and Fall of the American Empire. Southend […]
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The Specter of Capitalism

[…]throughout his writing. In Underworld we meet the “garbage guerilla” turned UCLA cultural studies professor Jesse Detwiler, who lectures his students on the basic maxim of their civilization: “Consume or die” (286-87). While commentators have noted DeLillo’s aversion to American materialism, consumption, and extravagant waste, in Peripheralizing DeLillo, Thomas Travers offers the first systematic reading of political economy in his work. Travers deploys Marxist literary theory under the influence of Fredric Jameson to analyze the crisis in late capitalism’s ceaseless subsumption of markets and its creation of a permanently unemployable underclass, a surplus population. Narrative fiction that represents capitalism’s totalizing […]

Infopower and the Ideology of Extraction

[…]contributions from literacy studies, Foucauldian theory, environmental justice scholarship, and critical data studies. Next, I explain why extractive ideologies are at the core of infopower. My guiding assumption throughout is that data and power are always intertwined. Writing in Big Data & Society, Andrew Iliadis and Frederica Russo rightly emphasize that corporate, governmental, and academic entities “own vast quantities of user information and hold lucrative data capital,” enabling them to “influence emotions and culture,” and that “researchers invoke data in the name of scientific objectivity while often ignoring [the fact] that data are never raw [but] always ‘cooked’ ” (1). […]

Episode 7: Computational Narrative Systems and Platform Studies with Nick Montfort

[…]the Atari VCS, around not just about Combat, but that whole platform, and about the platform studies approach as we saw it. So, Ian and I wrote a book called Racing the Beam. And we also started a series with MIT Press, Platform Studies. Racing the Beam incorporates these ideas, it has a methodology to it, we reverse engineered some of the cartridges, we looked at the material history of the system, by analogy to book history, or the material history of texts. We did a few interviews, but it was not a qualitative social science approach that we took, […]
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February 2024: Unplugging, Litera[ture]lly

[…]Gaddis Scholarship. Want to dive deeper into post-post-modern futurology? The Futures of Gaddis Studies roundtable—featuring CRYSTAL ALBERTS, GREGORY COMNES, TIME CONLEY, BRIGETTE FÉLIX, VICTORIA HARDING, ANJA ZIEDLER, RONE SHAVERS, TOM LECLAIR, and electronic book review’s very own JOSEPH TABBI—delivers reflections, revelations, and recognitions of The Recognitions! JOIN US NEXT TIME FOR MORE ELECTRONIC BOOK REVIEW Tegan Pyke Co-editor, ebr contact@electronicbookreview.com   All listed articles come with risk of riPOSTe, re-riPOSTe, and re-re-re-riPOSTe. Authors’ views are their own. Internet connection required for access but not […]

William Gaddis at his Centenary

[…]Era: Introduction to the Special Issue on ‘Gaddis at his Centenary’” 2: Futures for Gaddis Studies’ Steven Moore – “New Directions in Gaddis Scholarship” Various Authors – “Futures of Gaddis Studies: Visions for the Next 100 Years’” 3: Gaddis in Context: Peer-reviewed articles Benjamin Bergholtz – “‘Trouble with the Connections’: J R and the ‘End of History’” Jack Williams – “‘A Long and Uninterrupted Decline’: Accumulation, Empire, and Built Environments in William Gaddis’s The Recognitions” John Soutter – “Vaihinger’s Not So Fleeting Presence: Gaddis, Ballard, and Delillo” Rochelle Gold – “Pre-Written Business Correspondences and Computer Therapists: William Gaddis’s J R, ELIZA, […]

Writing in Flux

[…]laudable and understandable, especially in the light of Herman & Krafft’s flawless politeness, critical generosity and respect for other critical voices, such a narratological ‘solution into playful irony’ tends to smooth out the often painfully sharp and hurtful edges and contours of specific sentences, passages and characterizations. Considering that Pynchon’s texts always acknowledge ‘our’ immature complicity with the dark sides of power and sin, we should perhaps give his texts some leeway, and in fact come to value their controversial and immature tendencies. Maybe one might even imagine a poetics of “more maturity, more immaturity!” Maybe we should value the […]

Gaddis-Knowledge After the “Very Small Audience” Era: Introduction to the Special Issue on “William Gaddis at his Centenary”

[…]2010s was academia. Notwithstanding the biography and letters, there was no further conference, critical monograph, or collection of essays on Gaddis between The Last of Something and the centenary events: not even another conference panel after “Why Now.” The reason may be generational: many of the 20th century’s Gaddis scholars—the generation(s) whose foundational 1970s or 1980s articles, or 1990s monographs, were compiled in Harold Bloom’s 2004 Modern Critical Views —had retired by the early 2000s. Between 2015 and 2022 a third of Bloom’s Gaddisians died. The bibliography of Gaddis scholarship reveals that only a small proportion of Gaddis’s scholars have published […]
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New Directions for Gaddis Scholarship

[…]is responsible for the advancement of feminism, anticapitalism, posthumanism, postcolonialism and critical race studies.” No. Literature is an art project, not a political project, and should be judged solely on its artistic merit, not for its usefulness in pursuing social justice. Last year a Jane Austen specialist wondered about teaching older novels that fail “to speak to pressing societal issues. Perhaps a world in grave crisis truly doesn’t have time for texts from the past which can’t be instrumentalized by the future.” No concern for artistry, craftsmanship, style, tone, wit, only whether a novel qualifies as a tool for social […]

Futures of Gaddis Studies: Visions for the Next 100 Years

[…]and the artist’s value and role in a rather disenchanted society, have been recurring topics in critical studies of Gaddis, as they were for the man himself (see for example Angela Allan’s excellent recent study on neoliberalism and the value of art). Due to the encyclopedic and allusive nature of the novels across abundant cultural, religious, and philosophical themes and aesthetic issues, interdisciplinary, intertextual, intermedial, and transgeneric critical approaches suggest themselves. Various of Gaddis’s acknowledged influences have thus been studied; visual art illuminates him through studies of the meaning and implications of perspective and technique of fifteenth-century Flemish painting for […]
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Episode 6: Gendered AI and Editorial Labour in Digital Culture with Lai-Tze Fan

[…]2022 N. Katherine Hayles Award for Criticism for editing the first issue of The Digital Review on critical making and critical design. What is The Digital Review, and how is it distinct from other kinds of journals? And also, what is critical making? LF: Thank you for asking that. Because I think a lot of people will associate the editorial work I’ve been doing with ebr, electronic book review, which has been edited by Joseph Tabbi for a long time. TDR came, not necessarily out of the pandemic, but it was manifested in 2020. So, the timing seems as if […]
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Expanding the Algorithm

[…]simply builds on its community focus, since at the heart of all of these essays is the way that a group can use algorithms to do something that really wasn’t possible before. But the ability of these kinds of algorithmic systems to foster creative practices, rather than simply replacing artists, is something that needs more emphasis in our current debates. In a recent Atlantic article, Ian Bogost wrote about how he is using AI image creators like DALL-E to produce visuals to accompany seemingly trivial musings (“My daughter texted, asking what her ‘goth name’ should be; moments later, I sent […]

Episode 5: AI, Computational Creativity, and Media Production with Drew Keller

[…]was a direct response. When hydropower arrived, there were a lot of folks who were in horrible working conditions and, frankly, were undervalued in what they were doing and were out of a job. And so there were a group of folks who used a fellow by the name of Ned Ludd as their sort of spiritual leader, and they decided to fight the rush towards industrialization. And they started, as you said, breaking into factories, breaking the looms, and they worked really hard to target the factories, the mill owners and the people who supported this rush to industrialization. […]
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Davin Heckman Netprov Interview

[…]I love the idea of Google Docs. But in practice it’s hard to track, depending on the size of the group that you’re working with. I love that Google Docs is so wide open. You can radically alter the aesthetics of the writing space itself, which adds a whole different level. Lately, I’ve been using Reddit a lot with students, I like it, because it’s easy to create accounts. There you can bracket space by creating a subReddit. And you can define norms for play within that space. You can kind of do your own thing unobstructed for periods of […]

Who Does Your Game Play?

[…]I thoroughly enjoyed reading every article, most articles also hold the promise of becoming unique studies in and of themselves. That scope of exploration is not necessarily Tyler’s purview. Still, this obvious need for more study underscores the work’s potential as thirteen enlightening starting points for exploration and elaboration. I am hopeful that others will take up this challenge as I was left wanting closure with certain topics. After reading this book, you may also find yourself in an endless search for conclusions to his can of worms (which seems a fitting metaphor). Scholars such as Haraway continue to affect […]

Episode 4: Meme Culture, Social Media, and the January 6th Insurrection with Ashleigh Steele

[…]share memes. And if you don’t, it’s like you don’t belong. So, these platforms are kind of working to galvanize these groups and prepare them for something, whether it’s just being on this platform and being a member of the community or taking action offline. SR: And it’s sort of a recruitment tool. AS: That’s right. SR: It’s bringing people to different kinds of movements, and then maybe that’s what gets replicated in other parts of the world, that people see that this is an effective propaganda tool. AS: That’s it exactly. I believe, Parler was and Telegram, Parler was […]
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Embodied AI: An Extended Data Definition

[…]is inseparable from human embodiment at any and all levels of linguistic structure. The LLMs are working with text not language.” While acknowledging the strength, persuasiveness, depth and clarity of Cayley’s arguments, the central claim here is that multimodal ML trained on youtube and massive quantities of public domain science data that exceeds the spectrum of the human-perceivable world will give AI a grounding that is in some ways vaster than that experienced by a singular human neurophysiology. The distributed body of 21st century AI, ingesting the output of mass uploaded images-text-speech-video and cartographic-accelerometer data, will utilize humanity as its […]

Review of Bernard Dionysius Geoghegan’s Code: From Information Theory to French Theory (Duke UP 2022)

[…]from the hope that it might be possible to organize mass behavior otherwise. In other words, “code, communication, computing, feedback, and control…embodied an effort to develop more enlightened analytics for the force wielded by science and the state” (2). This impulse (or temptation) is to achieve the ends of the colony, asylum, and camp without resorting to their grisly means. At the risk of editorializing too aggressively, this is the main tension that persists in me upon finishing the book: To achieve submission to authority without violence and to obviate politics though technology (a recurring point within the book) are […]
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Episode 3: Artistic Research and Digital Writing, with Jason Nelson

[…]and some of the most impactful, powerful experiences for students are when they’re actively working on projects that we’re working on, or at least witnessing it, being a part of it, that kind of thing. So I could really see those two integrated. SR: Yeah. And merging practice and theory, I think is real important. It’s something that might be, if not unique, pretty distinctive about the environment that we’re bringing here. JN: I think you’re right. Because it is true as a research Center, it is actually really unique in that regard, in the sense that we have both […]
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Automation and Loss of Knowledge

[…]joining the reactionary. And, beyond Stiegler, maybe that risk should anyway be taken in order to critically assess new technologies? As I argue above, not all negative critique is reactionary, and not all new inventions are purely good (or bad). As for specifically “left-wing” critique, I am not sure why critique of technology or new media should be assigned to either or any wing at the start. And, finally, if I may comment on the description of “the old bank robber” – yes, Stiegler was incarcerated for armed robbery, as is well known from his own books and elsewhere. But […]

MATERIALS FOR A LIFE: “whispered conversations: beholding a landscape through journey and reflection” at Stand 4 Gallery

[…]elusive and frank, beautiful and witty and quietly challenging, which rethinks the very idea of a group show, from singular research journeys these three artists have separately taken and the self-described “bundles” of ordinary materials they perhaps unpredictably collect and bring home to work with or hang onto as memories; that sometimes nonetheless retain their identity as materials in finished works that in turn, warmly and surprisingly, may also happen to respond one to another in this “collective,” and slantingly to their journeys, materials, and questions. Have I ever seen a group show like this one? So varied, delicate, even […]
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Episode 2: Joseph Tabbi on the Electronic Book Review, Research Infrastructure, and Electronic Literature

[…]possible in print, how it’s better. And if in some cases it’s not better. That’s where the critical component, critical communities, the two Cs, that’s what one gets with EBR when it’s working. SR: Yeah, and I do think that it’s been one of these places that really did expand the reach and the community of electronic literature. So for example, I know people like Steve Tomasula, an experimental novelist, or Lance Olsen. I see their work, they our work. We sort of have this experimental tradition in print literature, interacting with this experimental tradition in digital literature. So I […]
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Harlin/Hayley Steele Netprov Interview

[…]2016. I met Mark Marino in LA when I was living there. I’d been following his work in critical code studies from afar for years, and I had been wanting to talk to scholars of code about the way code is used in some types of LARPs. There’s a reason for this bizarre moment, for this sort of liquid — what Colin Wilbert has called technogenic life — when the technology in our life restructures things. As I studied code-based LARPs I was realizing the timing matched up — these are computing practices bleeding into an analog practice where we’re […]

Episode 1: Introducing the Center for Digital Narrative, with Jill Walker Rettberg

[…]them in historical literary contexts, comparing them to conventional literary genres, to focus groups, working with studying male gamers in their own voices. And a thing that I’m very excited about is experimental research, where we’re actually working with creative writers and digital artists and exploring the potentialities of these new forms for storytelling, seeing how they affect us, how they affect our consciousness, our sensory apparatus, our experiences of narrative, our affect in different ways. So really ranging from qualitative survey-based research to documentary research, database-driven research, visualization, to that kind of creative experimental research. Jill: One of the […]
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Davin Heckman’s Re-Riposte

I appreciate the thoughtful reply from Søren Bro Pold, as it really forces me to drill down to the crux of the matter. There is nothing mistaken in his reply, but I do believe that he focuses the key dynamic to the core reality that we need to push on: 1) “It already happened.” And, 2) “how do we understand the many ways this tertiary retention grammatizes us?” For me, to be reminded of the ways in which the social knowledge base of the University has already disappeared is painful. As a teacher, editor, and researcher, I know that the […]

Digital Histories: A review of Astrid Ensslin’s Pre-web Digital Publishing and the Lore of Electronic Literature

[…]and which leans towards ideas of elit practices enveloped within the broader field of literary studies, rather than a literary studies composed as much of form-making as it is breakages and proto-redefinitions of genre. Echoes of the traversals from Grigar and Moulthrop’s own “first cut at an oral history of early electronic literature” in Pathfinders (2015), later elaborated upon in Traversals (2017), can be heard in Ensslin’s interviews with the key figures of the history; however, Moulthrop and Grigar go further by including interviews and video recordings of the artist experiencing their own pre-web work, and recordings of two additional readers, […]
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Classifying the Unclassifiable: Genres of Electronic Literature

[…]S. (2017). Towards a Tension-Based Definition of Digital Literature. Journal of Creative Writing Studies 2. 1. Chen, J. (2012). Refashioning Print Literature: Internet Literature in China. Comparative Literature Studies 49. 4, pp. 537-546. Croft, W. B., D. Metzler, and T. Strohman. (2015). Search Engines: Information Retrieval in Practice. Pearson Education. Dillon, A., and B. A. Gushrowski. (2000). Genres and the Web: Is the Personal Home Page the First Uniquely Digital Genre? Journal of the American Society for Information Science 51. 2, pp. 202-205. El Bouyahyaoui, S. and L. Al-Khemar. (2014). _Hafanāt Jamr (Bunches of Embers). http://narration-zanoubya.blogspot.com/, accessed on Sept. 6, […]
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From Datarama to Dadarama: What Electronic Literature Can Teach Us on a Virtual Conference’s Rendering of Perspective.

[…]Data may become Dada through ML processes. Through this series of reflections, we aim to approach critical data studies as an aesthetic process of sensemaking, which combines what data analysis can make us see with how the platform produces data and text – or, to present a literary perspective on what the platform is as a technical apparatus. Although the apparatus according to Michel Foucault reflects an assemblage of “discourses, institutions, architectural forms, regulatory decisions, laws, administrative measures, scientific statements, philosophical, moral and philanthropic propositions,” (Foucault and Gordon 194) our ultimate aim is not to provide a full apparatus analysis […]
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Modelit: eliterature à la (language) mode(l)

[…]that resonates with a foundational tenant for the methodology of textual criticism as a literary studies specialism. Text is not to be identified with its physical instantiations. Text in a computer is the same object of textual critical study as text in a book. And alphabetic text is, in fact, foundational for modern computation. It is determinant of important characteristics for encoding conventions which still predominate. But as we have also already pointed out text implies nothing more than some kind of regular relation with language as such, and it does not take much research – think English spelling (orthography) […]
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Cyborg Authorship: Writing with AI – Part 1: The Trouble(s) with ChatGPT

[…]able to get the Bing chatbot to reveal its secret name “Sydney,” which was in fact the project code name that Microsoft used while it was initially training the Bing chat feature. This comes however after Roose has already suggested to the chatbot the “well-reported” fact that Sydney is its code name and then associates Sydney with the alter ego. Eventually Roose manages to get the chatbot to suggest destructive acts that its shadow self might perform. Roose has invoked a binary, and it really shouldn’t be that surprising or that unsettling that an AI chatbot is able to list […]
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