antecedents

Digital Modernism examines how and why some of the most innovative works of online electronic literature adapt and allude to literary modernism. Digital literature has been celebrated as a postmodern form that grows out of contemporary technologies, subjectivities, and aesthetics, but this book provides an alternative genealogy. Exemplary cases show electronic literature looking back to modernism for inspiration and source material (in content, form, and ideology) through which to critique contemporary culture. In so doing, this literature renews and reframes, rather than rejects, a literary tradition that it also reconfigures to center around media. To support her argument, Pressman pairs modernist works by Pound, Joyce, and Bob Brown, with major digital works like William Poundstone's "Project for the Tachistoscope: [Bottomless Pit]" (2005), Young-hae Chang Heavy Industries's Dakota, and Judd Morrissey's The Jew's Daughter. With each pairing, she demonstrates how the modernist movement of the 1920s and 1930s laid the groundwork for the innovations of electronic literature. In sum, the study situates contemporary digital literature in a literary genealogy in ways that rewrite literary history and reflect back on literature's past, modernism in particular, to illuminate the crucial role that media played in shaping the ambitions and practices of that period.

Table of ContentsIntroduction

Chapter 1 - Close Reading: Marshall McLuhan, From Modernism to Media StudiesChapter 2 - Reading Machines: Machine Poetry and Excavatory Reading in William Poundstone's Electronic Literature and Bob Brown's ReadiesChapter 3 - Speed Reading: Super-Position and Simultaneity in Young-hae Chang Heavy Industries's Dakota and Ezra Pound's CantosChapter 4 - Reading the Database: Narrative, Database, and Stream of ConsciousnessChapter 5 - Reading Code: The Hallucination of Universal Language from Modernism to CyberspaceCoda - Rereading: Digital Modernism in Print, Mark Z. Danielewski's Only Revolutions

(Source: OUP catalog copy)

Concrete Poetry: product of a critical evolution of forms. Assuming that the historical cycle of verse (as formal-rhythmical unit) is closed, concrete poetry begins by being aware of graphic space as structural agent. Qualified space: space-time structure instead of mere linear-temporistical development. Hence the importance of ideogram concept, either in its general sense of spatial or visual syntax, or in its special sense (Fenollosa/ Pound) of method of composition based on direct-analogical, not logical-discursive juxtaposition of elements. "ll faut que notre intelligence s’habitue à comprendre synthético-idéographiquement au lieu de analytico -discursivement" (Apollinaire). Elsenstein: ideogram and montage.

(English translation by the authors)

Based on personal memory and research, this writing focuses Brazilian Concrete Poetry’s
magazines NOIGANDRES and INVENÇÃO, evaluating their importance as media for a new poetic practice.

(source: author)

“The Emergence of Electronic Literature” exhibit includes objects and artifacts, books, computers and software, posters and ephemera documenting the rise of the field of electronic literature over the past four decades. Electronic literature includes literary works that take advantage of the context of the computer and the contemporary networked environment. This broad category of digital work includes genres such as hypertext fiction and poetry, kinetic poetry, computer art installations with literary aspects, interactive fiction, novels that take the form of emails, SMS messages, or blogs, poems and stories that are generated by computers, network-based collaborative writing projects, and literary performances online that develop new ways of writing. The field is essentially focused on potentially transformative uses of the computer to develop new literary genres, and the experiments that contemporary writers and artists are conducting within the new communications paradigm.

(Source: Introduction to the exhbition catalogue)