close reading

Electronic literature exists in a perpetual state of flux, due to its reliance on digital technology; with the rapid progression of processing power and graphical abilities, electronic literature swiftly moved from a reliance on the written word into a more diverse, multi-modal form of digital arts practice. The literariness of early electronic literature is manifest: the work was primarily textual, the centrality of reading paramount. The current crop of electronic literature--with its audio-visual, multimodal nature--calls into question the literariness of this work, however, as is evidenced by this year's call for papers. I propose that this ambiguity as regards literariness and written textuality in electronic literature disadvantages the field, in both academic circles and in the search for a wider reading audience. If electronic literature as field is to assert and validate its position within the greater literary tradition, links between electronic literature and past literary achievements need to be uncovered and illuminated. In this paper, I will explore the connections between works of postmodernism (in particular, experimental authors such as William Gaddis and Thomas Pynchon, and authors explicitly critiquing their own craft, such as Paul Auster), and electronic literature. In doing so, I hope to uncover a richer, more nuanced background for the literary in the traditions/practices of print and oral cultures, rather than in arts where the literary may or may not be present. Literature qua literature is currently present only as a minority element in works claiming the status of electronic literature, and it is therefore unlikely that literary studies will set itself up for reading just this sub-genre within an as yet minority arts practice. Turning to the works of Tom LeClair and Joseph Tabbi, postmodern novels are seen as coming into existence at a time when the world was on the brink of the globalized, world system. LeClair writes of the art of excess, in which the "recognition of radically new and massive information in the world and the impulse to represent this information are. . . the ultimate motives for the art of excess" (48) in postmodern novels. Tabbi, building off of LeClair, understands Gaddis and Pynchon as not only accurately representing a globalized world of excessive information, but also as representing the cognition developing out of this world system. My paper will explore how we can understand our own contemporary world system through works of electronic literature. If postmodern authors turned to their own material supports--the written language marked on a page through the course of a particular writer's thinking--then how are we to understand electronic literature as representing a certain mode of consciousness, especially considering electronic literature's distinct marginalization of the written word? My paper will offer close readings of earlier works of hypertext fiction and new works of electronic literature (published in 2012), in an effort to uncover the uniquely literary accomplishments of chosen texts/authors writing in a medium in which the literary is not always evidently manifest.

(Source: Author's Abstract)

Digital fiction began by defining itself against the printed book. In so doing, transgression of linearity and the attempt to reduce the authorial presence in the text, were soon turned into defining characteristics of this literary form. Works of digital fiction were first described as fragmented objects comprised of “text chunks” interconnected by hyperlinks, which offered the reader freedom of choice and a participatory role in the construction of the text. These texts were read by selecting several links and by assembling lexias. However, the expansion of the World Wide Web and the emergence of new software and new devices, suggested new reading and writing experiences. Technology offered new ways to tell a story, and with it, additional paradigms. Hyperlinks were replaced with new navigation tools and lexias gave way to new types of textual organization. The computer became a multimedia environment where several media could thrive and prosper. As digital fiction became multimodal, words began to share the screen with image, video, music or icons.
In electronic literature, the emergence of new software and new devices is often followed by the creation of new texts. Head-mounted displays and tracking devices are being used to produce new textual responses. Bodily movement is often treated as the catalyser of these textual responses and the reader is often considered as the creator of a narrative written in real-time. This means that the attempt to offer the reader a participatory role continues to be fostered by electronic literature. In this thesis, digital fiction is described as part of an introspection and self-generating process catalysed by literature. Consequently, these new kind of texts will be defined as part of the ever-evolving field of literature.
While interactivity was often described as a set of physical activities that can interfere with attention, immersion was frequently seen as an uncritical and passive response to the text. Interactivity was used to offer freedom of choice to the reader and to give the reader the opportunity of co-authoring the text. Immersion was, by contrast, considered as the result of a reading experience constrained by authorial intention. In so doing, interactivity was mostly regarded as an antidote of reader’s immersion in the text. However, in this thesis, I will focus on a cooperation rather than a conflict between both. By describing interactivity as a set of cognitive and physical actions on the part of the reader and by defining immersion as a result and origin of these actions, I will demonstrate that immersion and interactivity cannot survive separately. This thesis aims at addressing the relation between immersion and interactivity by taking into account the text’s multimodality and transiency, as well as the ergodic and cognitive work done by the reader.

Leonardo Flores tells about his beginnings in the field of electronic literature and his current project on electronic poetry. He then makes an in-depth description of the paradigmatic change from printed literature to electronic literature with special attention on the expectations of readers who are new to new media works and the tradition, so to speak, of experimentalism in literature. With the same accuracy he ponders about the status of science of electronic literature and ends the interview with some considerations about the important issue of preservation.

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)

In Paratexts: Thresholds of Interpretation (1987; English translation, 1997), Gérard Genette provided scholars with the seminal concept of paratext: functional elements of the book (such as covers, title pages, illustrations, footnotes, etc.) that help to fulfill the text’s destiny (p. 408) by making it present for the reader (p. 1).

Today, the book often escapes the boundaries of the tangible object of Genette’s study, as is the case with The Unknown – The Original Great American Hypertext Novel. This born-digital collaborative work, so far from Genette’s perception and yet so suited to his views, is a goldmine of thresholds, namely through the source code, which the reader is invited to explore in parallel with the content and navigation provided in the published pages (Gillespie et al., 1999).

This paper combines outlooks from two disciplines, held together by a shared interest in the study of digital culture. The field of information studies provides a qualitative content analysis of the creators’ information-sharing practices and outlines issues of access and retrieval; the literary studies field offers a textual analysis, relating the paratext to the text in order to determine whether the former fulfills what Genette called its “literary function”.

Together, these perspectives reveal how measuring this work against Genette’s framework paves the way for an interdisciplinary study of digital culture. Here, as the concept of book hovers so near the edge it might yet fall over, the paratext may truly be the threshold we need to step inside its new, parallel, and virtual reality.

Source: Authors Abstract

Franco Moretti’s notion of “distant reading” as a complementary concept to “close reading,” which has emerged alongside computer-based analysis and manipulation of texts, finds its mirror image in a sort of “distant” production of literary works—of a specific kind, of course. The paper considers the field in which literature and new media creativity intersect. Is there such a thing as literariness in “new media objects” (Manovich)? Next, by focusing on the websites that generate texts resembling and referring to sonnet form, the article asks a question about the new media sonnet and a more general question about new media poetry. A mere negative answer to the two questions seemingly implied by Vuk Ćosić’s projects does not suffice because it only postpones the unavoidable answer to the questions posed by existing new media artworks and other communication systems. Teo Spiller’s Spam.sonnets can be viewed as an innovative solution to finding a viable balance between the author’s control over the text and the text’s openness to the reader-user’s intervention. In conclusion, two concrete reconfigurations of the experience of (new media) literature—and through it the surrounding world—are considered: the experience of time in Spiller’s News Sonnets and the spatial dimension as implied in his project SMS Sonnets. News Sonnets uses current news obtained via RSS feeds from various sources, which makes the “messages” contained in the lines of the sonnet a potential stimulus for readers’ immediate action. SMS Sonnets expands the territory where the communication takes place beyond the text-reader confrontation and into the community of participants in an interactive (non-artistic) communication system.

(Source: English abstract in Primerjalna književnost 36.1)

In this presentation I propose a close/distant reading of some Argentinean e-poetry works –Migraciones and Outsource me! by Leonardo Solaas and TextField, Eliotians and some of the works of The Disasters by Iván Marino– in order to pose a debate concerning the development of e-poetry in audiovisual electronic environments, particularly e-poetry created by artists/programmers who hardly would defined themselves as poets or writers.To what extent one should still speak about literature concerning this kind of works? Is it possible to find a literary impulse in contexts where literature has lost its privileges and migrates “out of bounds”? If the artists mentioned above lean themselves into literary traditions, why are their works more frequently regarded by visual art critics rather than literary critics? I argue that the works analyzed enable us to resituate literature in inter/trans media contexts, which nevertheless are readable in terms of literary effects. It is not that we should read this works only as literature, but it happens that nowadays critics who were educated in literary traditions can probably read in these works something that visual arts’ critics are not reading. I will not say that this situation provides necessarily better readings, only different. And after centuries of delimitations between artistic languages, even if 20th century avant-gardes opened the path to the dissolution of those boundaries, we still lack an educational system which could deal with the merging of languages. Meanwhile, I would consider how literary critics could collaborate in order to show how literary impulses could still be readable, and not invisibilized, when visual artists and programmers tangle languages and openly lean themselves into literary traditions to which they are more or less “outsiders”. In addition, I will propose a political reading of this “out of bounds” movement. In a world where migration is part of globalized capitalism, migration of languages, for instance merging languages, could be easily seen as going with the flow. But maybe we can reverse the argument: some works within contemporary electronic arts engage themselves with a “translanguage” politics which comments, reflects on and even deviate globalized flows in order to expose the false ecumenism of the globalized era.

(Source: Author's abstract for ELO 2013: http://conference.eliterature.org/critical-writing/out-bounds-searching… )

ELO 2013 brought out the question of how the theoretical discussions about specific works can be extended in space and time beyond teams. A few months before, different teams began a project of the labex Arts-H2H focusing on the design of “Cross-reading”, a tool to make a pooling of theoretical perspectives used in different parts of the world to treat works of Electronic Literature. This experience, the first large-scale in this area, has as its primary mission to cross different methodologies (or points of view) on the same object to produce a high value-added analysis, which is not only a juxtaposition of disparate contributions but a construction reflecting teamwork.The still ongoing implementation implied first the design of an ontology to harmonize the different analyses produced autonomously by each team. Analyses come from diverse backgrounds such as literature, semiotics, media and cultural studies, ergonomic experimentation and aesthetics. The ontology considers the work as a Spinozist individual in the context of the procedural model of Ph. Bootz, allowing the contemplation of both the visible "surface" and the computer program of the work. Based on this ontology, we indexed all contributions. Then, “Cross-reading” presents a visualization to show relationships, similarities and differences between the analyses. Relations between synonyms and homonyms concepts are those that allow the construction of a combined theoretical approach. A prototype is available at http://ineslaitano.com.ar/crossreading/

My dissertation "The Rematerialization of Poetry: Space, Time and the Body from the Bookbound to the Digital" is a deep-reaching account of what digital poetry is, what it does; it presents the reader with a historically and theoretically-based model for reading digital poetry within a limited scope of twentieth and twenty-first century science, media theory, and American/Canadian poetry. In this much-needed account of digital poetry, I first draw from media theorists ranging from Vannevar Bush to George Landow and Mark Poster as well as contemporary critics of electronic literature (such as N. Katherine Hayles, Marjorie Perloff, and Jerome McGann) in order to broadly contextualize the genesis of digital poetry and its relationship to the larger field of electronic literature. I then explore, in a section titled "My Digital Dickinson," the methodological possibilities and limits of using our understanding of the digital to inform our readings of bookbound poetry and vice-versa. In Chapter 2, I then discuss Ezra Pound's Vorticism and William Carlos Williams's variable foot; interwoven between these two sections are three paratactic interludes—close readings of what bookbound and digital texts whose underlying spatial structure is both an analog to and a distinct departure from what Pound and Williams attempted to embody in their bookbound texts. My intention is to create a formal and thematic conversation, as both Pound and Williams do in their own work, between bookbound and digital works whose impetus arises from and departs from the same dedication to translating scientific and mathematical principles of space into the poetic realm. Despite what can often appear as an unbridgeable gap between digital and bookbound poetry, surely we can now say, looking at Williams through our present moment of electronic literature, that his work stands as a bookbound example of what we now recognize as an emergent, flexible poetics? The third chapter is dedicated solely to providing the framework for much-needed close-readings of digital poetry; here I focus on one of the most influential digital poets, John Cayley. In the final chapter, I turn explicitly to the pressing question of what a poem is, of how the computer challenges our conceptions of how to read and write poetry, by considering the relationship between human and machine in computer-generated, bookbound poetry by Erin Mouré and computer-mediated poetry by Kenneth Goldsmith. Source: Author's Abstract

ENGLISH SUMMARY Digital Poetry: Aesthetic analysis and the role ofmediality in the communication of artwork Digital poetry (language-based digital art) is a global, interdisciplinary movement consisting of poets, artists and programmers who study and develop opportunities for programmed writing. Digital poetry combines writing with animation, images and sound. There are moving letters, interaction and autogenerative programming. Some digital poems also consist of actual programming code. Digital poetry can be colourful, expressive, technologically advanced, organic, delicate and minimalistic. The thesis consists of analyses of selected examples of digital poetry and investigates, discusses and demonstrates how digital poetry can be analysed. This results in a wide range of theoretical issues concerning genre and intermediality, media philosophical questions regarding technologies of writing and issues related to programming, materiality, temporality and agency. The thesis is a methodological reflection on which concepts should be applied and what new set of questions should be asked in the analysis of digital poetry and contemporary digital art in a broader sense. The methodological approach is based on the theory of enunciation. This means that rather than focusing on the artwork as object or on the experience of the artwork, the analysis focuses on the relation between object and recipient and investigates the specific conditions for experience provided by the artwork. Throughout the thesis, this analytical approach is supplied with investigations that examine issues related to medial issues and their effect on the communication of artwork. The thesis contributes to the research field of digital literature with aesthetic analyses of digital poems. It argues that the analysis of operational logics (i.e. formal studies of code) and hermeneutic traditions fail to provide adequate tools to analyse the potential experiences and effects of digital poetry. Digital poetry is in the thesis characterised as a diaspora in continuation of historical literary avant-gardes, but it is also considered important to include comparative perspectives on other art forms and genres than the literary and in general to move away from literary entrenched logics by, among other things, using the more inclusive terms ‘work’ and ‘recipient’ instead of ‘text’ and ‘reader’. The thesis consists of an introduction to digital poetry, as well as to the methodology, questions and concerns of the research project. This is followed by six chapters and a conclusion. The first chapter is called ‘MO [VE.MEN] TION – Code, Materiality and Concretism in Digital Poetry’. The Australian poet mez and her work practice in which programming languages are combined with phonetic English are analysed. This raises questions of programming language versus natural language, and drawing on the theories of N. Katherine Hayles and Nelson Goodman, among others, questions concerning materiality are explored. How is materiality complex in the digital field where works should be regarded as processes and events rather than as objects? This procedural nature is made explicit in the digital poem ‘La série des U’ where the letters move, and it is investigated how that affects the meaning. The chapter finally investigates issues of concretism through a short outline of historical concrete movements in various art forms, and it discusses why digital poetry is not concretistic in the same way; historical concrete works usually experiment with the limits of the work's own art form, while digital poetry is too complex a mixture of art forms to be determined at all. Digital poetry is distinctly multimodal, which among other things means that you cannot operate with notions such as ‘writing’ or ‘text’ as the smallest medial units. This fact is important for the development of a multimodal approach to the analysis of digital poetry. Chapter two is named ‘Mediality and Historical Language Technologies’. Drawing on Walter J. Ong and Friedrich A. Kittler's analysis of historical language technologies the chapter argues for the use of a broad concept of media. As W. J. T. Mitchell and Mark B. N. Hansen have argued, the collective singular media could be used as a third term capable of bridging, or ‘mediating’, the binaries (empirical versus interpretive, form versus content, etc.) that have structured media studies until now. This bridging is exemplified by how analyses of ‘moveable writing’ are interested in the meaning as well as the effects hereof. However, analyses should not exclude empirical interest in the digital computer as a ‘language technology’ that determines the moving letters. Based on the broad media concept, chapter three, ‘Art Form, Mixture, Hybrid – The Role of Multimodality in The Communication of the Artwork’, develops an analytical approach that helps to avoid notions such as ‘writing’ and ‘text’, as the smallest medial units, by instead operating with Lars Elleström’s model of the modalities of media, in which all media consist of material, spatiotemporal, sensory and semiotic modalities. This terminology is applied in an analysis of the Swedish poem ‘Väljarna’ [The Electorates] by Johannes Helden. It is argued that traditional art forms can be defined by their specific combination of the four modalities, but that digital poetry as a genre is so composite that each new work will constitute a new combination of the four modalities. This is used as an argument to move the model from a descriptive level to an analytic one to be used on types of works where the combination of modalities is precisely ‘new’ and therefore can be said to be explored at the level of signification. The mode of investigating how the medial (in this case the multimodal) affects the communication of the works is an important part of the methodology of the thesis, and it is repeated in the last three chapters which focus on other medial elements: issues concerning programming, temporality and distributions of agency, respectively. Chapter four is called ‘Limits of Sensing, Incestuous Interaction and Breathing Letters – On Secrets of Programming and its Role in the Communication of the Work’. The chapter analyses David Jhave Johnston's digital poem ‘Human-Mind-Machine’ and discusses how knowledge of programming can be incorporated in the analysis if relevant characteristics are incomprehensible on the phenomenological level. In continuation hereof the differences between human and machine ‘senses’ and issues of interpretation and agency are investigated, followed by a discussion of whether a concept such as ‘liveness’, which is otherwise attributed to human bodies, can be used to denote the performance of digital programmes. The issue of secret programming is also discussed as a cultural issue relating to secret surveillance of data. Chapter five bears the title ‘WHEN NOW IS MORE NOW THAN NOW - On the Role of Temporality in the Communication of the Work’. By focusing on specific temporal organisations and their significance, the chapter analyses ‘Mémoire Involuntaire no. 1’ by Braxton Soderman, ‘Dada Newfeed’ by Eugenio Tisseli and ‘Last Life: Your life. Your time’ by Gregory Chatonsky as well as other types of works and digital artefacts. The analyses explore how the works thematise issues of presence, memory and trace, and focuses on how the temporal organisation determines different senders and subjects. How does it, for instance, affect the significance of pronouns in a digital poem where the words move about? The chapter makes use of Paul Ricoeur’s differentiations between cosmic, phenomenological and historical times, Bernard Stiegler’s theory concerning the relation between time, technology and memory and his concept of tertiary memory, and Mark B. N. Hansen's concept of ‘diachrone things’. The analyses, among other things, determine how moving letters (also in artefacts that are not poetry or art) can ‘outsource’ the communication in the sense that a statement, even though it has a specific sender, has never been formulated by a subject. This interest in the relation between medial forms and the determination of a subject is continued in the thesis’s sixth and final chapter titled ‘Cyber- identities and Economies of Communication - on the Role of Distributions of Agency in the Communication of the Work’. The chapter's analysis is, among other things, motivated and inspired by Bernard Stiegler’s criticism of contemporary communication technologies that the user is unable to understand, influence and develop. Through analysis of ‘_cross.ova.ing ][4rm.blog.2.log 07/08 XXtracts_.’ by mez, it is studied how agency is distributed in works where the medium or the technology appears to control the communication or where it is obvious that a sender has been ‘communicating’ with the technology before communicating with us. This analysis provides an opportunity to discuss issues related to the interpellation of communication technologies and further discuss possibilities for various Internet identities and their correlations with medial conditions. The thesis is a contribution to the research field of digital literature, but it is also a contribution to intermediality studies, using Elleström’s model of the modalities of media to describe modalities and their composition in addition to talking about arts (e.g., literature and visual arts) or ‘basic media’ (e.g., text and image) and their combinations. Furthermore, it is argued that intermedial and multimodal dimensions should be treated not only on a descriptive level when they are essential to the creation of meaning and therefore should be analysed. Hence, the thesis also contributes to the development of methods of aesthetic analysis by supplementing them with a medial sensibility. The mindset behind the broad mediality concept and the model of the modalities of media can contribute with analyses that avoid dichotomous differences between human and machine performances, between analogue and digital media, between ‘reality’ and ‘Internet’. At the same time, the broad mediality concept and the model of the modalities of media provide opportunities for an analytically accurate identification of these phenomena and their distinct differences. It is an approach that has far-reaching potential for further developments, e.g. in connection with studies of relations between communication and identity in different media.