contemporary literature

In this review of Heather Houser’s Ecosickness in Contemporary U.S. Fiction, Sharalyn Sanders identifies the hopeful potential for environmental justice via contemporary literature. Finding a solidarity implied between intersectional identities and ecocriticism, Sander’s finds in Houser’s call for “scholarly activism” an antidote to the detachment which threatens to thwart environmental awareness.

(source: http://electronicbookreview.com/thread/criticalecologies/ecosick) 

Nonlinear writing refers to (a) a writerly activity and (b) a specific type of written document. The first meaning relates to the strategy of composing a text in a nonsequential way by adding, removing, and modifying passages in various places of manuscript rather than producing it in one piece, from beginning to end. The second meaning refers to documents that are not structured in a sequential way, with a clear beginning, middle, and end. Rather, their macrostructure follows an associative logic, which assembles its composite elements (paragraphs, text chunks, or lexis) into a loosely ordered network. These networks offer readers multiple choices of traversing a document, which can facilitate specific types of reading strategies, such as keyword searches or jumping between main text and footnotes, and complicate others, such as reading for closure or completeness. (Source: Author's introduction)

The terms ‘interculturality’ and ‘transculturality’ are every time more present in literary studies. However, the relationship between the phenomena of cultural contact and aesthetic dimension demand understand deeply of which both consist. This study explores the need of a convergence between culture sciences (Kulturwissenschaften) and literary theories to tackle in the right way the relationship between cultural interactions and aesthetic-literary strategies. In the first place, from a critical and systematic revision of the main theories and conceptualizations to nowadays, a new method is elaborated to produce readings from an intercultural perspective. In other words, a focus that deals with cultural contacts in production and textual reproductions. In the second place, the analysis of three contemporary novels representative of different models of interculturality and transculturality illustrate this approach to the texts and offers contributions that move beyond the literary.

A reflective essay on the history of Afsnit P, from the beginning, through finding its form as a contemporary electronic culture critical website, towards the end and a new function as archive over added digital content and own development.

The talk discusses a series of characteristics of contemporary literature: multimodality, co-creativity, location-awareness, and tactility. Looking at digital narratives, particularly from the ELMCIP Anthology of European Electronic Literature I explore these four dimensions of what I call the polyaesthetic nature of contemporary culture. In addition, I present a locative media narrative that I am creating with Jay David Bolter and Michael Joyce, using the AR browser Argon.