literary modalities

Alan Bigelow tells in this interview how he started publishing online works of digital poetry around the year 1999 and where his inspirations for his work come from. Furthermore he explains why he chose to change from working with Flash to working with HTML5 and in which way this decision subsequently changed his way of writing. Then he considers the transition from printed books to digital literature from the point of view of the reader also in regards of the aesthetics of digital born literature. In the end he gives his opinion about the status of electronic literature in the academic field.

This critical essay was written for the Prairie Art Gallery catalogue presenting Kate Armstrong's and Michael Tippett's Grafik Dynamo! Its argument, implied in the catalogue version, can be stated explicitly in the present scholarly format, namely that narrative, associated with the development of the modern novel in print, is distinctly unsuited to literary arts produced in and for the electronic medium. Narrative in the Dynamo! is not entirely absent, but its dominance is put into question. The same holds for the place of argumentation in critical writing. The Dynamo! develops episodically, haunted by the comics, and by the popular and literary narratives it samples; the essay develops similarly, in blocks of partly autobiographical, partly analytical text. Propositions emerge not sequentially or through feats of interpretation, but at the moment when a block of text encounters a cited image from the Dynamo! Another collocation having implications for criticism, is the reading of Armstrong/Tippett's work in the context of a particular strain of contemporary fiction in print, which itself demonstrates that narrative was only ever a mode, one among many and not necessarily the dominant mode, in print literature itself. References are made to Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow, to Pynchon's (and Armstrong/Tippett's) modernist antecedent, Henry Adams, to non-linear, non-sequential narratives by Robert Coover, Don DeLillo, and William Gaddis that are as open to innovation formally as they are expansive in subject matter. In this context, "Graphic Sublime" also introduces a major, as yet unpublished novel from the early 1970s by Phillip Wohlstetter, Valparaiso.

(Source: Author's abstract in DHQ 6.2)