literary modernism

The first two chapters of William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury (hereafter SF) (1929) use stream-of-consciousness prose to represent the perspectives of the intellectually-disabled Benjy and suicidal Quentin, respectively. The text moves freely between time periods, using italics to indicate shifts, establishing what Faulkner calls ‘unbroken-surfaced confusion’. As a result, the novel depicts the novel’s titular ‘Sound and Fury’.

To this day, SF poses editorial dilemmas. Polk (1985, XIV) lists four difficulties: (i) none of the extant documents fully preserve Faulkner’s ‘final intentions’; (ii) the documents preserve inconclusive and contradictory testimony; (iii) it is impossible to determine who caused variations between the book and carbon typescript; and (iv) given the nature of the text, it is difficult to determine which variations are corrected ‘errors’ and which are not. Faulkner’s correspondence with his literary agent also reveals his desire to use colourised text, which has led to the development of colour editions: the 2012 Folio Society edition and the 2003 hypertext edition.

In textual criticism, an ‘ideal text’, Gracia (1995, 83-4) argues, can be understood in three different ways: (i) as an ‘inaccurate version of a historical text produced and considered by an interpreter as an accurate copy of the historical text’; (ii) as a ‘text produced by an interpreter who considers that it expresses perfectly the view that the historical text expressed imperfectly’; and (iii) text produced by an interpreter as the ‘text that perfectly expresses the view the historical author should have expressed’ (85). Adopting Gracia’s third approach, the colourised editions of SF could be regarded as the view Faulkner should have expressed, had he access to digital technologies.

The digital novel, Little Emperor Syndrome (2018), follows the decline of the Selkirks, an upper middle-class Australian family, from the years of the Global Financial Crisis to the beginning of the Abbott government. Different family members determine each chapter. Its form is inspired by Faulkner’s SF, and attempts to create Faulkner’s ‘unbroken-surfaced confusion’. Like the 2012 Folio edition, this electronic text allows the text to be colourised and navigated using a key. It also adds functionality that allows lexias to be rearranged in various modes: ‘stream-of-consciousness’, ‘cosmos’ (chronological), and ‘chaos’ (random). Time-frames can also be isolated or removed. I argue that this electronic format better articulates Faulkner’s vision. At the very least, such a form could be regarded as an – if not ‘the’ – ideal text of SF.

This introduction to the Letterist poet Isidore Isou was published in a journal on whose editorial board I serve, E.R.O.S.: A Journal of Desire (2012). The introduction accompanied a selection of Isou’s poems that I ‘translated’.

(Source: Author)

This paper will discuss how picturebook applications place themselves within the tradition of children’s literature. In the discussion the various ends of hypermediacy will be emphasized.
Children’s literature is characterized through a child perspective, which is a narratological means developed within literary modernism. It reflects a consideration for the child reader’s cognitive capacity. Even though the narrator may have an adult voice, the story’s point of view reflects the point of view of a child, in order that the reader may be able to recognize—or at least imagine—the story’s universe, characters, milieu and plot. In picturebooks for children the child perspective is equally dominant through the pictures and the verbal text. And in picturebook applications environmental sounds duplicates the effect. One might therefore ask whether the child perspective is highlighted in multimodal children’s literature with hypermediacy as a result.
Picturebook applications seem to combine a cognitive consideration with performative aesthetics. Interactive elements increase the possibility of play. Thus, the applications can be characterized as playgrounds, which is a common way to define postmodern picturebooks (Meerbergen 2012, Sipe and Pantaleo 2008). The interactive elements might also increase the reader’s involvement in the storytelling, which is a common ambition in contemporary picturebooks (Ørjasæter 2014a). Schwebs 2014 argues that the affordances of an app is to bring a story to life in a multi-sensous way, and that the story-telling is embodied in the reader through the finger gestures. My point is that even hypermediated picturebooks such as Stian Hole’s trilogy on Garman have developed means for embodied sensuous experience (Ørjasæter 2014b). But when the picturebook Garmann’s summer is adapted to a picturebook application the multi-sensous story-telling becomes redundant. The story is told out loud as well as presented as scripture. The environment becomes audible as well as visible. The effect of this seemingly redundancy in the storytelling might be regarded as hypermediacy. The question is how it affects the work’s capacity to make embodied sensuous impression.
Apart from Remediation. Understanding New Media (1999) where Bolter and Grusin introduce their hypermediacy concept, the discussion in this paper will be influenced by Software takes command (2013) where Lev Manovich points out that ”computers and software are not just ’technology’ but rather the new medium in which we can think and imagine differently” (13). Thus, the research question in this paper will be: What does hypermediacy do to the way one thinks about children’s literature? Does it in any way alter what one thinks children’s literature is?

(source: ELO 2015 conference catalog)

A prominent strategy in some works of contemporary electronic literature is the appropriation and adaptation of literary modernism, what I call "digital modernism." This paper examines digital modernism as a strategy relevant to rethinking not only the origins of electronic literature but the ways in which we discuss and understand the field of electronic literature in general. I examine Bob Brown's Readies machine (circa 1930), an avant-garde attempt to speed up text and thus transform literature and reading practices, in relation to works of electronic literature by Young-hae Chang Heavy Industries and William Poundstone. These contemporary works employ Flash to create a flashing aesthetic that resonates with Brown's goals for the Readies. Situating electronic literature within this forgotten but distinctly literary history of machine-based textual experimentation exposes the importance of reading today's new, new media literature in relation to the a movement from the early decades of the twentieth century which sought to "make it new" in the new media of its time.