literature

In some ways, the COVID-19 pandemic brought us closer to the mission of The New River, even as it pushed our meetings apart. Since the beginning, The New River has dedicated a platform to emerging and established artists working at the intersection of digital art and literature. Excellent execution has always been one of our top priorities, along with innovative ideas and user-friendly engagement. We aim to challenge passive readership—a symptom of overindulgent screen time and existential Googling. The artists we have selected for the Spring 2020 issue of The New River compliment this vision and complicate the questions “what is art?” and “who is it for?”

The novel is digital, it was digital, and it will be digital. Most authors have written on word processors and most publishers have made books with some form of desktop publishing software since the early 1990s. The first novels for digital display were written and published in the late 1980s. From a literary perspective, the question is whether such digital-born literature translates into palpable changes in the novel form, why, and how.

Previoustheories of the meeting of digital technology and literature have all too often presented a predetermined fate for this pairing—an essentialist vision of literature, technology, or both. I begin by showing this process at work in the creation of Michael Joyce’s afternoon, a story (1987), the most well-known hypertext fiction. Joyce’s work is often understood as evidence that hypertext and digital technologies were inherently suited to experimental practice. I show, instead, that hypertext technology was initially reader and user friendly, and that the experimentalism of afternoon should be credited to Joyce’s literary goals. Print books also became digitally born in the 1990s, with all major American publishers shifting to digital typesetting (or desktop publishing). This largely unnoticed shift shows a technology developing according to the particular state of the publishing industry during this period, and the fading influence of high postmodern literary style. I show how three authors—Mark Z. Danielewski, Jennifer Egan, and Junot Díaz—turn digital technology toward more narrative means during this period, augmenting textual meaning with an enhanced typographical paratext. Last, I look at a digital book within a book, the Primer from Neal Stephenson’s The Diamond Age or, A Young Lady’s Illustrated Primer (1995), to show how this digital book remediates the social and contextual aspects of the early British novel. The Primer shows how clearly digital fiction has been defined as highly experimental, and how this constricts how we think about digital fiction and what it can be. Digitizing the novel has not meant something stable or predefined, but is a moving target, shifting to account for context, public, and literary moment.

Since the 1980s, experimental poets of Asian descent writing in English around the world have created works informed by both their experiences of being in the Asian diaspora and their subjectivities in the age of advancing computing technologies. Studies of these works have been scarce and few have put them all together in order to make an argument about how to read them in connection with each other. The aim of this dissertation is to make a case for what I call the diasporic reading framework, and to argue that this way of reading fills in crucial gaps in our understandings of experimental Asian poetry.

The diasporic reading framework uses diaspora, in this specific case the Asian diaspora, as a concept that helps us interpret the techniques, forms, and content of digitally-influenced poetry produced since the 1980s. In turn, this reading also allows us to see how the experimentations of these poets enrich the conventional categorizations of Asian diasporic writing. To this end, I gather an archive of literary works that includes the poetry of more renowned and canonically accepted poets (e.g. Leung Ping-kwan, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Fred Wah) as well as less easily categorized genres by lesser known individuals and groups (e.g. multi-media works, blogs, public projects) in order to read them together productively.

The first chapter of my dissertation uses poetry from Hong Kong as a case study to establish my definition of diaspora and build a theoretical basis for using it as a reading framework. The second chapter takes this framework and applies it to works beyond Hong Kong, demonstrating its portability as well as showing how the abstraction of shared land into non-physical spaces is a powerful way to understand works that have previously been considered only post-colonialist, only nationalist, or only feminist. Chapter three applies this reading further to works that experiment with form using digital technology, and the final chapter revisits previous themes in light of new advances in social media. I conclude that the political stakes of diaspora as a reading framework is its function as a tactic against hegemony.

Over the past decade, Internet literature has indeed accomplished remarkable achievements. Internet literature has garnered a readership of 202.67 million, amounting to 39.5 percent of all netizens in mainland China now. That 55.5 percent of these netizens are between the ages of twenty and forty indicates that Internet literature is clearly very popular with young people, which is surprising nowadays considering that there are so many forms of entertainment available to them. Although Internet literature has developed rapidly, it is not only accepted as a part of mainstream contemporary literature but also plays an increasingly important role in literary creation, theory, and criticism in mainland China

The umbrella term ‘electronic literature’ arches broadly over a multitude of digital art forms, so long as they satisfy the criteria ‘electronic’, and ‘literature’. However, it is this paper’s primary contention that the extent of the term’s coverage is delimited by whatever has already been archived. Understandings of what constitute ‘literature’ and the ‘literary’ are manifold and include concepts of the letterary (also as in ‘belles lettres’), the poetic, the lyrical – but also, the canonical, and the institutional. This paper will argue that that which can now be pointed to by literary and digital humanities scholars, and called ‘electronic literature’, is in large part only recognisable because archivisation has been used in its regard as an instrument for institutionalisation and canon-creation. This body of work is also only findable because archivisation has preserved it, faced as it is with the constant threats of platform erosion, and obsolescence sooner rather than later. Archivisation is therefore both a problem of media, and a problem of selection. Indeed, it is one because it is the other: electronic literature must be archived based on practical merits, like the feasibility of emulating, migrating, or documenting works; as well as conventional merits, such as iconicity, or importance for anchoring the praxis of electronic literature within a scholarly tradition. That which is less iconic, little studied, or a repetition of what has already been done, is consigned to the peripheries of the field to await oblivion, its fate sealed by a platform that is intractable and unamenable to archivisation. The peripheries teem with relatively unknown works that nonetheless speak for the potential evolution of the field. It is one such work that this paper will examine, in order to enable the final argument: that recent undercurrents of dissatisfaction with the term ‘electronic literature’ (reminiscent of those felt in the early years of the field) are now perceivable because there is a need to expand the horizons of what electronic literature is now; how is it increasingly practised and theorised. As ‘a periodic snapshot of an emergent field in motion’ (Scott Rettberg), the canons of electronic literature must move with the field, its evolution snapped – albeit selectively – by the archive. Some of what is at the peripheries ought to be pulled into the center by the archive’s gravity if ‘electronic literature’, or whatever it’s called now, is to stand the twin tests of time and nomenclature.

WordHack Anthology brings together projects and documentation presented during the first five years of WordHack, a monthly presentation series at Babycastles in NYC centered around the intersection of language and technology. WordHack is designed to be an open meeting space for people across disciplines to see what each other are working on and thinking about, from coders interested in the creative side, to writers interested in new forms writing can take, to game makers looking for new ways to play with words, to academics researching the newly possible. 

(Source: https://toddwords.itch.io/wordhack-anthology)

Since its earliest materializations, literature has tried to not only describe space, but also to imagine new forms of it. Utopian literature has always envisioned a socio-political perspective in thinking about new societies, not only in a temporal manner – in an undefined future or past – but also through the invention of countries, maps, and even worlds. In the 20th century, it was via the works of science-fiction writers that things such as cybernetics, virtual reality, and cyberspace became a common imaginary, shared by all kinds of people. If until the beginning of 1990s, literature was one of the prominent instances, along with cinema, shaping the spatial imaginary and its structures, throughout the 1990s the role of literature in building and shaping these common spaces was progressively replaced by a more technological and commercial discourse. Nowadays, while the so-called GAFAM (Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon, and Microsoft) system is driving the digital narrative basically unchallenged, it is from the literary field that new ways to look at digital and physical space come out. Echoing the Empire’s art of cartography in the Borges short story, Google’s aim is not only to represent the world, through its mapping system and its digital presence on the Web, but also to be the structuring principle of the Web and therefore to be the world. Projects such as Jon Rafman’s 9 eyes or Cécile Portier’s Traque Traces and Étant donnée, or the works of Pierre Ménard, Anne Savelli and François Bon try to thwart the technological and commercial foundations of contemporary space representation, showing flaws in the philosophy of digital and web mapping tools developed by such actors, mainly Google Maps and Google Earth. By hacking these projects, these authors intend to show their hidden ideology: by putting the mask of spatial representation neutrality on, they are on the other hand spreading their own dominant vision of space. In my presentation, I will analyze one of the examples of how literature and authors are trying to mind the gap between the soft power of GAFAM and the literary one. I will talk about the Montreal-based multimedia collective project Dérives, which manifestly put space at its core by situating itself in the trail of the Debord philosophy and practice of situationism and dérive. Basing their poetic on the use of Twitter’s hashtags as paratext and geolocation technique, these authors participate actively in building the image of the city of Montreal, in reshaping the digital space of Twitter, and in imaging a new structure of contemporary space. The aim of my presentation is, ultimately, to show how literature can play a fundamental role in rethinking the structures of space, spatial representation, and digital space.

Source: https://sites.grenadine.uqam.ca/sites/nt2/en/elo2018/schedule/1109/D%C3…

In his 1966 essay “Rhétorique et enseignement,” Gérard Genette observes that literary studies did not always emphasize the reading of texts. Before the end of the nineteenth century, the study of literature revolved around the art of writing. Texts were not objects to interpret but models to imitate. The study of literature emphasized elocutio, or style and the arrangement of words. With the rise of literary history, academic reading approached texts as objects to be explained. Students learned to read in order to write essays (dissertations) where they analyzed texts according to prescribed methods. This new way of studying literature stressed dispositio, or the organization of ideas. Recent developments in information technology have further challenged paradigms for reading literature. Digital tools and resources allow for the study of large collections of texts using quantitative methods. Various computational methods of distant as well as close reading facilitate investigations into fundamental questions of the possibilities for literary creation. Technology has the potential for exploring inventio, or the finding of ideas that can be expressed through writing. One possibility is the Word Vector Topic Generator (https://github.com/mbwolff/WVTG), a Python script that makes use of vector space models of words. These models represent relationships between words from a defined corpus in spatial terms and can be used to calculate semantic similarities and differences. With a corpus and a given text it is possible to generate a new text according to how language was used within the corpus. Considered as an algorithmic topos in the Aristotelian sense, the WVTG instantiates an opposition to the thesis of an asserted text through analogy. Three inputs are required: the asserted text, the corpus from which a vector space model of words is derived, and a pair of words establishing an analogy for substitutions in the text. For instance, a corpus of 117 texts by Honoré de Balzac produces a vector space model of words that can generate a new text from Charles Baudelaire’s prose poem Enivrez-vous! by replacing each word in the poem with a word in the vector space model that best completes an analogy from the opposition bénir/maudire as expressed in Balzac’s writing. The code allows a user to easily experiment with different corpora and analogies to generate different texts. Unlike a traditional notion of invention positing that arguments to persuade an audience are discoverable within a shared and uncontested discursive space, the algorithmic invention of WVTG parameterizes both the discursive space and the relationships between words. Rhetorical invention such as this explores the potentiality of language as members of the Oulipo have done with techniques such as Jean Lescure’s S+7 method, Marcel Bénabou’s aphorism formulas and the ALAMO’s rimbaudelaire poems. The WVTG implements analytical tools from the digital humanities as a means for creating e-literature. With technology we can explore not only how something was written and why it was written, but also what was possible to write given a historical linguistic context. 

Andrew McMurry looks back on ten years of ecocriticism and identifiesa “new physiocracy,” whose exclusive interest in technology is no better than the exclusive valuation of property that typified physiocrats of the Nineteenth-Century.

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