media

In connection with the workshop “Aesthetic Imaginaries in Text and Image” 28-April, author and professor of English Steve Tomasula (University of Notre Dame) wil give two talks connected to his work. The talks are open to all interested:

“Ascension, A Novel: A Reading/Presentation of an Image-Text Novel in Progress”

“Ascension is a story of nature as it was. And is. And might become. It is the story of how our changing conception of nature, and the means we use to depict it, change the “natural.” And ourselves. It is the story of how we continually remake the world in our own image and in turn are remade by it."

(Source: http://www.uib.no/en/node/106721)

The central objective of this paper is to provide a new conceptual theoretical framework starting from the role of new new media in shaping a new kind of literature, which I call Cosmo-Literature. Towards this, I start working from Levinson’s differentiation among old media, new media, and new new media to arrive at the difference among the variable types of media. Next, I address the role of new new media in establishing world democracies and changing the social, cultural, and political world map. After that, I investigate the terms of “global village” and “cosmopolitanism” in relation to literature. To clarify what I mean by Cosmo Literature, I will investigate two new new media novels: Only One Millimeter Away, an Arabic Facebook novel by the Moroccan novelist Abdel-Wahid Stitu, and Hearts, Keys and Puppetry an English Twitter novel by Neil Gaiman, to infer the characteristics of Cosmo literature in general and Cosmo narration in particular.
What I mean by Cosmo-literature is all forms of literature produced by the capabilities provided by new new media. These include digital works but also examples where the digital artifact is printed or presented in other media.
Cosmo literature is derived from the political, social, and cultural context that the whole world lives in nowadays. Appiah’s cosmopolitanism as “universality plus difference” is the most significant term to refer to the pluralistic and universal society of today. Respecting diversity, caring about each other, and kindness are the moral principle of the cosmopolitan society according to Appiah. My project builds on Appiah to argue that digital media facilitate the cultural co-existence of the peoples of the cosmopolitan society. As long as such a society has its own morals and identity, it is logical to have its own literature, which I believe to be Cosmo-Literature.
The investigation of two new new media novels: Only One Millimeter Away, an Arabic Facebook novel, and Hearts, Keys and Puppetry an English Twitter novel, has shown many features of Cosmo-Literature in its relation to cosmopolitanism. At the heart of these features are interactivity, multilingualism, multimediality, suspense, new literariness, blurring the boundaries between the real and the fictional, and creating new dimensions of time. Those features also play as the characteristic features of the group identity of the universal society of today.

In PAIN.TXT, Alan Sondheim and Sandy Baldwin explore the limitations of expression at the borders of human sensation. Derived from a dialog between Sondheim and Baldwin on extreme pain, this essay considers how one signifies intensity and another attempts to interpret that intensity, and the challenges this process poses for affect, imagination, and ultimately intersubjectivity. In keeping with the content of this piece, the two preserve the dialog format, recreating for readers a discourse on pain that never finds its center. (Source: Electronic Book Review)

Media are always and at once substances and channels, both things and bridges. When we use this word medium, it is sometimes though not always clear in which sense we are using it. With broadcast media (television, radio) we tend to emphasize the network aspect. With fine art media (paint, ink, stone, clay), we tend to emphasize the material aspect. Yet as the 17th century painter and architect Frederico Zuccari reminds us in his writings about drawing as an artistic practice and medium, the inscription of a mark on a page is itself a bridge between an idea and its external realization. Thus every act of inscription is at once blending these two senses of the term media, thing and network. However, with digital media, the distinction between the two aspects of the term medium appear to be conflated and to collapse into each other. In this paper, I explore ways in which it may be possible to recuperate both senses of the term medium in a digital age by first acknowledging the importance of materiality to textual representation and communication practices and secondly, by developing a nomenclature for accurately describing the actions involved in such practices. (Source: ELO 2015 Conference Catalog)

In Always Already New, Lisa Gitelman explores the newness of new media while she asks what it means to do media history. Using the examples of early recorded sound and digital networks, Gitelman challenges readers to think about the ways that media work as the simultaneous subjects and instruments of historical inquiry. Presenting original case studies of Edison's first phonographs and the Pentagon's first distributed digital network, the ARPANET, Gitelman points suggestively toward similarities that underlie the cultural definition of records (phonographic and not) at the end of the nineteenth century and the definition of documents (digital and not) at the end of the twentieth. As a result, Always Already New speaks to present concerns about the humanities as much as to the emergent field of new media studies. Records and documents are kernels of humanistic thought, after all―part of and party to the cultural impulse to preserve and interpret. Gitelman's argument suggests inventive contexts for "humanities computing" while also offering a new perspective on such traditional humanities disciplines as literary history. Making extensive use of archival sources, Gitelman describes the ways in which recorded sound and digitally networked text each emerged as local anomalies that were yet deeply embedded within the reigning logic of public life and public memory. In the end Gitelman turns to the World Wide Web and asks how the history of the Web is already being told, how the Web might also resist history, and how using the Web might be producing the conditions of its own historicity.

Source - amazon.com

Digital literature is based on tensions that contribute to establishing its specificity: tension on the devices, on the programmed writing, on the media and on the aesthetic experience. The word tension does not necessarily mean conflict, but rather suggests the deconstruction of the obvious on both sides; it can be a creative tension.

- Tension on devices
Digital literature stresses the tension between the cultural, literary and artistic forms inherited from the printed world and those born with the Digital. The tension regarding devices does not only refer to the tension between the digital medium and the printed medium, but also to the tension between the various devices used to render the work (in the framework of an installation or a performance e.g.).

- Tension on the programmed writing
A program makes it possible to define in advance the manipulation of units that will be executed automatically. On the other hand, writing can be defined as a system of expression that reflects thinking. One can thus identify a tension between the program (which is an automatic manipulation of symbolic inscriptions) and writing (which is a device used to externalize memory and thinking). On the one side a form of closure, on the other the possibility of the expression of meaning. The challenge is to create a space for new meaning from an initial impossibility. There is thus a tension between programming and writing, which is a creative tension.

- Tension on the media
Technically, thanks to the digital, all media (linguistic text, image, sound, video) are encoded in the same way, i.e. in binary form. But from a semiotic point of view, they retain properties inherited from cultural traditions. Thus tension arises between the technical potentialities made possible by the digital and the semiotic properties of these different media, as well as the way they make sense together and are transformed by this inter-semiotisation.

- Tension on the aesthetic experience
There is a tension between the contemplation of the revealing of meaning and the physical action which is necessary for this revealing. Indeed the creations of digital literature often rely on devices in which the reader acts, composes, constructs. Is this experience, which is based on gestural activity, compatible with an aesthetic experience - or even an aesthetic revelation? The creative tension here is between the openness to meaning which requires the reader to be ready and available, and the closure of the device which requires him/her to be be busy, active, engaged. The device has to entail an aesthetic experience, which can not only be based on “doing”.

I will show these tensions through examples. All these tensions are not new with digital literature, but they are probably raised anew. It is on the basis of these creative tensions that digital literature can build its identity and consider new perspectives.

(Source: Author's abstract)

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)

Writers and professors such as Jordi Carrión, Vicente Luis Mora, Juan Francisco Ferré, Francisca Noguerol and Daniel Mesa sign up articles of this volume that is about the technological and mediatic presenses and its links to processes of deterritorialization in the globalization of literature from the last twenty years, trying to face these presences which are already a tradution in media narratives or seduced by the canon of Latin American literature.