Article in an online journal

In their article "Electronic Literature and the Effects of Cyberspace on the Body" Maya Zalbidea and Xiana Sotelo discuss how new technologies are facilitating the emancipation of subjugat- ed subjects aimed at transforming unequal social relations through an intersectional and performative approach. This perspective is discussed through the exploration of the so-called intersectional ap- proach described by Berger and Guidroz, Haraway's situated knowledges, and Butler's performative agency based on transgressions. Framed within the posthuman, post-biological deconstruction of so- cial and cultural hierarchies, Zalbidea and Sotelo argue for the value of a conjuncture between post- colonial post-modern/post-structuralist literature and the field of feminist cultural studies. Based on previous theories of gender and bodies in cyberspace, Zalbidea and Sotelo develop ideas about bodies, gender, and anxieties, and how these theories may be illustrated metaphorically in electronic literature and new media art works.

Via close readings of Eugenio Tisselli's degenerative and regenerative, ¨paired works that become progressively less comprehensible the more users interact with them," we are able to grasp the ecological costs of the time we spend online. And we can begin to recognize, with Justin Berner, a concern with permanence and ephemerality in the digital sphere that is not unique to the work of Tisselli. It is, rather, a common thematic concern throughout the history of electronic literature. The term that Berner advances for this literary countertext to the instrumentalism of the Digital Humanitiers, is digital posthumanism.

Marino, Douglass, and Pressman describe their award-winning collaborative project, Reading Project: A Collaborative Analysis of William Poundstone’s Project for Tachistoscope {Bottomless Pit} (2015). Given the novelty of Poundstone’s work and its deviation from traditional forms of print-based literature, the authors break down the methods and platforms that allowed them to respond with new ways of reading—what they call “close reading (reimagined).” Indeed, their respective methods of interpreting Poundstone reminds that the field of e-literature not only brings new literary forms to our critical attention, but also necessitates that hermeneutics adapt to digital contexts as well.

In this contribution to her co-edited collection, [Frame]works, Saum brings to the digital humanities both makers and theoreticians, gnosis as well as poiesis, school teachers as well as research professors.

Returning to his 2010 essay, “Electronic Literature as World Literature,” Tabbi extends those arguments in light of community built scholarly databases that have since emerged and in contrast to an uncritical tracking of “views, citations, downloads and occasional shared themes” (not to mention an increased precarity of authorship, where one’s scholarly work is basically given away).

For digital practices to be literary, Tabbi argues, our selections need to circulate within various institutional, academic, curatorial, and cultural structures – each of which is devising its own set of relations to the digital. This essay aims to initiate those ongoing conversations and evaluations in the field of born digital, electronic literature. In so doing, Tabbi suggests how acts of close reading can bring scholars into closer contact with one another and also activate the databases where e-lit archives are presently stored, read, curated, and mined for verbal and perspectival patterns. (Which have been described, in broad outline as a kind of distant reading.)

Roderick Coover and Scott Rettberg reflect on the cultural values, political debates, power structures and architectures of exploitation underlying much of contemporary digital culture. As digital artists and collaborators, they also identify aesthetic reactions that actually combat what they critique. But for this to happen, we need literary works that are themselves produced, and actively circulating within digital environments.

Rettberg and Saum introduce a collection of essays, presented at the Summer 2019 [Frame]works conference at the University of California, Berkeley, that bring literary criticism and creativity (equally) to bear on the digital humanities.

Engagement with public databases has become a leading way for scholars, artists, and readers alike to encounter works of electronic literature as well as get an overview of the field. Although acknowledged as an important and difficult process, database construction is, in practice, too often underestimated as merely a preparatory task in Digital Humanities. Through the conception of database criticism, I provide a critical apparatus to approach databases in terms of qualitative and aesthetic characteristics.

Considering public databases as media texts, I take a digital hermeneutic approach to the reading strategies involved in engaging with databases. What follows is the presence of databases as cultural artifacts that are themselves studied in humanities and social science frameworks. It is in the interest of both the quality and esteem of the databases to develop ways to study and evaluate them parallel to academic reviews of monographs and edited collections.

I offer a media-specific framework of four core vectors for database criticism: data and scope, experience, aesthetics, and labor. Building on Critical Data Studies, database criticism needs to identify the means and objectives of the database and thing along with those in reviewing the data. But a database is so much more than its data. A good database incites the pleasure of anticipation and this is determined by both the user and browsing experience. This is linked to the aesthetics of the database, which includes the accessibility of the database at its core. Finally, the explicit evaluation of labor addresses which value is placed on various tasks of developing and maintaining an academic database.

My call for database criticism opens up ways to revalue the databases as dissemination of research and provide the opportunity to highlight all elements that we wish to be part of the field going forward.

Seiça describes modification as an art practice meant to subvert and divert from what we—as readers, spectators, and also consumers—expect from technological apparati and platforms. He extends the study of mods to “lit mods”—including art, games, and literature.

In particular, Seiça notes that the learning curve for modding has changed: where in the past, it may have taken a certain amount of user knowledge, modification may now be automated (for instance, through Instagram filters). More importantly, he asks what lit mods show us about literary practice and literary criticism. Where fast-moving content—fast-moving e-literature and e-poetry included—may defy interpretation, so analysis is strengthened by breaking down their mechanisms.

(Source: publisher)

Walking and ‘haunting space’ have become means of political and aesthetic resistance to the invisibility or inhospitality that women face in the public sphere. Power imbalance in spatial habitation—‘power-geometry’ in Doreen Massey’s terms— negatively affects women, just as shown in an Iranian context in Shirin Neshat’s film Women without Men (2009) and through feminist social movements such as #mystealthyfreedom. As these women wilfully assert themselves against their exclusion from certain places, they challenge the binaries public/private, men/women, and mobility/stasis both politically and aesthetically. Ghost characters and haunting narratives disrupt the linearity between dead and alive, virtual and actual (following the works of Jacques Derrida and Gilles Deleuze respectively), and open up possibilities that challenge the status quo. Through a micro-analysis of Women without Men, this article reveals that shapes, structures and lights participate to dismantling gendered norms, expectations, and power-geometries. Both the magical realism of the film and an affirmative analytical approach invite to seeing beyond the negativity of narratives and unveil alternative conceptions of space, gender and power.