Joseph's Tabbi's talk introducing "Post Digital: Dialogues and Debates from the Electronic Book Review," new two-volume collection of essays edited by Joseph Tabbi documenting highlights of 20 years of essays one of the longest-running open-access research journals focused on literature and culture after the digital turn.
This thesis looks at a sample of twelve stories of electronic literature written in Spanish and focuses on the different narrative techniques that these works implement. The techniques range from simple hyperlinks to highly complex functions as in videogames. These works draw from the traditions of print literature as well as from the digital culture that has shaped this era: hypertext, algorithms, text reordering, text fragmentation, multimedia creations, and almost anything else the computer is capable of. As each work discussed here is unique, a different theoretical approach is used for each.
The Broken Poem: Ephemerality, Glitch, and De-Performance in Digital (and Non-Digital) Poetry explores a few ways in which digital poetry, poetry that is written in programmable media and is intended to be read on computers or other digital devices, is acting to tactically resist various forms of oppression through what I am calling “breakage.” Breakage is, in this sense, an error or disruption in a perceived continuity. For example, I look at digital poems that take advantage of the fact that, because of software or hardware upgrades, they have a limited functional life. The poets’ embrace of their poems’ ephemerality actively resists market forces, cultural or professional demands on the poet to participate in processes of canonization, and the like. I also explore the idea of “glitching poetic language,” in which existing texts are digitally manipulated, digitally “broken” through a process in which the poet provokes errors. This is a remix strategy with aleatoric results that shifts the reader’s focus from the referential elements of the text, or the fragments of text, to an error, a break. I argue that these poems, by breaking, challenge systems that support institutional racism, violence, economic disparity, and other unjust social phenomena. I then explore poetic breakage in live performance. I look specifically at the Black Took Collective, a group of performance poets who utilize digital media in live performance to subvert expectations that an audience might have regarding race, gender, and poetry’s place in the academy. The final chapter is a demonstration of practice-based research and a discussion of the role of this kind of research in an evolving English department. I offer two examples of practice-based research in literary studies: Poemedia 2.0 and The Denver Poetry Map.
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.
Braidotti, who holds Italian and Australian citizenship, was born in Italy and grew up in Australia, where she received a First-Class Honours degree from the Australian National University in Canberra in 1977. Braidotti then moved on to do her doctoral work at the Sorbonne, where she received her PhD in philosophy in 1981. She was appointed as the founding Professor in Women’s Studies at Utrecht University in the Netherlands in 1988; in 1995 she became the founding Director of the Netherlands Research School of Women’s Studies, a position she held till 2005. Braidotti is a pioneer in European Women’s Studies: she founded the inter-university SOCRATES network NOISE and the Thematic Network for Women’s Studies ATHENA, which she directed till 2005. She was founding director of the Centre for the Humanities from 2007 until September 2016. Braidotti is currently Distinguished University Professor at Utrecht University.
(source: https://rosibraidotti.com/about/)
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.)