Revisions required

This study concentrates on reading digital poetry. Reading entails the act of reading, strategies of analysis, and the means of understanding. Specifically, this study constructs a model of reading and interpreting poetry in digital form by close analysis of three complex case studies. Broadly, this study concerns the aesthetic means and meanings of poetry in the contemporary moment, where new and old media are in visible negotiation with each other. In digital poetry artistic expression, digital media, technology and cultural practices clash and combine to produce new poetic forms. With new forms of poetry come new challenges to reading, analysis, and interpretation. Digital poetry presents new material, literary, technical, and rhetorical strategies and techniques that offer novel possibilities – and restrictions – for reading. Thus, my broad question is: How do we read digital poetry? This broad question is broken down to a subset of research questions. These deal with the material medium, readerly action, and the processes of the poem, which are all to be seen as constituent of its effects and meanings. In answering these questions, I construct a new model for reading digital poetry. The model is distilled from my close readings of the case studies. The readings are literary, cultural, media-historical and media-specific. The background methodology for the investigation comes from the notion of close reading (sensu Culler 2010; Simanowski 2011; Pressman 2014). My reading model consists of three main elements: interface, interaction, and interpretation. I further divide the interface into elements of data (e.g. text, music, images), processes (e.g. temporal control, text generation), and medium (as material and conceptual). Interaction consists of logic, performance, and effect, which designate the mode of engagement with the work, the joint performance of the poem and the reader, and the effects these produce. Interpretation includes the articulation of effects and meanings. Whereas the effects are created in interaction with the work, articulating them is seen as part of interpretation. Interpretation includes the articulation of the meanings and connections the poem invites. In other words, the poem’s interface guides the concrete act of reading, interaction guides the reader’s mode of engagement with the interface, and interpretation guides the means of understanding what is read. The case studies renegotiate the interrelated and overlapping arenas of print and digital poetry, old and new media, and traditional and digital literary criticism. The first includes Cia Rinne’s zaroum (2001), archives zaroum (2008; with Christian Yde Frostholm) and notes for soloists (2009). The second is Young-Hae Chang Heavy Industries’ Dakota (2002). And the third is Stephanie Strickland’s “V-project”, which includes two print books (V:WaveSon.nets /Losing L’Una 2002; V: WaveTercets /Losing L’Una 2014) two web applications (V:Vniverse Shockwave application 2002 with Cynthia Lawson-Jaramillo; Errand Upon Which We Came 2001; with M. D. Coverley), and an iPad application (Vniverse 2014; with Ian Hatcher). The emphasis in the case studies is on examining strategies of reading and interpretation as well as producing new readings and interpretations of the poetry in question. I investigate the interdependence of traditional print-based and emerging digital strategies of reading poetry, and combine print-based scholarly approaches with digital-based scholarship.

Since the 1990s, Chinese literary enthusiasts have explored new spaces for creative expression online, giving rise to a modern genre that has transformed Chinese culture and society. Ranging from the self-consciously avant-garde to the pornographic, web-based writing has introduced innovative forms, themes, and practices into Chinese literature and its aesthetic traditions. Conducting the first comprehensive survey in English of this phenomenon, Michel Hockx describes in detail the types of Chinese literature taking shape right now online and their novel aesthetic, political, and ideological challenges. Offering a unique portal into postsocialist Chinese culture, he presents a complex portrait of internet culture and control in China that avoids one-dimensional representations of oppression. The Chinese government still strictly regulates the publishing world, yet it is growing increasingly tolerant of internet literature and its publishing practices while still drawing a clear yet ever-shifting ideological bottom line. Hockx interviews online authors, publishers, and censors, capturing the convergence of mass media, creativity, censorship, and free speech that is upending traditional hierarchies and conventions within China—and across Asia.

Research on culture and literature from the perspective of the media has been a hot topic among Chinese scholars in recent years. In this special issue, the relevant authors organize and analyze major issues in online literature, including understanding media culture, cyber technology and the characteristics of literature, defining online literature, online writing and online text. We hope to provide, to the best of our capacity, cultural interpretation and theoretical reference for the healthy growth and sustainable development of online literature and to serve as a modest stimulus for academic inheritance and innovation with regard to the theory and criticism of online literature.

(Source: last paragraph of introduction to special issue.)

"Twenty Years of Chinese Network Literature" is an excellent book with important academic value and practical significance. It can enable readers to fully understand the basic development of Chinese Network literature in the past 20 years, and understand what online writers and online literature are like. People and what kind of works are written; it can also enable researchers to have a correct understanding and evaluation of the achievements, existing problems and historical status of the development of Chinese online literature in the past two decades, and become an important basis for future research; It can also provide a basic reference and basis for the decision-making of network literature management departments, and provide basic judgments for grasping the future development of network literature.

(Source: Amazon.com description, Google translated from Chinese.)

This thesis extrapolates electronic literature’s différance, proposing an ontology of the form through critical inspection of its traits and peculiarities. Rather than offering a prescriptive definition of electronic literature, this thesis takes an ontological approach through descriptive exploration. In essence, my approach is anti-essentialist, in that I dismiss the view that electronic literature has a specific set of attributes. As will be explored throughout, there are aesthetic properties which frequently emerge, but the implication of their presence remains transient, to the point where electronic literature cannot be one thing, for to be so, it could not be literary. Computational aesthetics resist stable definition, so if we are to achieve an understanding of what separates electronic literature – if it is indeed, separate – from its non-digital counterparts, then we must do so through an articulation of those differences which may, at first, be less apparent. It is an impossibility to state what electronic literature is, as in doing so, one is oblivious to what it might become. The heightened relationship between form and content encountered in this field means that electronic literature is continuously in flux. Literature, while equally resistant to definition, is at least recognisable to our faculties. As readers, we have long possessed the sensibilities necessary to discern the literary from the communicative. Non-digital literary content is open to evolution and experimentation, but predominantly, with a few exceptions, its paratextual form remains consistent. Electronic literature’s content is open to the same artistic manipulation as the physical, but its form too, symbiotically attached to the exponential rate of technological change, gives rise to phenomenological disruption. As multimodal aesthetics challenge our ability to perceive the literary, we should abandon our attempts at defining the relevant works, and instead, seek understanding through analyses of the means by which they differ, and of how they defer, from the literatures that have both preceded and characterised the digital age. This thesis does not seek to resolve the aporetic, but rather, demonstrates how we must extract our theories of the digital out of observation and analysis, as opposed to speculation. This is not to say that my peers are necessarily wrong; I will be in agreement with many of them on a number of matters. My purpose, rather, is to offer some synthesis to a field comprised of a multiplicity of divergent views. Throughout the process of presenting this notion of a new modernity, and offering synthesis to the theories that have emerged from this epoch, I will offer fresh insights and novel approaches to the literary practices of the digital age. In doing so, my purpose will be to contribute to the progression of a consistent and legitimate digital poetics by showing that it cannot be one thing, but a balance of forces – a poetics of equipoise.

This dissertation is part critical essay and part poetry collection. The critical essay, “Flipping the Script: On the Pedagogical Relevance of Teaching Digital Creative Writing,” examines the benefits of digital creative writing, i.e. text-based, literary work that requires digital technology at every stage of existence, by organizing those benefits into five categories, or nodes: poiesis, literacy, identification, authority, and cognition. Then, it argues that digital creative writing, like print creative writing, reinforces and extends the goal of liberal education, i.e. to promote creative, critical, and conscientious citizens. As students read, or interact with, and construct their own digital literary objects, they simultaneously learn to read, interact with, and construct their various selves and knowledge. As for the poems in the collection, they act, in Pound’s words, as “radiant node[s] . . . from which, and through which, and into which, ideas are constantly rushing.” They enact a broad conception of the literary, one characterized by connectivity, interactivity, multimediality, non-linearity, performativity, and transformability, features that coincide with those of digital literary works. Diverse with regard to style, the poems narrate the mind and body at play amid the world’s charged states. The poems cohere around concepts and associations attendant to the anode, node, and ode. The “anode” poems explore relationships among larger cultural forces (e.g. poetry, art, identity, and politics). The “node” poems explore autobiography through the lens of experimental biopic. And the “ode” poems explore and destabilize the ode and its conventions. Ultimately, the work responds to its environment and strives to contain a world that resists being contained.

Digital children’s literature is a relatively recently established field of research that has been seeking for its theoretical base and defining its position and scope. Its major attention so far has been on the narrative app, a new form of children’s literature displayed on a touchscreen computational device.

The narrative app came into being around 2010, and immediately attracted the attention of the academics. So far, various studies have been conducted to explore its educational potential, but very few have investigated the app for what it is in its own right. To bridge the gap, this study has explored the nature of the narrative app and the essential principles of its narrative strategies.

As the subject of this study concerns a variety of disciplines, this research has been conducted in an extremely interdisciplinary way in order to develop a thorough understanding of the narrative app. In general, it has consulted scholarship in children’s literature (picturebook studies in particular), narratology, computer science, game studies, social semiotics, film studies, media studies, communication studies, electronic literature and game design.

With this interdisciplinary approach, this study has attempted to define the subject of the study, identify some tendencies in its development, and most importantly, develop an original theory of storytelling and a narrative map that may be able to explain the intrinsic methods used in the narrative app storytelling as well as other digital and non-digital storytelling. The findings of this study seem to suggest that the narrative app does not display any essential differences from the codex and other forms of literature in terms of its narrative strategies, but it appears to have great potential to truly innovate storytelling.

It is suggested that this study may provide an effective theoretical scope and methodology for the study of the field of digital children’s literature, which may offer the potential to strengthen this field of research. The theoretical framework constructed by this study may be applicable to some educational approaches to the narrative app, and may also be useful for teaching new literacies.

A theoretical examination of the surprising emergence of software as a guiding metaphor for our neoliberal world.

New media thrives on cycles of obsolescence and renewal: from celebrations of cyber-everything to Y2K, from the dot-com bust to the next big things—mobile mobs, Web 3.0, cloud computing. In Programmed Visions, Wendy Hui Kyong Chun argues that these cycles result in part from the ways in which new media encapsulates a logic of programmability. New media proliferates “programmed visions,” which seek to shape and predict—even embody—a future based on past data. These programmed visions have also made computers, based on metaphor, metaphors for metaphor itself, for a general logic of substitutability.

Chun argues that the clarity offered by software as metaphor should make us pause, because software also engenders a profound sense of ignorance: who knows what lurks behind our smiling interfaces, behind the objects we click and manipulate? The combination of what can be seen and not seen, known (knowable) and not known—its separation of interface from algorithm and software from hardware—makes it a powerful metaphor for everything we believe is invisible yet generates visible, logical effects, from genetics to the invisible hand of the market, from ideology to culture.

(Source: MIT Press)

This book offers an original and accessible introduction to the contemporary debates on the notion of the posthuman. It develops two lines of argument. First, contemporary market economies profit from the control and commodification of all forms of life. 'Second Life', genetically modified food, advanced prosthetics, robotics and reproductive technologies are familiar facets of our globally linked and technologically mediated societies. This high degree of bio-technological development results in hybridization, erasing categorical distinctions between the human and other species, seeds, plants, animals and machines. The dislocations produced by posthuman cultures therefore make possible a critique of anthropocentrism. Post-anthropocentric politics, as exemplified by environmentalism, encompass not only other species but also the sustainability of our planet as a whole.

The second line of argument is concerned with the shape of contemporary philosophical debates about the human. Braidotti explores the extent to which a post-humanist perspective displaces the traditional unity and universality of the subject. Rather than perceiving this as a loss of cognitive self-mastery and ethical decency, she argues that the posthuman condition helps us make sense of, and find a new moral compass within, our globalised culture. The book concludes by providing some intellectual and ethical guidelines for the new and alternative modes of non-anthropocentric thinking that are emerging today. The challenge of the posthuman condition is to seize the opportunities for creating new forms of social bonding and community building, while pursuing economic sustainability, empowerment and social justice.

(Source: back cover)