digital modernism

In Electronic Writing, what often becomes more essential than the narrative is how the computational elements are brought into the fold of storytelling with the text at its centre (Heckman and O’Sullivan 2018). It is true but not uniform across all spaces of creative production. Collaborative efforts like We Are Angry | Experience have been very successful in using the online space to deliver a powerful message. But, in a space like India, the digital divide also dictates the mode of storytelling, especially when it comes to solo ventures. When we think about Indian online narratives, the most common instances reach us via social media (Shanmugapriya and Menon 2018). Despite its reach, the extent of experimentation is rather low. That is why much of the writing can also be found on blogs hosted by websites like WordPress or Blogger. Yet, from personal experience of online writing, as most of the readership is found on mobile phones, the amount of media that can be incorporated is also limited. It is limited because, in a space like India, many people still do not have access to a standard internet connection to view the multimodal elements.My paper proposes to address how individual storytellers, i.e., the people who write, design, and publish narratives all by themselves, without any collective or institutional support, who are forced to be minimal, go about telling stories in the online mode. My central research questions would be to understand: 1) the markers of Indian-ness (if any will vary from a case to case basis as it is impossible to reduce a culture to certain markers) in the narratives 2) the socio-cultural background of people who are telling these stories 3) the platforms they are choosing to tell these stories. To gather the data, I intend to float a short survey in various research and writing communities and use the dra. ft | Future of Text (@dra_ft_) • Instagram photos and videos archive to develop my hypothesis. Via analysis, I hope to understand the type, mode, and platform(s) most accessible for storytelling in the Indian online space.

(Source: author's own abstract)

A prominent strategy in some works of contemporary electronic literature is the appropriation and adaptation of literary modernism, what I call "digital modernism." This paper examines digital modernism as a strategy relevant to rethinking not only the origins of electronic literature but the ways in which we discuss and understand the field of electronic literature in general. I examine Bob Brown's Readies machine (circa 1930), an avant-garde attempt to speed up text and thus transform literature and reading practices, in relation to works of electronic literature by Young-hae Chang Heavy Industries and William Poundstone. These contemporary works employ Flash to create a flashing aesthetic that resonates with Brown's goals for the Readies. Situating electronic literature within this forgotten but distinctly literary history of machine-based textual experimentation exposes the importance of reading today's new, new media literature in relation to the a movement from the early decades of the twentieth century which sought to "make it new" in the new media of its time.

What happens to literature, the literary, and the cultural value of both when text moves from page to screen? What can these shifts teach us about the traditions, practices, and discourses that shape the ways in which we read, study, and engage with print and electronic literature? Digital Modernism reads digital literature within a modernist tradition of making it new, a history that is both experimental and canonical. Across literary genres and programming platforms, I examine a shared strategy in some of the most innovative works of electronic literature online. These works adopt, adapt, and allude to the seminal aesthetic practices, principles, and texts of literary modernism. Digital Modernism analyzes these consciously crafted ties to modernism as part of a larger strategy and cultural situation. These works challenge common assumptions about digital literature, such as associations with hypertext and expectations of reader-controlled interactivity. They use modernism to construct immanent critiques about a culture that privileges images, navigation, and interactivity over narrative, reading, and textuality. The results are works of web-based literature that are text-based, aesthetically difficult, and ambivalent in their relationship to mass media and popular readership. Digital Modernism examines how and why contemporary works of online literature employ this modernist modus operandi and what this trend exposes about the role of the "literary" in our digital culture and reading practices. Reading electronic literature through modernism also provides an opportunity to reread modernism through perspectives made visible and vital because of contemporary media and culture. Digital Modernism thus pursues a dual perspective: it illuminates the role of modernism in contemporary literature and, in so doing, reflects back on modernist literature. Addressing the question "What is new about new media?," Digital Modernism reads works of electronic literature that follow Ezra Pound's mantra and "MAKE IT NEW" by renovating a literary past.

(Source: Author's abstract)

from Project MUSE: A prominent strategy in some of the most innovative electronic literature online is the appropriation and adaptation of literary modernism, what I call “digital modernism.” This essay introduces digital modernism by examining a work that exemplifies it: Dakota by Young-hae Chang Heavy Industries. I read this Flash-based work in relation to its literary inspiration: the authors claim that Dakota is “based on a close reading of Ezra Pound's Cantos part I and part II.” The authorial framework claims modernism’s cultural capital for electronic literature and encourages close reading of its text, but the work’s formal presentation of speeding, flashing text challenges such efforts. Reading Dakota as it reads Pound’s first two cantos exposes how modernism serves contemporary, digital literature by providing a model of how to “MAKE IT NEW” by renovating a literary past.