logos

An overview of Gregory Ulmer’s thought by Victor Vitanza.

1. How do we not know we think, yet think?

Gregory Ulmer (a.k.a. ‘Glue’) has been for some time developing a theory of invention that would be appropriate and productive for those cultural theorists who have an interest in electronic media. (Invention, classically defined in oral and print culture, is the art of recalling and discovering what it is that one would think or say about a given subject. In electronic culture, invention takes on new ramifications). In his Applied Grammatology (1985), Ulmer moves from Derridean deconstruction (a mode of analysis that concentrates on inventive reading) to grammatology (a mode of composition that concentrates on inventive writing); that is, he moves towards exploring “the nondiscursive levels - images and puns, or models and homophones - as an alternative mode of composition and thought applicable to academic work, or rather, play.

This paper argues that digital literature can be understood as a social hermeneutic dispositif. To demonstrate this thesis, an experimental book is presented. It is written/read using a geo-tagging software, that restitutes, to the reader acting as a co-author in a Web 2.0/3.0 context, the combination of significant (semantic) keywords (or tags) with a given city place and with a certain social temporality. The novel’s title is based in the philosophical idea of deixis, i.e., the articulation of space (geo), time (neo) and logos (discourse, reason). In the interface, the fictional text presents, at each scene, 3 writing/reading itineraries, each one using a specific literary medium/language, referring, in a greater or lesser extent, to dimensions ‘space’, ‘time’ and ‘logos’. A first text has linguistic nature and was deconstructed into several sub-texts types: narrative (mention of major events), dialogic (characters dialogues) and meta-informative (keywords, tags). A second ‘text’ uses visual language inherent to characters and scenery photos (space or synchronic level) subjacent to the novel’s scenes (time or diachronic level). A 3rd ‘text’ refers to the language of maps, which represent the course (time) of the paths (space) used by novel’s characters in their daily lives both in the real and fictional world. The first (seminal) author associated photos both to the moment they were taken and to the urban space where these photos were captured or to a point in cyberspace.

(Source: ELD 2015)

Pedro Barbosa recalls in this interview his memories of the first studies and works of electronic literature back in the 1970s when he was a student at the University of Porto. Starting from considerations about his collaborative works he makes a comparison between printed literature tradition and the age of new media focusing on the paradigmatic change of this very transitional period with live in and the differences of the creative work. Furthermore he makes an interesting statement on regard of the aesthetics of new media by comparing works of electronic literature with the oral tradition. In the end he mentions some of the milestones of electronic literature that he considers important.