ontology

Electronic Literature as Digital Humanities: Contexts, Forms & Practices is a volume of essays that provides a detailed account of born-digital literature by artists and scholars who have contributed to its birth and evolution. Rather than offering a prescriptive definition of electronic literature, this book takes an ontological approach through descriptive exploration, treating electronic literature from the perspective of the digital humanities (DH) that is, as an area of scholarship and practice that exists at the juncture between the literary and the algorithmic.

The domain of DH is typically segmented into the two seemingly disparate strands of criticism and building, with scholars either studying the synthesis between cultural expression and screens or the use of technology to make artifacts in themselves. This book regards electronic literature as fundamentally DH in that it synthesizes these two constituents. Electronic Literature as Digital Humanities provides a context for the development of the field, informed by the forms and practices that have emerged throughout the DH moment, and finally, offers resources for others interested in learning more about electronic literature.

(Bloomsbury description)

Aaron Pease reviews Manual DeLanda’s philosophy of the virtual.

Reviewing Andrew McMurry’s Environmental Renaissance, Stephen Dougherty questions the systems approach to ecocriticism.

(source: http://electronicbookreview.com/thread/criticalecologies/connected)

Matthew Fuller on The Cyborg Handbook.

The Cyborg Handbook tells the story of how one particular model, or one cluster of models grouped under the term cyborg (cybernetic organism), has come to occupy a key place as a meaning-making apparatus that either actually or rhetorically involves such disparate areas as: the invention of new emotions; self-directed evolution; combat and medical augmentation; the prediction, monitoring, and control of body movement; farming; automatism; remote or prosthetic operations; reproductive technology. Culling material from a wide variety of academic sources, The Cyborg Handbook follows the lead of Donna Haraway, who adds an image-rich foreword to the book, in putting cyborgs on the map of cultural criticism.

In this review of Mitchum Huehls’ After Critique, Smith situates Huehls’ “ontological approach” to the study of contemporary literature as arising from and standing in opposition to the “zombie plague” of neoliberalism.

(Source: EBR) 

This book offers a decoder for some of the new forms of poetry enabled by digital technology. Examining many of the strange technological vectors converging on language, it proposes a poetics appropriate to the digital era while connecting digital poetry to traditional poetry’s concerns with being (a.k.a. ontological implications). Digital poetry, in this context, is not simply a descendent of the book. Digital poems are not necessarily “poems” or written by “poets”; they are found in ads, conceptual art, interactive displays, performative projects, games, or apps. Poetic tools include algorithms, browsers, social media, and data. Code blossoms into poetic objects and poetic proto-organisms. Introducing the terms TAVs (Textual-Audio-Visuals) and TAVITS (Textual-Audio-Visual-Interactive), Aesthetic Animism theorizes a relation between scientific method and literary analysis; considers the temporal implications of animation software; and links software studies to creative writing. Above all it introduces many examples of digital poetry within a playful yet considered flexible taxonomy. In the future imagined here, digital poets program, sculpt, and nourish immense immersive interfaces of semi-autonomous word ecosystems. Poetry, enhanced by code and animated by sensors, reengages themes active at the origin of poetry: animism, agency, consciousness. Digital poetry will be perceived as living, because it is living. (Source: The MIT Press)

This paper starts with a consideration of Jakobson’s model of communication and argues in favour of a more pragmatic version of this as articulated by Jean-Jacques Lecercle. His model introduces the notion of interpellation whereby the text calls the figure of author and reader into subject positions. For our purposes however, this pragmatic model doesn’t account for the presence/function of the machine, vital to any model of digital literature. One way of dealing with this is to posit a second communication layer, an identically shaped model of digital elements laid over the top of Lecercle’s. This raises the question of the connection between the two planes? The answer offered here is ‘performativity’. To develop this further, the language positions of the two models are used as an example, i.e. how are the language of the text and the language of the machine linked through performativity? To answer this question, the paper exploits certain conceptual tools, starting with integrational linguistics. This argues that in natural language, meaning is determined by the performance of communication in specific contexts. This links with the Speech Act theory of John Searle, which itself grew out of J.L. Austin’s notion of ‘performatives’. And it is precisely the notion of Speech Act theory which underlines Geoff Cox’s articulation of code as performative, as speech/act. The paper considers certain objections to this argument – not least concerning the social nature of performative – as well as counters to this. The conclusion gives a very brief account of how the other elements of bi-planar model can similarly be linked through performativity.

(Source: ELD 2015)

In his approach, Gérard Genette studies the elements of texts called paratext that are not the core of text but still influential for understanding or interpreting literature. He identified two different groups of paratext and divided them into peritext and epitext (Genette 1997). Peritext is strongly related to the author’s intention and includes elements like the title, preface, table of contents, etc. Epitext is separated from the text and consists of interviews, commentaries, letters by the author about the text, debates, etc. Both, they can guide and influence the interpretation of texts. Genette also states that paratext is very changeable, temporary fashion and can appear and disappear. In this contribution, I want arise the question whe
ther special kinds of representing the reader’s understanding of texts can be also seen as paratext. So, is it possible to expand the borders of Genette’s definition to integrate the reader’s mind?

(Source: Author's Abstract)