Skip to main content Accessibility help
×
Hostname: page-component-cc8bf7c57-5wl6q Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-10T05:49:18.681Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

Chapter 18 - The Politics and History of Digital Poetics

Copyright, Authorship, Anti-Lyric

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 April 2023

Daniel Morris
Affiliation:
Purdue University, Indiana
Get access

Summary

Digital poetry emerged in tandem with advances in the computer sciences in the mid-twentieth century, although we can trace its experimental impulses to earlier literary traditions. As Dani Spinosa argues, “digital poetry has its roots in a history of print-based avant-garde” (x). The recombinant and nonlinear conditions of electronic literature, broadly conceived, have led some scholars to attend to modernist works by writers and media visionaries such as Gertrude Stein, Ezra Pound, and Bob Brown in a search for the origins of the procedural play in contemporary innovative writing. “Early digital poems,” as Christopher Funkhouser notes, “can be conceptually interpreted as searching for their essence or as striving to make their essence apparent, as did modernist endeavors” (3). Media theorists, such as Marshall McLuhan, Friedrich Kittler, and Lev Manovich understood the innovations of early media as cornerstones in the development of the digital revolution. The modernist transition to new communication and media technologies, such as cinema, radio, and the gramophone, fostered faster transmissions of information that in turn influenced novel approaches to structuring narrative time, visual language, and reading practices. Bob Brown’s 1930 proposal for a mechanized reading machine offers an intriguing example of this collision between media and literature. Invoking the “talkies” or sound films, Brown’s reading device proposed to deliver “readies” or a ticker-tape stream of prose or poetry to a viewer, thereby efficiently transmitting a visual spectacle of information. For Brown, the machine would “revitalize” an “interest in the Optical Art of Writing” and thus merge the act of reading with the technological innovations that were already modernizing society (27). With this background in mind, it remains a useful exercise to apprehend the radical experimentation of contemporary electronic literature alongside the visual, technological, and formal innovations of earlier avant-garde movements, including Futurism and Dadaism, as well as later literary groups, such as Oulipo, Fluxus, and language writing.

Type
Chapter
Information
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2023

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Works Cited

Baldwin, Sandy. “The Nihilanth: Immersivity in a First-Person Gaming Mod.” Electronic Literature Volume 2 (2006), collection.eliterature.org/2/works/baldwin_basra/irw_baldwin.pdf.Google Scholar
Barlow, John Perry. “A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace,” www.eff.org/cyberspace-independence (accessed March 2, 2022).Google Scholar
Bhatnagar, Ranjit. Encomials: Sonnets from Pentametron. Counterpath Press, 2018.Google Scholar
Borsuk, Amaranth, Durbin, Kate, and Hatcher, Ian. Abra: A Living Text. iOS app, 2017.Google Scholar
Brown, Bob. The Readies. Edited and with an introduction by Saper, Craig. Roving Eye Press, 2014.Google Scholar
Collins, Billy. The Apple That Astonished Paris. Arkansas University Press, 2006.Google Scholar
Electronic Disturbance Theater 2.0/B.A.N.G. Lab. The Transborder Immigrant Tool. 2007. https://anthology.rhizome.org/transborder-immigrant-tool (accessed February 22, 2022).Google Scholar
Electronic Disturbance Theater 2.0/B.A.N.G. Lab. The Transborder Immigrant Tool Book. University of Michigan Press, 2014.Google Scholar
Electronic Literature Organization. “History.” https://eliterature.org/elo-history/ (accessed February 22, 2022).Google Scholar
Eskelinen, Markku. Cybertext Poetics: The Critical Landscape of New Media Literary Theory. Bloomsbury, 2012.Google Scholar
Flores, Leonardo. “Digital Poetry.” In The Johns Hopkins Guide to Digital Media, ed. Ryan, Marie-Laure, Emerson, Lori, and Robertson, Benjamin J.. Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014, 155–61.Google Scholar
Flores, Leonardo. “Third Generation Electronic Literature.” Electronic Book Review, April 6, 2019, doi.org/10.7273/axyj-3574.Google Scholar
Funkhouser, Christopher. Prehistoric Digital Poetry: An Archaeology of Forms. University of Alabama Press, 2007.Google Scholar
Gibson, Richard Hughes. Paper Electronic Literature: An Archaeology of Born Digital Materials. University of Massachusetts Press, 2021.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hayles, N. Katherine. Electronic Literature: New Horizons for the Literary. Notre Dame University Press, 2008.Google Scholar
Heckman, Davin, and O’Sullivan, James. “Electronic Literature: Contexts and Poetics.” In Literary Studies in the Digital Age: An Evolving Anthology, ed. Kenneth M. Price and Ray Siemens. MLA, 2018. https://dlsanthology.mla.hcommons.org/ (accessed February 15, 2022).Google Scholar
Jagoda, Patrick. Experimental Games: Critique, Play, and Design in the Age of Gamification. University of Chicago Press, 2020.Google Scholar
Knowles, Alison, and Tenney, James. House of Dust. Gebrüder König. 1968.Google Scholar
Nakamura, Lisa. Cybertypes: Race, Ethnicity, and Identity on the Internet. Routledge, 2002.Google Scholar
Nelson, Jason. “Poetic Playlands: Poetry, Interface, and Video Game Engines.” In Electronic Literature as Digital Humanities: Contexts, Forms, and Practices, ed. Grigar, Dene and O’Sullivan., James Bloomsbury, 2021, 335–49.Google Scholar
Parrish, Allison. Articulations. Counterpath Press, 2018.Google Scholar
Perloff, Majorie.Screening the Page/Paging the Screen: Digital Poetics and the Differential Text.” In New Media Poetics: Contexts, Technotexts, and Theories, ed. Morris, Adalaide and Swiss, Thomas. MIT Press, 2006, 143–62.Google Scholar
Raley, Rita. Tactical Media. University of Minnesota Press, 2009.Google Scholar
Salter, Anastasia. What Is Your Quest? From Adventure Games to Interactive Books. Iowa University Press, 2014.Google Scholar
Silliman, Ron. “Disappearance of the Word, Appearance of the World.” In The Language Book, ed. Andrews, Bruce and Bernstein, Charles. Southern Illinois University Press, 1984, 121–32.Google Scholar
Spinosa, Dani. Anarchists in the Academy: Machines and Free Readers in Experimental Poetry. Alberta University Press, 2018.Google Scholar
Wardrip-Fruin, Noah. “Reading Digital Literature: Surface, Data, Interaction, and Expressive Processing.” In A Companion to Digital Literary Studies, ed. Schreibman, Susan and Siemens, Ray. Blackwell, 2008, 163–82.Google Scholar

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure no-reply@cambridge.org is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×