Pressman’s Bookishness wins the 2021 N. Katherine Hayles Prize

Bookishness cover image

Winner:
Bookishness, by Jessica Pressman

Honorable Mention:
Antología Lit(e)Lat. Vol 1. by Leonardo Flores, Claudia Kozak, and Rodolfo Mata (eds)
.break.dance by Marisa Parham

ELO is proud to announce that The 2021 N. Katherine Hayles Award for Criticism of Electronic Literature goes to Jessica Pressman for Bookishness: Loving Books in a Digital Age (Columbia 2020).

Winner:
Bookishness, Jessica Pressman

From the publisher’s page:

Twenty-first-century culture is obsessed with books. In a time when many voices have joined to predict the death of print, books continue to resurface in new and unexpected ways. From the proliferation of “shelfies” to Jane Austen–themed leggings and from decorative pillows printed with beloved book covers to bookwork sculptures exhibited in prestigious collections, books are everywhere and are not just for reading. Writers have caught up with this trend: many contemporary novels depict books as central characters or fetishize paper and print thematically and formally.

In Bookishness, Jessica Pressman examines the new status of the book as object and symbol. She explores the rise of “bookishness” as an identity and an aesthetic strategy that proliferates from store-window décor to experimental writing. Ranging from literature to kitsch objects, stop-motion animation films to book design, Pressman considers the multivalent meanings of books in contemporary culture. Books can represent shelter from—or a weapon against—the dangers of the digital; they can act as memorials and express a sense of loss. Examining the works of writers such as Jonathan Safran Foer, Jennifer Egan, Mark Z. Danielewski, and Leanne Shapton, Pressman illuminates the status of the book as a fetish object and its significance for understanding contemporary fakery. Bringing together media studies, book history, and literary criticism, Bookishness explains how books still give meaning to our lives in a digital age.

According to the prize jury:

Bookishness provides a provocative look at the status of the book in the post-digital age. Pressman’s formulation of “bookishness” offers a compelling heuristic for considering the role of the overdetermining power of the book amidst the media shifts of the 21st century. Rather than sequestering electronic literature, Bookishness integrates a discussion of the digital with print-based texts, ushering in a new moment in e-lit scholarship in expertly crafted prose.”

Jessica Pressman is associate professor of English and comparative literature at San Diego State University, where she cofounded the Digital Humanities Initiative.  Pressman previously won the N. Katherine Hayles award forcoauthor of Reading “Project”: A Collaborative Analysis of William Poundstone’s “Project for Tachistoscope {Bottomless Pit}” (2015), which she co-authored.  She is the author of Digital Modernism: Making It New in New Media (2014) and coeditor of Comparative Textual Media: Transforming the Humanities in the Postprint Era (2013) and Book Presence in a Digital Age (2018).

Honorable Mentions:

Leonardo Flores, Claudia Kozak, and Rodolfo Mata (eds). Antología Lit(e)Lat. Vol 1.

Front page of LiteLat

https://litelat.net/

The Latin American Electronic Literature Network (litElat) aims to bring together academics, researchers and artists who are interested in topics / works of electronic literature in the Latin American context. According to the jury,

Lit(e)Lat is an overdue and powerful anthology that brings to the forefront the crucial contributions of Latin American and Caribbean writers to electronic literature since the 1960s. Collecting and curating this body of work, Lit(e)Lat expands the canon of electronic literature and demands attention to and promotes discovery of the remarkable work of these writers.”

.break.dance by Marisa Parham

breakdance cover image

http://smallaxe.net/sxarchipelagos/issue03/parham/parham.html#about

.break .dance is a time-based web experience opened in response to a prompt for a Small Axe Archipelagos issue, launched by Alex Gil and Kaiama Glover, and guest-edited by Jessica Marie Johnson. In thinking through and against the machineries of commercial interface efficacy, this pocket intentionally shows its material and discursive seams. Rooted in a sense of anarchival play, it is designed for multiple engagements, changes over time, and assumes no one will take the same path through. In its interface and experimental performances, .break .dance begs temporal patience and playful engagement with digital space. Here, touching and playing and looking are important to thinking. You can also read the process piece that goes with this project here. Acccording to the jury:

“.break.dance offers a compelling model of criticism that is itself a masterful piece of electronic literature. The piece prompts electronic literature scholars to look beyond the genres of monograph, anthology, and journal article to consider how the innovative and experimental methodologies of electronic literature can rewrite the rules of scholarship as we know it, using digital systems to dismantle larger systems of oppression.”

About the Award

The N. Katherine Hayles Award for Criticism of Electronic Literature is an award given for the best work of criticism, of any length, on the topic of electronic literature. Bestowed by the Electronic Literature Organization and funded through a generous donation from N. Katherine Hayles and others, this annual prize recognizes excellence in the field. The Prize for 1st Place comes with a $1000 award, with a plaque showing the name of the winner and an acknowledgement of the achievement, and a one-year membership in the Electronic Literature Organization at the Associate Level. One prize for Honorable Mention is awarded and consists of a plaque showing the name of the winner and an acknowledgement of the achievement, and a one-year membership in the Electronic Literature Organization at the Associate Level.

Jury: Elika Ortega-Guzman, Roopika Risam, and Mark Marino

Announcing “Teaching Electronic Literature,” A Resource for Teachers

ELO is pleased to announce a collaboration with N. Katherine Hayles on “Teaching Electronic Literature,” a resource for teachers featuring useful links to curated collections of works, selected scholarly resources, and sample syllabi and course materials from leading scholars and teachers in the field. The website is a companion to Dr. Hayles’ MLA presentation “Why Teach Electronic Literature” at 3:30 on January 11, 2020.

With this project, Dr. Hayles shares knowledge and experience accumulated since becoming active in the field of electronic literature in 1995, when she directed the first of three NEH Summer Seminars on the topic. Since then, she has remained a leading voice in the study of electronic literature, producing the first systematic survey of the field, Electronic Literature: New Horizons for the Literary. In addition, Dr. Hayles has served as ELO’s President and is the namesake of our annual award for scholarship on digital literature. Her goal in creating “Teaching Electronic Literature” is to make the transition into electronic literature easier for anyone who wants to teach these works.

Assisting in the creation and maintenance of the website is Ryan House, currently a doctoral student in Media, Film, and Digital Studies at the University of Wisconsin Milwaukee. Ryan has been a member of ELO since 2016. If you would like to contribute to this resource, please contact him at rnhouse@uwm.edu.

Please share widely!

Summer eReading: Analyzing Digital Fiction

Analyzing Digital FictionOur Summer eReading series resumes with a scholalry work that examines many of forms of electronic literature. Analyzing Digital Fiction (Routledge 2014), edited by Alice Bell, Astrid Ensslin, and Hans Rustad, features readings from an international group of scholars on an equally international collection of works.

Collected authors, in addition to the editors, include: Serge Bouchardon, David Ciccoricco, Isabell Klaiber, Alexandra Saemmer, Roberto Simanowski, Bronwen Thomas, and Susana Tosca.   Finnish scholar Raine Koskimaa says, “This book provides the reader with powerful tools to analyze and understand the emerging fictions of digital culture.” It will make a good companion to the diverse works of electronic narrative that will also be featured in our summer eReading!

From the Publisher:

Analyzing Digital Fiction offers a collection of pioneering analyses based on replicable methodological frameworks. It offers analyses of digital works that have so far received little or no analytical attention and profiles replicable methodologies which can be used in the analyses of other digital fictions. Chapters include analyses of hypertext fiction, Flash fiction, Twitter fiction and videogames with approaches taken from narratology, stylistics, semiotics and ludology. Essays propose ways in which digital environments can expand, challenge and test the limits of literary theories which have, until recently, predominantly been based on models and analyses of print texts.

Summer eReading: Digital Modernism

A continuation of our weekly Summer eReading series, highlighting new works of e-lit and scholarship.

Digital Modernism coverA certain self-referentiality and playful experimentation in works of electronic literature has won it the affection of those with an appetite for the Post-Modern.  But in Jessica Pressman‘s new book, she situates these literary works in a category she calls “Digital Modernism.”  Throughout the monograph, Pressman performs detailed interpretations of Young-hae Chang Heavy Industries’ Dakota and William Poundstone’s Project for Tachistoscope {Bottomless Pit}, and other works of digital literature in the context of print-based, canonical Modernist texts such as Ezra Pound’s Cantos.  In what Rita Raley calls “wonderfully elegant close readings,” Pressman demonstrates how critical reading practices evolve with developments in technologies.

In the midst of these close readings,  Pressman presents her exploration of the media archaeology of older forms of “new media,” epitomized by her analysis of Bob Brown’s Readies, in which she sees anticipation of the fast-flashing words that flicker through so much electronic literature.

Jessica Pressman is currently serving on the Board of Directors of ELO, but has a much longer history of service with the organization, beginning with its time at UCLA.  She will be presenting her recent research at the upcoming ELO 2014 conference in Milwaukee.

Read more Summer eReading: Digital Modernism

Summer eReading: Phantasmal Media

As the semesters wrap up and the summer months begin in the Northern Hemisphere, you might find yourself with a little more time to catch up on your digital lit reading. Today we begin a weekly reading series featuring recent critical and creative works in electronic literature by ELO members.

Phantasmal Media cover
Phantasmal Media by D. Fox Harrell

The first scholarly book is Phantasmal Media: An Approach to Imagination, Computation, and Expression by D. Fox Harrell.  Published in 2013, Harrell’s conceit of the phantasm offers him a framework for exploring the unseen figures (of speech, self, and thought) moving within within computational media.  Among the many featured texts in the book, Fox presents two of his works Living Liberia Fabric and The Girl with Skin of Haints and Seraphs, as he discusses aspects of GRIOT, his narrative generation system.

In addition to serving on ELO’s Board of Directors (currently on temporary leave), Harrell is an Associate Professor of Digital Media at MIT where he directs the Imagination, Computation, and Expression Laboratory.

From the publisher: Read more Summer eReading: Phantasmal Media

Digital Preservation Project Launches at WSU Vancouver

Following up on their NEH Digital Humanities Start-up Grant, ELO President-elect Dene Grigar sends word of the Pathfinders project with first guest ELO board member Stuart Moulthrop:

“Pathfinders: Documenting the Experience of Early Digital Literature” is making its debut at Washington State University Vancouver July 8 – 9 in the Electronic Literature Lab in the Classroom building, room 210. Stuart Moulthrop, professor of English at the University of Wisconsin- Milwaukee and an innovator of electronic literature and hypertext fiction as both a theoretician and writer, will be the first guest. He will also lecture at 7 p.m. July 9 at Nouspace Gallery, 1005 Main St, Vancouver, Wash. The lecture, “Failure to Contain: Electronic Literature and the State of (Machine) Reading,” is free and open to the public.

The project explores the idea of digital preservation and asks the questions: What happens to literary works meant to be experienced on a computing device when the software and computer systems with and for which they were created update, change or become obsolete? Do we allow these works also to become obsolete too, or do we find ways to preserve them?

“Pathfinders,” led by Dene Grigar, associate professor and director of the creative media and digital culture program at WSU Vancouver, and Moulthrop, are developing methods for digital preservation with the goal of capturing not only the digital work but also the human experience of interacting with early digital art . It is supported by a “Digital Humanities Start Up Grant” from the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Moulthrop has produced many critically significant works of digital writing and art over the past 25 years. One of his best-known, “Victory Garden,” (1991) was produced for computers that are not compatible with current standards, making the work unavailable for web-based archives without changes to its original form.

To preserve the beauty of the original work, Grigar will videotape Moulthrop in the Electronic Literature Lab as he talks through “Victory Garden” using a vintage Mac Classic. Following Moulthrop’s reading, two readers unfamiliar with “Victory Garden” will be videotaped to produce a record of multiple readers’ experience with the work. This is a process Grigar and Moulthrop call “traversal.”

Three more “Pathfinders” traversals are scheduled through the fall. To learn more, visit http://dtc-wsuv.org/wp/pathfinders or contact Grigar at dgrigar@vancouver.wsu.edu

 

MEDIA CONTACTS:
Dene Grigar, dgrigar@vancouver.wsu.edu
Brenda Alling, Office of Marketing and Communications, 360-546-9601, brenda_alling@vancouver.wsu.edu

 

OTHER RESOURCES
Pathfinders website:  http://dtc-wsuv.org/wp/pathfinders
Electronic Literature Lab website:  http://dtc-wsuv.org/wp/ell
Nouspace Gallery website:  http://dtc-wsuv.org/wp/nouspace

CFP New Works on Electronic Literature & Cyberculture: CLCWeb (3/1/13)

CFP: New Works on Electronic Literature and Cyberculture
CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture 16.5
Deadline:March 1, 2013
Email to: mzalbidea [at] lasallecampus.es

This CFP is aimed at participants in the 2012 ELVA  conference on Electronic Literature & other scholars of electronic literature.  Participants can submit their conference papers, but all relevant critical works will be considered.  The selected papers will be published on New Works on Electronic Literature and Cyberculture of CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture 16.5 (2014): (Purdue University Press ISSN 1481-4374). <http://docs.lib.purdue.edu/clcweb>

Guest edited by Maya Zalbidea Paniagua (Universidad La Salle, Madrid), Asunción López Varela (Universidad Complutense, Madrid) and Mark C. Marino (University of Southern California), the theme of the special issue, in the context of digital humanities, is the critical, social, philosophical, gendered, and pedagogical aspects of electronic literature, digital art, and cyberculture.

Please send papers in 6000-7000 words to Maya Zalbidea at by March 1st 2013. Of particular interest are papers on cybertext/hypertext theory and application; hypertext fiction (flash fiction, e-poetry, digital storytelling, online graphic novels, etc.); game studies, net and video art; and gender, identity, race, and sexuality in cyberspace. For the style of the journal consult http://docs.lib.purdue.edu/clcweblibrary/clcwebstyleguide.

Articles published in the journal are double-blind peer reviewed and indexed, among others, in the Thomson Reuters ISI Arts and Humanities Citation Index and Social Sciences Citation Index.

For more information contact Maya Zalbidea Paniagua, Universidad La Salle, Madrid

New Scientist Discovers Electronic Literature

Members of the Electronic Literature Organization no doubt remember the first time they heard about electronic literature. That exhilarating moment wrapped around a sense of possibility and a desire to get their hands on either the tools of creation or the mind-blowing creations or both. Over the past month, the popular science journal New Scientist has been publishing posts marking its discovery of electronic literature in a series called Storytelling 2.0.

The posts mention ELO and ELO co-founder Robert Coover along with works by Jay Bushman and others. There’s even a mention of ELO-President Nick Montfort, alluding to his work on his IF platform Curveship.

Check out the posts and join the conversation as New Scientist readers discover e-lit.

The posts:

Electronic literature jobs at the University of Bergen

ELO Co-founder and Board member, Scott Rettberg, sends word of 2 opportunities in Norway! (Note: Summer deadlines for applications.)

Two opportunities are now available at the University of Bergen’s Digital Culture program (http://www.uib.no/rg/digitalculture) for scholars of electronic literature.

FULBRIGHT SCHOLAR/LECTURER IN DIGITAL CULTURE http://catalog.cies.org/

POSTDOC IN ELECTRONIC LITERATURE BIBLIOGRAPHY

Read more Electronic literature jobs at the University of Bergen

The ELO Directory returns 010110

ELO welcomes 010110 (decimal 22) with a special announcement:

The framework for the Electronic Literature Directory version 2.0 is now online:
http://eld.eliterature.org/

Think of this as an open house in a model home for e-lit.

The Directory has always been key to helping outsiders discover electronic literature. With the new version, it will be even easier to add and find works of electronic literature AND criticism.

But there’s more: The ELD will feature venues or “collections,” aggregators of e-lit and criticism.

When you take a glance at our demo works, you will notice some exciting features:

In addition to basic information about author, date, url, and language, entries list software platforms as well as annotations by ELO members. However, registered users will be able to extend the discussion in the comment section or by writing a review.

The ELO Directory team has worked hard to make these works more accessible, developing search tools, categories, and tags, the subject of much discussion on Joseph Tabbi’s recent online meditation (On Reading 300 Works of Electronic Literature).

The works you see are but a small sample of the ones already vetted, but this is a special invitation to see the structure of this exciting re-imagined resource.

Start by creating an account and submitting creative or critical works or collection sites. Those submissions will be delivered to our Directory team for evaluation and review.We’re looking forward to the re-launch of this flagsite enterprise of ELO.

Watch for full announcements to follow including thanks to the team who have been working so hard to make this a possibility.

At the start of the new decade, it is impossible to predict what new forms of literature will emerge, but you at least know where you can find them: the Electronic Literature Directory.

[Also, reminder, ELO AI deadline: January 15, 2010 or 011501]