Category: Summer eReading

Our 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.

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

A 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

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.

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