The Story Of Crass by George Berger
The Western Canon: The Books & Schools Of The Ages by Harold Bloom
The Stiehl Assassin by Terry Brooks
We Created Chavez: A People's History of the Venezuelan Revolution by George Circcariello-Maher
A Penelopean Politics: Reweaving The Feminine In Homer's Odyssey by Barbara Clayton
Atari To Zelda: Japan's Video Games In Global Contexts by Mia Consalvo
The Odyssey of Political Theory: The Politics of Departure and Return by Patrick J. Deneen
Titan Screwed: Lost Smiles, Stunners, and Screwjobs by James Dixon
I Hated, Hated, Hated This Movie by Roger Ebert
K-Punk: The Collected & Unpublished Writing Of Mark Fisher by Mark Fisher
Transformers: Regeneration One Volumes 1-4 by Simon Furman
Soccer In Sun & Shadows by Eduardo Galeano
Radioactive Man: Radioactive Repoository by Matt Groening
GI Joe Volumes 1-33 by Larry Hama
My Hero Academia Volume 1-3 by Kohei Horikoshi
Death Of The Territories: Expansion, Betrayal, and The War That Changed Pro Wrestling Forever by Tim Hornbaker
The New Testament As Literature by Kyle Keefer
Ajax, The Dutch, The War: Football In Europe During The Second World War by Simon Kuper
Marvel Masterworks: The X-Men Volume One by Stan Lee
Kill Shakespeare Volume One by Conor McCreery
Norwegian Wood by Haruki Murakami
One Piece Volume One by Eiichiro Oda
Mega Man 3 (Boss Fights) by Salvatore Pane
Football For A Buck: The Crazy Rise & Crazier Demise of the USFL by Jeff Pearlman
Shakespeare and the Middle Ages by Curtis Perry
Electronic Literature by Scott Rettberg
Capitalism: A Ghost Story by Arundhati Roy
Where We Go From Here by Bernie Sanders
Corbyn: The Strange Rebirth of Radical Politics by Richard Seymour
Essays by Wallace Shawn
Night Thoughts by Wallace Shawn
1923: A Great Depression Memoir by Harry Leslie Smith
Harry's Last Stand: How The World My Generation Built Is Falling Down and What We Can Do To Save It by Harry Leslie Smith
Love Among The Ruins: A Memoir of Life and Love in Hamburg, 1943 by Harry Leslie Smith
Strike For America: Chicago Teachers Against Austerity by Micah Uetricht
The Unknown Odysseus: Alternate Worlds In Homer's Odyssey by Thomas Van Nortwick
Never Any End In Paris by Enrique Vila-Matas
The Future of Our Schools: Teachers Unions and Social Justice by Lois Weiner
A Politics of Love: A Handbook For A New American Revolution by Marianne Williamson
Brilliant Orange: The Neurotic Genuis of Dutch Soccer by David Winner
Podcast #9
This was my first publication for The Quarterly Conversation about, generally, an overview of electronic literature. I have always been so proud to have published in TQC and look forward to doing so again.
Weekly Reader
Weekly Reader 4-9-12
New Publication In The Quarterly Conversation
For the second spring in a row, I have been published in The Quarterly Conversation. This time I wrote about Shelley Jackson’s career in and out of print and electronic literature. There are a lot of other interesting essays on Borges, Bolano, and Swift among others alongside of my piece in the new issue.
My Digital Humanities Origin
In its original draft, this was part of the introduction to my MA thesis. After some discussion, I ended up pulling this out to keep my thesis more focused on the matters at hand. I really like what I wrote here so I decided to excerpt it on my domain for my readers. I wrote this right around this time last year.
Everything I found in electronic literature upon discovery, the intellectual aesthetic and interplay with computers, which had been my cherished companion since childhood, I had been looking, searching, for in my literary studies. As a child I had played some text adventures, known as interactive fiction, and certainly remember their printed cousins the Choose Your Own Adventure book. I loved how interactive those books were and the agency which readers were given to decide their own fate and reading path. Growing up, I had a lot of problems with motor development and coordination. This led to many other problems including very poor penmanship. A wise teacher, when I was in elementary school, suggested my parents buy me a computer. She claimed that I would end up ahead of the curve because personal computers were going to takeover classrooms before I left for college. Wisely, my parents took her advice and purchased an Apple II for me to do my school work on and, because I did not play well with other children, to have an outlet for play and creativity.
Long before I became an avid reader in my teens, my creativity came almost exclusively from computers. Game designer Jane McGonigal’s recent weblog post about her experience creating detailed narratives out of Apple II games that did not already have them like Summer Games brought back memories from my own childhood. I had a similar experience at almost the same time by creating forms in a word processing program with different countries and names. I created brief backgrounds for each character and had them compete against each other on screen. Scandal, same gender romance, athletic achievement, and other intrigues played out in this interpretation of my gaming experience. I would not call that literature, obviously, but I tell this story to show how my creativity was electronically nourished before I embraced print culture later in my teens.
I have been on the Internet since sometime in early 1995. Immediately I became involved with participatory online culture by writing fan fiction, posting to newsgroups and listservs, chatting on Internet Relay Chat (IRC) and, on and off, creating journals which nowadays would be called a weblog. At the same time, I published print based punk rock fanzines periodically until 2005 when I began Signifying Nothing, a webzine, archive of my earlier fanzines, and podcast devoted to my endeavors in hardcore punk which continue to this day.
My interest in electronic literature came to fruition while taking a senior seminar on postmodernism with Scott Rettberg in the spring of 2004. While being turned onto writers like Italo Calvino, John Barth, Jorge Luis Borges, and theorists like George Landow, Roland Barthes, and Julia Kristeva I realized that not only were these fiction writers exactly what I had longed for all of my life from literature, but the bridge between literary theory I fell in love with from Kristeva and Barthes, which I had struggled with until this time, and computers which Landow and others like Rettberg himself bridged via their theories was a dream come true. The beginning years of my college career were filled with frustration, failure, and difficulty. The first step of my recovery came when I embraced electronic literature.
Reading hypertext fiction and the theories of Barthes and Kristeva in Rettberg’s seminar improved my readings of previously read authors like Faulkner, Woolf, and Wallace. I began researching electronic literature and exploring the links on Rettberg’s weblog. Through these links I was able to explore the work of other hypertext and New Media theorists like Nick Montfort, Angela Thomas, and Jill Walker. I experimented with and clicked through Rettberg’s hypertext novel, The Unknown, and began actively participating in the sticker novel he authored with Montfort. As the semester wound down, two classmates and myself began our own weblogs, inspired with Rettberg and Walker especially, and I moved mine to its own domain later that summer.
Since the rise of the novel the past few centuries have had some hypertextesque works of literature. Novels like Tristram Shandy, Infinite Jest, and Ulysses can seem to those familiar with the workings of electronic literature to have qualities which “stand out for the first time.” (Landow 1982) When I read Sterne’s novel in an undergraduate course on the history of the novel, I came in one morning and remarked to my professor that the novel had a lot of the qualities of hypertext fiction which I was learning about in Rettberg’s seminar on postmodernism the same semester. Without knowledge of electronic literature I would have never made the connection, which made my reading of Sterne’s novel much more pleasurable. Experimental works of literature like Pavic’s Dictinary Of The Khazars and Nabakov’s Pale Fire also exude qualities which are emphasized by an understanding and familiarity with hypertext and electronic literature.
As Janet Murray argues in Hamlet On The Holodeck: The Future Of Narrative In Cyberspace, “the impending dissolution of Yugoslavia,” in Dictinary Of The Khazars, “is preconfigured by the fragmentary account of a mythical lost tribe” of three separate, conflicting, dictionaries (Murray 37). The “multicursally” seen in Pale Fire has been seen as a branch between not only modernism and postmodernism but as a text that has hypertextesque qualities (Aarseth 8). Writers like Robert Coover, a longtime advocate of electronic literature, Borges, and other postmodernists from France and South America also write literature which embodies many aspects of hypertext fiction.
Robert Coover Links
My friend Bucky commented on here recently asking what I thought about Robert Coover. After replying to him, I decided it might be a good idea to link to some supplemental information about Coover:
- Bucky and I were discussing The Public Burning, which I absolutely love. Coover really nails the voices of Nixon and the Rosenbergs. This novel has been very influential on my own writing.
- A few months ago Coover gave a reading at the Kelly Writers House in Philadelphia. They have mp3s uploaded of his reading and a question/answer session.
- Here is the video of Coover’s keynote from the Electronic Literature In Europe conference from last fall.
