NJCEA Presentation: The Gaping Garments of Electronic Literature

Here is my presentation from the annual NJCEA conference at Seton Hall. The Gaping Garments of Electronic Literature looks at how electronic literature has moved off the page and into the world around us. There is discussion of the works of Espen Aarseth, Jill Walker-Rettberg, Shelley Jackson, Roland Barthes, and more.

I posted the pdf as it stood when I read it at the conference. There may be citations missing, paragraphs crossed out, and parts where I go make lists to discuss in more detail in person. I wanted to preserve what I actually read that day.

As the summer goes on, I will post my notes from the different panels I attended at the conference.

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.

End Of Semester Roundup

Prof Hacker’s end of semester checklist post suggested writing some sort of “End of the Semester Roundup” post so I thought I would write one up. This semester was one of great advancements for me. I taught my first college level courses and had a great time doing so. Originally, my schedule involved teaching two sections of Composition I but during the first week of the semester I ended up adding a section of Composition II as well.

Comp I was a lot of work, but well worth it. I saw a lot of advancement in my student’s work as the semester went on. I also saw a lot if disappointing efforts from others. Teaching writing and grammar also allowed me to sharpen my own skills and talk about some of the adventures I have had over the years as a student and academic. Check out the class weblog for more information.

Composition II was a great joy to teach. I got to teach a lot of my favourite canonical authors like Chopin, Gilman, and Ibsen. An unconscious theme of discussing gender and women’s liberation became a focus of our close readings as the semester advanced through short stories to plays (A Doll House, Othello) and then to poets like Plath and Dickinson. Immediately, a handful of students stood apart from the rest of the class but I also saw many others slowly begin to contribute more and more as they became more comfortable with their own close reading skills. My focus in class was on what my students wanted to discuss. Of course, I would bring lecture notes with ideas I wanted to highlight. However, after our daily, randomly selected, journal readers I would ask the class where they wanted to begin, what they wanted to discuss, and that is where we would start. I could talk for hours about most of the texts we read, but I am more concerned with what my students wish to discuss.

One student in particular started the semester off very slowly only to eventually be the first to raise their hand almost every class. Another only contributed on Fridays, somehow, but always blew our minds with their ideas. Almost every student in class had a day where they stood out and shone brighter than anyone else.

The week of my classroom observation by Dr. Alexander coincided with my favorite week of the semester: the week we discussed (post)modern authors like Borges, Coover, and Auster. I was very impressed with my students and their ability to tackle these difficult texts. I can’t wait to teach 102 again and hope I get a chance to pick up a section in the spring. Check out our course weblog.

This semester I ran our course weblogs on WordPress and am thrilled with the results. I have run WP on a number of websites, including this one, for the past four years and couldn’t be happier with the results. In the spring I think I am going to try the dreaded Blackboard for my classes. As an offsite alternative, I believe I am going to wade my toes into the world of Drupal as well. I am going to spend some time over break considering my options.

I also guest lectured for two classes in Dr. McCadden’s upper level class ENG203 The Origins of Literature. I presented two lectures: “Telemachus & The Search For the Ideal Son in Classical Greek Literature” and “The Odyssey & Nonlinear Reading.”

Another project I am going to finish over break is the long-awaited draft of my article on Shelley Jackson for The Quarterly Conversation. I was supposed to have this completed for the winter issue, but the hectic nature of the fall semester got in the way. Veronica Esposito was gracious enough to give me an extension. I’m hoping to have something to him early in the new year.

I have a handful of journal article proposals that I need to send over break as well. A few of them are spinoff projects from my MA thesis and others are ideas that I have brewed for a period of time. Hopefully some of them will be publishable.

in the spring, currently, I am teaching two sections of Comp I. One is MWF, the other TT. This isn’t the most ideal schedule, but hopefully I will pick another Comp I, a Comp II, or another class. I am very happy to have a few weeks off to get some of my work done and prep for the spring. However, I am also excited to get back to Burlington and begin teaching again.

 

The Guilty Parties

(inspiration)

During the fall of 2004, the following are guilty as charged of offering inspiration for what you are reading.

  • Scott Rettberg’s hypertext fiction The Meddlesome Passenger.
  • Jorge Luis Borges’ collection Labyrinths, especially The Library Of Babel, The Immortal, and The Circular Ruins.
  • The literary weblog Conversational Reading, which, beyond generally getting me excited about literature, introduced me to the work of Gilbert Sorrentino, referenced in the penultimate lexia.
  • Jill/txt was a daily, still, source of inspiration.  A conversation with Jill in real life inspired a lexia.
  • Grand Text Auto in general.
  • Shelley Jackson’s My Body a Wunderkammer, which made me cry more than once and pushed me to be brave enough to write about sexuality issues.
  • Of course, The Unknown Collective’s The Unknown, which greatly influenced how I both read and write hypertext, and my aesthetic vision for hypertext fiction.
  • Derik Badman’s, who I met on a Buffy The Vampire Slayer listserv, writing about constraints at the time I was writing War Prayers inspired me to try to write three hundred word, exact, entries.
  • Although offline, Rettberg and Nick Montfort’s sticker novel Implementation was paradoxically what made me create a blog to document War Prayers.  I had to get my words onto a screen somewhere.  I even created a few summary stickers, one of which still is on a wall at The Richard Stockton College Of New Jersey underneath an Implementation sticker.

Fall 2007 Annotated Symposium Notes

I have created an annotated version of my presentation at Hypothesis?, the first ever Monmouth University English program symposium (which I organized with Toni Magyar). My presentation was titled Remixing The Canon: Electronic Literature & Distributed Narratives. After defining and offering examples of various forms of New Media and electronic literature I discussed the most recent evolutions in Barthes’ writerly text, including what Jill Walker-Rettberg has termed distributed narratives. I call for a look at “remixing” the canon to be more inclusive of electronic literature due to their often literary tone. The primaries examples I use comes from authors like Caitlin Fisher, Scott Rettberg, Nick Montfort, and Shelley Jackson. (PDF)

Feral Hypertext : When Hypertext Literature Escapes Control

A new idea!  Instead of a weekly update of what I am reading for my thesis and the project Toni and I are working on, how about I just blog my research daily as it goes on.  Bear with me: I am bouncing between a number of sources so posts will go back and forth between them often.  My goal is to upload one per day.  In fact, if all goes well the focus of this blog will shift for the time being to my current, in progress, research and writing almost exclusively.

Oh, I will get back to War Prayers soon.

History Lesson
My first entry will be for Jill Walker-Rettberg’s Feral Hypertext : When Hypertext Literature Escapes Control.   Dr. Walker’s paper offers a lot of useful information on two fronts.  There is plenty of good historical information about hypertext and many useful arguments for what Toni and I are working towards in our project, which is moving towards a focus on how texts have been, and are, defined and how this effects electronic literature.  Walker argues that hypertext before the World Wide Web is “domesticated…bred in captivity” (1).  She continues by arguing that hypertext was, however, always intended for individual users.  In 1974, Ted Nelson insists that ordinary people need to have access to personal computers.  Thirty years before, in an essay for The Atlantic in 1945, Vannevar Bush also argues for this:

Consider a future device for individual use, which is a sort of mechanized private file and library. It needs a name, and to coin one at random, “memex” will do. A memex is a device in which an individual stores all his books, records, and communications, and which is mechanized so that it may be consulted with exceeding speed and flexibility. It is an enlarged intimate supplement to his memory.

Continuing the historical look, Nelson creates the term “hypertext” in 1965.  Two years later, Julia Kristeva does the same for Intertextuality.  What becomes important here for my own thinking is, as Walker notes, the similarities between contemporary critical theory and hypertext have been pointed out numerous times, including, the work I am most familiar with, George Landow’s Hypertext 2.0 from 1997.  Walker is quick to point out, as Landow is as well, that the “relationship between hypertext and critical theory is not that simple” (3).

Walker continues by offering a brief history of preweb hypertext systems like Hypercard and Storyspace:

Though the first personal computers became available in the late seventies, the first home hypertext systems weren’t available till the late eighties. Peter Brown’s GUIDE [8] was followed by HyperCard, a hypertext authoring system that was packaged with Macintosh computers. Soon afterwards, Eastgate’s Storyspace became available, first for the Macintosh and later for the PC.  Tinderbox, released from Eastgate in 2001, is probably the tool that most closely follows in the footsteps of these systems, which were very much created in the spirit of Vannevar Bush and the desire for an intimate extension to memory. These hypertext authoring systems allow an individual to organise his or her personal notes and create his or her own self-contained hypertext which can be shared with others by copying it onto a diskette or CD or by emailing it as a single file. While Tinderbox and HyperCard were primarily intended as organisational tools, Storyspace was explicitly developed as a tool for fiction authors.

The Evolution Of The Writerly Text
Distribution of literary hypertext before the World Wide Web still shared many of the characteristics of the bounded text.  Like a copy of Sorrentino’s Aberration of Starlight in paperback, a CD of Shelley Jackson’s Patch Work Girl still restricted readers to a “sustained reading of a self-contained work” (5).  The rise of cheaper personal computers and the World Wide Web began to allow anyone with an Internet account to publish on the web, link, and be linked to.  This led to what Walker refers to as “feral hypertext,” hypertext that is “no longer tame and domesticated” (1).  For my own work, the most important point here is that hypertext on the World Wide Web in general cannot be tamed any longer.  Hypertext is very unruly and rather disobedient!

As Walker points out, literary hypertext that has gone, in her words, “feral” demands of the reader “to accept structures that are neither predefined nor clearly boundaried” (2).  Collaboratively written works like The Unknown and digital poetry like Megan Sapnar and Ingrid Ankerson’s Cruising defy the boundaries of the bounded text.  An interactive memoir like Caitlin Fisher’s These Waves Of Girls is an unruly and rather untamed account of growing up told with audio and visual links.  After making sure to note that Landow and others have pointed out the differences between critical theory and hypertext while pointing out their similarities, Walker expresses the idea, which I strongly agree with, that theorists involved with critical theory and intertextuality are already arguing that texts are unruly and extremely disobedient.  Literary hypertext on the World Wide Web is an evolution of the writerly text.  Hypertext that is feral is, as I see it, an interactive expression of the writing of the work on authorship of theorists like Foucault, Derrida, and Barthes.