EN41023

Digital Poetry

Convenor: Andrew Roberts

Semester: 1, Credits: 30

Digital poetry or 'e-poetry' is one of the newest and most innovative forms of 21st-century literature. Drawing on the traditions of avant-garde literature and art, visual / concrete poetry, and sound poetry, it uses moving and morphing texts or letters, graphics and photos, and recorded / synthesized sound to create dynamic works of literary-visual-aural literature. These typically take web-mounted forms such as flash movies, hypertext art-works and interactive or generative programmes. How do we read, watch and interpret such works? In terms of avant-garde aims - such as shock, radical questioning and political critique? Or in terms of the specific aesthetics of digital media - such as the aesthetics of game, error, browsing, software code, interaction or film? This module tries to answer such questions by exploring:

• ideas and tradition of the 20th-century avant-garde
• the tradition of visual and concrete poetry
• the varieties of 21st-century digital poetry, and debates over their aesthetic and cultural value

Assessment

• 8 weekly journals (500 words per journal)
• One 3000 word essay.

Primary Texts

Most of the primary texts are available free online:

• Works by Talan Memmott, Maria Mencia, Jim Andrews, babel and escha, Giselle Beiguelman, John Cayley, Brian Kim Stefans and Jim Rosenberg, all included in Vol. 1 of the Electronic Literature Collection: http://collection.eliterature.org/1/
• Young-Hae Chang, "Dakota". At: http://www.yhchang.com/DAKOTA.html.
• Giselle Beiguelman, "recycled" and "content=no cache" At: http://www.desvirtual.com
• Jodi, "404" and "OSS" At: http://404.jodi.org
• Ana Maria Uribe, "Anipoems" At: http://www.vispo.com/uribe/anipoems.html.
• Squid Soup: http://www.theremediproject.com/projects/issue7/squidsoupuntitled/
• Jim Andrews, "Arteroids". At: http://www.vispo.com/arteroids/indexenglish.htm.
• John Cayley, overboard at http://homepage.mac.com/shadoof/net/in/

(Plus selections from concrete and visual poetry)

Selected Secondary Texts

• Adelaide Morris and Thomas Swiss (eds), New Media Poetics: Contexts, Technotexts, and Theories (MIT Press, 2006)
• Marjorie Perloff, Radical Artifice: Writing Poetry in the Age of Media (1991)
• N. Katherine Hayles, Writing Machines (MIT Press, 2002)
• Elizabeth J Aarseth, Cybertext: Perspectives on Ergodic Literature (Johns Hopkins UP, 1997)

Last updated Friday, 25-Jul-2008 23:40:05 BST by RESL