Description
Book SynopsisDigital Modernism examines how and why some of the most innovative works of online electronic literature adapt and allude to literary modernism. Digital literature has been celebrated as a postmodern form that grows out of contemporary technologies, subjectivities, and aesthetics, but this book provides an alternative genealogy. Exemplary cases show electronic literature looking back to modernism for inspiration and source material (in content, form, and ideology) through which to critique contemporary culture. In so doing, this literature renews and reframes, rather than rejects, a literary tradition that it also reconfigures to center around media. To support her argument, Pressman pairs modernist works by Pound, Joyce, and Bob Brown, with major digital works like William Poundstone''s Project for the Tachistoscope: [Bottomless Pit] (2005), Young-hae Chang Heavy Industries''s Dakota, and Judd Morrissey''s The Jew''s Daughter. With each pairing, she demonstrates how the modernist move
Trade ReviewDigital Modernisms not only exposes the self-consciousness of media on both twentieth-century and digital modernist texts, but demonstrates how close study of electronic literature can provide a framework for those seeking to reflect on older "reading technologies". * Stephanie Boland, Times Literary Supplement *
Jessica Pressman's Digital Modernism: Making It New in New Media is an impressive accomplishment. * Emily Christina Murphy, SHARP News *
Table of ContentsIntroduction ; Chapter 1 - Close Reading: Marshall McLuhan, From Modernism to Media Studies ; Chapter 2 - Reading Machines: Machine Poetry and Excavatory Reading in William Poundstone's Electronic Literature and Bob Brown's Readies ; Chapter 3 - Speed Reading: Super-Position and Simultaneity in Young-hae Chang Heavy Industries's Dakota and Ezra Pound's Cantos ; Chapter 4 - Reading the Database: Narrative, Database, and Stream of Consciousness ; Chapter 5 - Reading Code: The Hallucination of Universal Language from Modernism to Cyberspace ; Coda - Rereading: Digital Modernism in Print, Mark Z. Danielewski's Only Revolutions
