Post-Digital charts the history of the digital revolution and gauges its impact on contemporary literature, art, criticism, and theory.
Collecting more than 20 years' worth of major interventions from the pioneering journal electronic book review, this landmark 2-volume set contains close to 100 seminal articles from leading scholars, writers and digital artists, including Mark Amerika, Jan Baetens, Serge Bouchardon, Kiki Benzon, R. M. Berry, Anne Burdick, Stephen J. Burn, John Cayley, David Ciccoricco, Astrid Ensslin, David Golumbia, Paul Harris, N. Katherine Hayles, Matthew G. Kirschenbaum, Joseph McElroy, Brian McHale, Timothy Morton, Nick Montfort, Stuart Moulthrop, John Durham Peters, Scott Rettberg, Stephanie Strickland, Ronald Sukenick, Joseph Tabbi, Cary Wolfe, Laura Dassow Walls and Rob Wittig.
Post-Digital also includes new essays chronicling the most recent, multimodal developments in the literary field, a series of introductions by several generations of ebr co-editors surveying the long history of thinking about the digital, and a comprehensive bibliography of further reading.
Table of Contents:
Volume 1
Openings
Recollection in Process - Joseph Tabbi
2 or 3 Things I Know About Electronic Literature - Mark Amerika
The Rival Tradition - Ron Sukenick
A Literary Relocation: From Broadcast to Reception Media - Joseph Tabbi
01 Image + Narrative
Introduction: The Interface as a Tool for Writing - Anne Burdick
Image + Narrative Gallery - Anne Burdick
Reading Writing Space - Anne Burdick
Media, Genealogy, History - Matthew G. Kirschenbaum
Remediation or Premeditation? - Jan Baetens
The Processual Page - Joseph Tabbi
02 Electropoetics (& Polemics)
Introduction: Cyberdebates Circa 2001 - Brooks Sterritt
Cybertext Killed the Hypertext Star - Nick Montfort
Cybertext Theory: What an English Professor Should Know Before Trying - Markku Eskelinen
What Cybertext Theory Can’t Do - N. Katherine Hayles
Materiality and Matter and Stuff: What Electronic Texts Are Made Of - Matthew G. Kirschenbaum
A Poetics of the Link - Jeffrey Parker
The Pleasure (and Pain) of Link Poetics - Scott Rettberg
03 Fictions Present
Introduction - Kiki Benzon
What Was Postmodernism? - Brian McHale
Lynne Tillman and the Great American Novel - Kasia Boddy
Looking for Writing after Postmodernism - by Daniel Punday
The Importance of Being Earnest in Flatland - by Gilbert Pham-Thanh
Paranoid Modernity and the Diagnostics of Cultural Theory - by Timothy Melley
04 Technocapitalism
Introduction: Within the Touchscreen Storm - Aron Pease
Writing Futures - Aron Pease
The Machinic Multitude - Nicholas Spencer
Networking the Multitude - Linda Brigham
Irreducible Innovation - William Wilson
05 Critical Ecologies (i)
Introduction: Literary Ecology: From Resistance to Resilience - Eric Dean Rasmussen
Framed: The Machine in/as the Garden - Timothy Morton
The Novel at the Center of the World - John Limon
Devoted to Fake - Brian Willems
Plagiarism, Creativity, and the Communal Politics of Renewal - Christian Moraru
Beyond Representation: Deliberate Reading in a Panarchic World - Laura Dassow Walls
Notes on a Civics for the Sixth Extinction - Stephanie LeMenager
06 Critical Ecologies (ii)
It Was Never About That: The Deeper Ecologies of Media - Cary Wolfe
Anti-Negroponte: Cybernetic Subjectivity in Digital Being and Time - Timothy Luke
From Virtual Reality to Phantomatics and Back - Paisley Livingston
If It Could Be Wrapped -Joseph Mcelroy
Not Just a River -Rob Swigart
Strange Sympathies: Horizons of Media Theory in America and Germany -John Durham Peters
Environmental Remediation -Alenda Chang
Enclosures
End Gathering: ebr, CTheory, and Postmodern Culture -Joseph Tabbi
The Form of Censorship, Censorship as Form - Joseph McElroy
Volume 2
Introductory
Complicity and Resistance: A Critical Mass Interview - David Ciccoricco and Joseph Tabbi (introduction), Marie-Laure Ryan, Jessica Pressman, Mark C. Marino, Rui Torres, Scott Rettberg, Serge Bouchardon
Stuart Moulthrop, Matthew Kirschenbaum (Responders)
01 Histories of the Future (& Now)
Introduction: Monstrosities of the Present - Brooks Sterritt
Futures of Electronic Literature - Stephanie Strickland and Marjorie Luesebrink with participants David Jhave Johnston, Amaranth Borsuk, Patrick Lemieux, Natalia Fedorova, Samantha Gorman, Claire Donato
Ben Bishop, Stephanie Boluk and Ian Hatcher
A [S]creed for Digital Fiction - Alice Bell, Astrid Ensslin, David Ciccoricco, Hans Rustad, Jess Laccetti and Jessica Pressman
Field Notes from the Future of Publishing - Ed Finn
Metadiversity: On the Unavailability of Alternatives to Information - David Golumbia
Community of People with No Time - Victoria Vesna with responses from Stephanie Strickland and Victoria Vesna
02 Writing Under Constraint
Introduction: Less is More - Jan Baetens
The Procedural Poetries of Joan Retallack - Brian Lennon
More Pixels to the Inch - Thomas Hartl
The Sounds of the Artificial Intelligentsia - Mark Amerika
Abish’s Africa - Louis Bury
Constrained Thinking: From Network to Membrane - Paul Harris
03 music/sound/noise
Introduction: music/sound/noise - Robert Cashin Ryan
The Sonic Spectrum - Elise Kermani
The Language of Music and Sound - Olivia Block
False Pretenses, Parasites, and Monsters - Tom LeClair
04 Fictions Present
Introduction: Fictions Present - R.M. Berry
Making Now - R.M. Berry
An Aesthetics of the Unsaid - Andrew Lindquist
Amy Hungerford’s Making Literature Now - Tom LeClair
Post-Wankery: A Review of Infinite Jest - Piotr Siemion
Blank Frank - Joseph Tabbi
“And Furthermore…” (i) - R.M. Berry
“And Furthermore…” (ii) - Joseph Tabbi
The Avant-Garde and the Question of Literature - R.M. Berry
R.M. Berry in Conversation with Flore Chvalier
05 Critical Ecologies After Posthumanism
Introduction: Extra Ordinary Entanglements - Laura Shackelford
A New ‘Gospel of the Three Dimensions’: Expanding the Boundaries of Digital Literature - Lisa Swanstrom
Old Orders for New: Ecology, Animal Rights, and the Poverty of Humanism - Cary Wolfe
Dali Clocks: Time Dimensions of Hypermedia - Stephanie Strickland
06 electropoetics
Introduction: The Body as a Writing Instrument - Davin Heckman
Engineering Cyborg Ideology - N. Katherine Hayles
Digital Manipulability and Digital Literature - Serge Bouchardon and Davin Heckman
At the Time of Writing: Digital Media, Gesture, and Handwriting - Maria Angel and Anna Gibbs
Digital Ekphrasis and the Uncanny: Toward a Poetics of Augmented Reality - Robert P. Fletcher
Shuffle Literature and the Hand of Fate - Zuzana Husárová and Nick Montfort
07 What (in the World) Was Postmodernism
Introduction - David Ciccoricco
The Historical Status of Postmodernism under Neoliberalism - Simon During
Metaphysics after the Western Wall Has Come Down - Amy Elias
I Read Because it is Absurd - Birger Vanwesenbeeck
The End - Brian McHale
Continuings
Electronic Literature as Paratextual Construction - Friedrich W. Block
ELO and the Electric Light Orchestra: Electronic Literature Lessons from Prog Rock - Matthew Kirschenbaum
The Heaviness of Light - Eugenio Tisselli
Just Not the Future: Electronic Literature After the Fall - Stuart Moulthrop
About the Author :
Joseph Tabbi, an American academic who currently works at the University of Bergen in Norway, has made significant contributions to the field of American fiction in both print and electronic media. In 1995, he co-founded the scholarly journal electronic book review. His publications include Postmodern Sublime: Technology and American Writing from Mailer to Cyberpunk (1995), Cognitive Fictions (2002), Nobody Grew But the Business: On the Life and Work of William Gaddis (2015), and The Bloomsbury Handbook of Electronic Literature (2018).
