Digital Modernism
Subtitle: Making It New in New Media
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: Jan 31, 2014
Format: paperback
Number of pages: 240
ISBN-13: 9780199937103
Description: This text 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 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. The author pairs modernist works by Pound, Joyce, and Bob Brown, with major digital works like William Poundstone's Project for the Tachistoscope, Young-hae Chang Heavy Industries's Dakota, and Judd Morrissey's The Jew's Daughter. With each pairing, she demonstrates how the modernist movement of the 1920s and 1930s laid the groundwork for the innovations of electronic literature. This study situates contemporary digital literature in a literary genealogy in ways that rewrite literary history and reflect back on literature's past, modernism in particular, to illuminate the crucial role that media played in shaping the ambitions and practices of that period.
Notes: Source title: Digital Modernism: Making It New in New Media (Modernist Literature and Culture)