Electronic Literature

"An examination of the theory and practice surrounding the genre of electronic literature and exploration of its major works and authors."

Exam

A reminder that our exam is on Wednesday from 10:30-12:30 in VMMC 111. Your final projects are due at the beginning of class. I plan to pass your papers back to you on that day.

We will more than likely have visitors to the class to see your projects. So be prepared!

--Dene

posted by: grigar at 04/27/08 12:22 | link | comments |

Young-Hae Chang Heavy Industries in Town!

Portland State University MFA Monday Night Lecture Series

All The Way From Seoul, Korea!
YOUNG-HAE CHANG HEAVY INDUSTRIES Will Lecture About Their Work!
The Public is Invited (it's free, tell your friends)
Monday April 28th, 7:30pm Sharp!
5th Avenue Cinema Room 92
510 SW Hall St. (at the corner of SW 5th & Hall on the PSU Campus)
Portland, OR

YOUNG-HAE CHANG HEAVY INDUSTRIES is in Seoul. Its C.E.O is Young-hae
Chang (Korea), its C.I.O. Marc Voge (U.S.A). YHCHI's pieces present a
Homeric hero searching for sublime meaning in the insignificance of a
life lived anywhere but where it seemingly counts; Asian businessmen
and bar hostesses drinking the night away; a man who dies and is
reborn a stick; a Korean cleaning lady who is really a French
philosopher; an illegal immigrant in a holding cell under the Justice
Palace, in Paris; a woman who sexually embraces corporate monopoly;
an evening with Sam Beckett in a bordello; an S O S from a beauty
queen; a night roundup followed by an execution; a frustrated bongo
player; a guy who goes to work without his pants; a girl with a
Global Positioning Satellite chip sewn into her abdomen; the second
Korean war in the eyes of W.G. Sebald; cultural identity;
nothingness; loneliness; love in a snowy region of Japan; a guy and
his girlfriend trying to get from Tokyo to Detroit; official North
Korean policy on oral sex; eating glass; movie end credits; the
Riviera; a duty-free DMZ; a James Brown impersonator; Saul; and more.

For more information on Regine go to: http://www.yhchang.com/

PSU's Art Dept. offers free public lectures every Monday night of the
school year. This is the twenty-second lecture in the PMMNLS for this
season.
The PSU MFA Monday Night Lecture Series is supported in part by PICA,
Reed College, PNCA, Lewis and Clark College, PSU's Department of
International Studies, and Ben Rosenberg Studio. If you or your
organization are interested in becoming a supporter of the lecture
series please let us know.

Next up in the PMMNLS:

May 5th: Rebecca Ripple

May 12th: Edgar Heap of Birds

May 19th: Karen Yasinsky

May 26th: Holiday no lecture

June 2nd: Amy Yoes

June 9th: John Malpede

http://www.pdx.edu/art/

posted by: grigar at 04/24/08 21:57 | link | comments |

Follow Up

A special thanks to all of you who showed up for conferences prepared to talk about your analysis papers. All of you received a handout that provided some reminders about about how to edit your paper for the final version. Remember that when you turn your papers in on Monday to:

1. Turn in your older version that I commented on
2. Include all of your notes and articles used in the Works Cited page
3. Put your new version on top of all of other materials
4. Clip the work together with a binder clip

I will not need an electronic copy for this version.

Papers are due at the beginning of class. Call me cynical, but with six of you absent last week when the first draft was due, I am going to be very adamant about your turning in this version on time. If you are absent for any reason save for a cataclysmic earthquake, dangerous marauders from Mars, or death/significant illness, your paper will be marked late.

We will spend Monday during class working on final projects.

--Dene

posted by: grigar at 04/18/08 08:10 | link | comments |

Conferences over Work

Below is the list of students who asked for a conference about their writing project. Please remember to bring any back up material to the conference if you have not yet given it to me. And keep in mind what I said in class; Conferencing over your papers does not automatically give you an A. For this round of evaluation, I am focusing primarily on structure and content. You are still responsible for everything else.

Andrew, 9:30
Veronica, 10
Kristen, 10:30
Matt, 11
Scott, 11:30
Mallisa, 12
Chris, 12:30
Robert, 1
Greg, 1:30
Michael, 2
Donald, 2:30
Ryan, 3
Julia, 3:30
David, 4
Nina, 4:30
Tatiana, 5

posted by: grigar at 04/14/08 13:09 | link | comments |

Monday, the 14th

Just a reminder that your drafts of the analysis paper are due tomorrow at the beginning of class. You will turn these in to me and I will look over them. Those of you interested in talking to me about your papers in a student conference will sign up for this during class time. Students who do not turn in drafts will not be able to conference with me about your papers since you will not have one ready in time.

You will have time during class tomorrow to work on your final projects. The more you get done during the next week in class, the less stress you will have at the end of the semester when so much work is due in your classes. I ask each one of you to bring in your projects so that I can see where you are in them and what you may need in the way of help.

--Dene

posted by: grigar at 04/13/08 16:39 | link | comments |

MOVE LAB Today

Just a reminder that we will be meeting in the MOVE Lab today, Wednesday, April 9. The lab is located in VCL 3, which is the basement of the Classroom Building.

In the meantime, check this out: http://www.interactivestory.net/, and print out this diagram and bring it to class today.





--Dene

posted by: grigar at 04/09/08 08:30 | link | comments |

Joe Tabbi's Post

Well, the inevitable happened: after my flights home and a few hours
rest I woke up, wide awake, in the middle of the night. There's not
really much to do between 4 a.m and sunrise, so I thought I would use
these hours to draft some remarks for your follow-up to the class on
Cognitive Fictions. These will be impressionistic, given the
jet-lagged state of my own consciousness and also the absence of books
and articles, for reference. My books are all still in my luggage
somewhere between Riga, Frankfurt, and Chicago O'Hare.

Your course list looks great. The van Looy and Baetans collection,
which appeared around the time of Cognitive Fictions (just five or six
years ago), was one of many attempts to consider cognitive themes that
were then being imported into literary and cultural study. The authors
in this collection, Hayles in her close readings of early works of
electronic literature, Kac in his more visual and performative
practices, are each in their own ways trying to see how 'we' might fit
(or not fit) in the new cognitive environments under construction in
new media. I guess my own take on this convergence, at the time, was
that both environments, the human brain/body and the non-human media
ecology, posed similar challenges to literary study, namely: the
problem of *locating* the literary in two distinct material media, the
mind on the one hand, and the media ecology on the other hand.
Philosophers might quibble, but I think we can know, with some
confidence, that we have such things as consciousness, literature,
culture, and society: even if these immaterial possessions resist
definition (or can be known only by contrast with things they are
*not*), they can be experienced individually and they can reproduce
themselves and persist in time: not forever, but for a while. These
immaterial cultural accomplishments cannot exist without some material
basis, and they cannot exist without being communicated, among
different minds but also within our own, individual minds. That's true
even if scientists cannot map the precise routes and channels of
communication. It's not as if literary creativity were an area in the
brain the size of a walnut, or something. Creativity emerges from the
communication and interaction among many different modules, each of
them doing their own thing - attending to our motor functions, our
sight, out touch, and a variety of messages coming to the brain from
all organs of the body.

What I tried to do in Cognitive Fictions, was to connect two ideas. I
tried to explore whether the emergence of literature from material
media might follow the same logic and evince some of the same formal
qualities as the emergence of consciousness from the material of the
brain. I wanted to link these two developments, not just as metaphors,
but as two aspects of a single understanding about 'emergence.'

Knowing what we know, about cultures and consciousness, the critical
and creative authors listed in your syllabus are all, in different
ways, asking the question: where do these largely immaterial human
accomplishments fit, how do they emerge out of media practices and
brain modules that developed for reasons having nothing to do with
literature and creativity. Consciousness is only, after all, a very
small part of what the brain is doing at any given time, and the
conscious mind seems to have developed late, long after other parts of
the reptile brain had developed (and these earlier parts haven't
changed, only their ways of communicating with one another change as
the brain evolves). As far as we know, both the mind and the media
ecology developed, and continue to develop, not for reasons of
cultural uplift but in response to material constraints on the
evolving human organism and the changing structure of human societies.
The purpose of minds in nature, and the goal of technologies in a
competitive economic environment, can be easily stated: minds and
technologies are each, in their different ways, trying to survive.
They are trying to reproduce themselves within a competitive
environment. There is no other purpose, nothing *outside* themselves,
that they are put on this earth to achieve. These are closed systems,
self-producing and self-regulating within the conditions where they
happen to exist.

The term that systems theorists have come up with, to describe this
closed circuit of evolutionary development, is "autopoiesis":
literally, "self making." It's a good way of talking about literary
and cultural developments, because these things happen on their own,
under constraints imposed by the material world. We know, not the
world itself, but the constraints that the world impose on our thought
and action. Our cultural products, when they are more than trivial,
are not so much conscious responses to the world, or even
'representations' of it: they are self-producing worlds unto
themselves.

One can find examples of this "systems" way of thinking in scientific
authors such as Gerald Edelman, Humberto Maturana, and Francesco
Varela. An elaborate "systems theory" also emerges in sociology
(Niklas Luhmann), in politics (the "world system" of Immanuel
Wallerstein) and, increasingly, in literary study. What attracts me to
the language of autopoiesis and other, evolutionary and systems
concepts, is the way that such language applies to both the mind and
the media. There is a danger, of course, of getting too general, and
of collapsing areas that really are quite different from one another.
But the greater danger, in my view, is to approach these complex
environments (minds, media, works of literature) as if each one were a
set of unique, specific, wondrous but essentially one-off productions.
The understandable distrust of systems and grand theories, in cultural
studies, tends to fragment our approach to literature and culture. A
laudable desire for diversity and respect for personal and cultural
differences can produce a disparate and diffuse field. These
anti-systemic approaches can be quite limiting, politically, when the
only ideology is an ideology of personal 'identity' and multicultural
pluralism; the distrust of systems can be limiting aesthetically, when
the only recognizable literary quality is the development of an
individual 'voice'; and the resistance to systems can be troubling in
media studies, when the only term we have for approaching the field is
a respect for 'media specifity' (a term that N. Katherine Hayles
advances in Writing Machines and in her essay on the ELO site,
"Electronic Literature: What is it?").

Clearly, we need to make distinctions - that's what critical writers
do. We need to know, when we select a topic, that we are writing about
*this* thing, not another: a mind is not a distributed network of
computers; a work of literature is not an office memo; a chatterbot
drama is not a text-based fiction composed for reading on handheld
devices, and so forth. Conscious thought, too, depends on
distinctions: at any given moment, we are thinking about *this* thing,
and not something else. We bring before our attention *this* object,
and to do so we must ignore the vast majority of other objects and
impulses competing for our attention. But the wonder of consciousness
is not that we have all these different thoughts, and all these
different objects for attention: what is more relevant for literary
study is the continuity that the adult mind creates so that we
experience our thoughts as a stream, as a single, developing 'self,'
even (one might venture to say) as a narrative.

If we try to put things at this more general level, then it seems to
me we have a chance at bringing literary study into communication with
the sciences - better than by simply looking at each different work of
print or electronic literature as a unique product specific to its own
medium. Sure, we should note the differences between the kind of work
that can arise in print, and the quite different works (and
reading/viewing experience) that can arise in born digital writing.
But what we need, urgently in a time of fragmenting attention, is a
theory that can speak of the print and the electronic media not as
many, competing, systems, but as part of a single system.

The questions that I want to ask of literature and culture, for
example, are rather different from the questions that N. Katherine
Hayles asks - for example in a recent article published in MLA
Profession, where Hayles uses cognitive science not as a way of
approaching works, but as a way of looking at what goes on literally
in the minds of the current generation of school and university
students. For Hayles, the generations now growing up in a maturing,
multi-media environment, have minds that are objectively different
from the minds of earlier generations. The habits of attention that
arose in an educational environment dominated by print are different
from those that arise now, in an era of media saturation, and so are
the actual circuits and patterns in the minds of this new generation.
These observations by Hayles, and the science she cites in support of
her arguments, are compelling (as only someone steeped in the details
of scientific understanding and technical practice can be). However,
the direction of the investigation makes me uncomfortable. Hayles is
looking into the operation of the brain itself, and allowing studies
of how the mind works (in current and earlier generations) to help set
an agenda for education and literary study. That seems to me, to be an
appeal to an outside authority for what ought to be a development
internal to the established field of literature. I am afraid that such
an approach might subordinate literary study to the study of the
operation of the brain on the one hand, and the development of
technologies on the other hand. I would rather start with an
understanding of key questions relevant to literary study, and *then*
see how these literary topics converge, or contrast with, the science.
What science gives me, is not a way of speaking about changes 'out
there,' in the world and in our understanding of how the brain works.
Rather, when I read literature in the context of contemporary science,
I look for places where scientific descriptions converge with
long-standing literary concerns. Rather than try to make literature,
and students of literature, move in step with technological change, I
am looking for literary opportunities that might emerge, unexpectedly,
in the new environments. (And if those concerns are a very small part
of the new media production, that's fine with me: literature has
always been marginal to the majority of cultural and communicative
activity.)

One other thing that I've learned, from the cognitive scientists, is
that conscious awareness is indeed only a small slice of cognition.
There are things going on in our brain-bodies that we cannot be aware
of, and the same is true of our writing. When I published Cognitive
Fictions in 2002, I had a sense of its audience and how the book might
be received - what groups would welcome it, where it might be reviled,
and so forth. I got feedback from colleagues and, in time, reviews of
the book, some positive and some measured, reached me in print and
online. I had the chance to respond to some reviews, to see some of my
blind spots and get some ideas for later projects. And then the
reviews stopped, and I moved on to other things. I hadn't checked up
on the book for several years unitl, while composing this blog entry,
I decided to run a google search. Now, for the first time, I notice
that some pages of the book itself are available on the Internet, and
together with these pages one finds (nearly) all the reviews, books
whose keywords correspond with mine, and also a feature I've never
seen before: a list of 'popular passages' from my book that also
appear in other books. When I wrote or cited these 'passages,' I could
not have known how many authors were, or would be, working with the
same citations - or rather, I knew in some general vague way that
Varela and Luhmann and Edelman and others were being read and cited by
my professional cohort. But I had not known so precisely, in numerical
terms, how and where specific passages were being used. Now I can
follow these links, and see what others have done with the material I
worked with, six or seven years ago.

Here are the passages that the Google search engine found:

and if there was just America then it seemed the only way she could
continue, and manage to be at all relevant to it, was as an alien,
unfurrowed, assumed full circle into some paranoia - Page 14
Appears in 47 books from 1975-2006

an aesthetic of cognitive mapping, a pedagogical political culture
which seeks to endow the individual subject with some new heightened
sense of its place in the global system - Page 44
Appears in 68 books from 1990-2006

Maturana's well-known formulation, as a literal blindness: "every
world brought forth necessarily hides its origins. By existing, we
generate cognitive 'blind spots' that can be cleared only through
generating new blind spots in another domain. We do not see what we do
not see, and what we do not see does not exist - Page xxiii
Appears in 12 books from 1993-2004

Some of these 'popular passages' are sentences I wrote, others are
citations of authors that I was reading at the time. (The first
passage, for example, is from Thomas Pynchon's 1967 novel, The Crying
of Lot 49). But what this search brings home to me, is that writing
about literature, though it happens for the most part individually, is
happening at the same time among several individuals, each of whom is
responding to a set of passages whose selection turns these individual
passages into elements in a developing literary culture. That's how
literary canons and traditions are formed, and the process is not so
different from how networks form using computers, or how patterns form
in the distributed modules of the brain. Each citation, surely, means
something different in its specific context. Some citations are apt,
some are surely mistaken, some will be idiosyncratic, others
definitive. But what is crucial, is that all who do such literary
work, are working together and communicating within a single system.
That combination of isolated, autopoietic creation and system-wide
development seems to me the promise of writing in electronic
environments.

I look forward to hearing more, about the 'popular passages' that the
class has turned up so far. And please feel free to share my thoughts
with other authors you've been communication with, over the course of
the term.

All best,
Joe Tabbi

posted by: grigar at 04/03/08 07:42 | link | comments |

Today's Reading

"Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird"
http://edwardpicot.com/thirteenways/index.html

posted by: grigar at 04/02/08 10:59 | link | comments |