ACADEMIC PUBLICATIONS
“Lyric Recollection and the Preservation of Ephemeral and Social Elit”
As demonstrated widely by the discontinuation of Flash in early 2021, electronic literary works are exceptionally prone to obsolescence. While technical methods of preservation may work in some cases, the medium has often taken on ephemeral and social elements which cannot be recreated. In work such as Indra Sinha’s The Cybergypsies, we can see how lyric recollection can actually offer a measurably effective mode of preservation.
“From Wordsworth’s Poetic Problem to Puzzleless Interactive Fiction”
The development of the interactive fiction software Twine by Chris Klimas traces back to earlier experiments by Steve Meretzky in puzzleless interactive fiction, which were themselves constructed in parallel to William Wordsworth’s grappling with his own poetic problem starting in the late 18th century. Understanding why these considerations were made helps us better understand the potentials of the form.
“Embodying Failures of the Imagination: Defending the Posthuman in The Surrogates“
The surface narrative of Robert Venditti’s graphic novel The Surrogates offers a firm critique of virtually mediating experience, but as illustrated by Brett Weldele, the work visualizes its characters as re-embodied rather than dis-embodied, and urges us to maintain an everyday openness to others as digital technologies reframe our relations to ourselves, each other, and the world.
Independent Writing
“PreCursor Poets” refers to both the eternal way in which literature emerges in response to the writer’s precursors and the timely way in which a growing body of literature now comes after the computer cursor, a situation fundamentally different from navigating print.
Currently, most literature is pre-cursor, and I explore this tradition in order to better understand what will come next: the long future ahead of digital writing. I capture this haunting dynamic in the Dickensian line, “Ghosts of literature past, present, and yet to come.”
The Origin of All Poems
Literature develops as projects – both the project of the individual work and the larger, ongoing project of the author. Looking at a selection of self-published, hypertextual, and AI-generated writing, we see what an “author” is and why the latest generative language model, GPT-3, cannot function as one.
Starts & Stops in Reading Digital Literature
Digital literature periodically hits a potential readership of millions, but its typically readership is very niche – losing out often on even experts of contemporary literature. A voyage from the literary to the gimmick and back shows how we might achieve more continuous digital reading.
Rising to the Challenge of Literary Memory
Shortly before coining the term “hypertext,” Ted Nelson began working to make that vision a reality through “Project Xanadu,” referencing poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s “magic place of literary memory.” Looking back on this Romantic moment offers us again a source of aspirational potential.
Can literature exist on Instagram?
Taking on the most popular question I am asked, I weigh out the literary potential of Instagram via Rupi Kaur’s Instapoetry and Shelley Jackson’s weather-driven story, Snow. Looking back further to the visual textuality of William Blake and to a new initiative, possibilities are actually bright.
Galatea, pt. 3
Following the launch of the deep learning language model GPT-3, I read its output and mechanics against the Galatea myth, in which a statue comes to life. While we train these models, aesthetic appreciation requires that we be trained as well. As I note, “Once an ideal is alive, it may not give back our ideal response.”
(Hyperconnected) Solitary Reading
The growing popularity of audiobooks is not a new trend, but a return to a popular mode of literary transmission from the 18th century. Social reading was usurped by solitary reading, and innovations sparked by social distancing reveal renewed possibilities to connect through literature.
Conference Presentations
I have presented my research at over a dozen academic conferences, speaking to communities of scholars within professional organizations across the United States and international such as the Electronic Literature Organization (ELO), International Conference on Romanticism (ICR), North American Society for Studies in Romanticism (NASSR), Northeast Modern Language Association (NeMLA), and American Comparative Literature Assocation (ACLA).
Below are two examples of talks given.
“The Silent Visions of the Very Offline Novel”
Presented at the 2021 meeting of the American Comparative Literature Association (virtual):
This was presented in context of a panel on the incorporation of the “very online” in novels: a state of being regularly, deeply immersed in online life. I argue that one of the most forceful depictions of this comes, instead, through a trend of novels imagining the complete collapse of the global Internet. In making drama of this loss, these authors recognize the otherwise indescribable extent to which the very online world has become a pervasive part of everyday life.
“‘A Taped Voice’: afternoon and the Romantic Periphery of Hypertext”
Presented at the 2019 meeting of the Electronic Literature Organization (University College Cork, Ireland):
One of the first works of hypertext fiction, Michael Joyce’s afternoon, is deeply tied conceptually and formally to the Romantic tradition. Even Joyce’s concept of how pages would link together – through “words which yield” – is taken from John Keats’ advice to Percy Shelley to “‘load every rift’ of your subject with ore.” Despite the prominence of Keats, Shelley, Byron, Austen, etc. in his writing at the time, critics have continually missed this lineage for three decades.