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SoSe 16: New Media Writing: Copying, Appropriating, and Materialization in the 21st Century

Mary Ann Snyder-Körber

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Does the digital make a difference? The poet Kenneth Goldsmith has answered this question with a resounding "yes." "With the rise of the Web, writing has met its photography," he argues. We have "a situation similar to that of painting upon the invention of photography, a technology so much better at doing what the art form was trying to do that, to survive, the field had to alter its course radically." Today, "faced with an unprecedented amount of available digital text, writing needs to redefine itself to adapt to the new environment of textual abundance" ("Why Conceptual Writing? Why Now?" 2011). This seminar is dedicated to testing, as well as questioning, the proposition that digital culture is reconfiguring how we create and experience writing. To these ends, we will revisit the model of hypertext to be found in projects like Adrienne Eisen's Six Sex Scenes (1996) in addition to print work such as Jennifer Egan's A Visit from the Goon Squad (2010), Marissa Pessl's Night Film (2013), and Barbara Browning's I'm Trying to Reach You (2011). We will further consider texts composed in the new media formats of twitter and the online collaborative communities of fan fiction. Such selections include Jennifer Egan's "Black Box" (2012), Teju Cole's "Hafiz" (2014), and David Mitchell's "The Right Sort" (2012) together with Slade House (2015). A further area of focus will be projects of "anti-virtuality" represented by Miranda July's Somebody (2014-2015) as well as It Chooses You (2011) and Goldsmith's own call to Printing Out the Internet (2013) and documentation of Capital: New York, Capital of the Twentieth Century (2015). The course concludes with a workshop conference on Friday, July 15th bringing together course participants and scholars from outside the JFKI for a day of discussion. Guest speakers will be Andrew S. Gross (Georg-August-Universität Göttingen) and Bettina Soller (Leibniz Universität Hannover). Recommendations: Due to the nature of the course, many materials are available online. However, please acquire access to the longer print projects of Egan, Pessl, Browning, and Mitchell. Also, as Goldsmith's assertions are a kick-off point and target for questioning in the seminar, browsing through some of his posts on issues of "uncreative" writing in the digital age is a good warm-up. See, for example, "If It Doesn't Exist on the Internet, It Doesn't Exist" (http://wings.buffalo.edu/epc/authors/goldsmith/if_it_doesnt_exist.html) or "The Digital Flood: You'd Better Start Swimming or You'll Sink Like a Stone" (http://www.poetryfoundation.org/harriet/2011/04/the-digital-flood-youd-better-start-swimmin-or-youll-sink-like-a-stone/). close