40 | 2010

Browsing 40 | 2010 by Subject "Digital Poetry"

Now showing 1 - 3 of 3
  • Article
    Aspects of Arabic Online Literature in the Gulf
    Lenze, Nele (2010) , S. 1-11
    Literature and poetry in Arab countries developed upon a rich tradition of oral story-telling and are still vital parts of cultural life all over the Gulf. In the age of new media, distribution of literary production has changed and now offers a wide spectrum for story transmission. As a consequence, online literature has emerged as a popular means of communication; short stories posted on blogs, in forums, and online publishing houses generate much commentary. This exchange of thoughts appears to be important for many web-users in the Gulf and triggers stories to “travel” from one virtual location to the other and affects the notions of author and censorship. Generally, it seems that Arabic online literature differs from online literature in other regions of the world. Until now, there exists only limited academic research on this phenomenon. Based on the analysis of a large text corpus of original Arabic online literature and interviews that I have conducted with authors in early 2010, this paper serves as a short overview of the concepts of online literature in the Gulf and discusses its various characteristics.
  • Article
    Editorial: Reading Digital Cultural Objects
    Tomaszek, Patricia (2010) , S. 1-4
  • Article
    Inside Out of the Box: Default Settings and Electronic Poetics
    Heckman, Davin (2010) , S. 1-17
    Developing meaningful approaches to criticism appropriate to new modes of cultural production is among the most pressing problems facing the humanities scholars today. This essay discusses digital poetry as a method of revealing defaults in a technical age. It begins with a general definition of the default, followed by a close reading of Jason Nelson’s This Is How You Will Die (2006) and David Jhave Johnston’s Interstitial (2006) as works that challenge default settings: practically, by opening up the space for criticism within digital practice, and philosophically, by engaging with questions of mortality. Through these poetic works, I trace a path through larger social and philosophical questions about technology via Heidegger and the contemporary discourses of technoscience and posthumanism. I conclude with a discussion of the “black box” as a metaphor for an unresolved knowledge of the human between the technical and the poetic.