On the Human Forum
ELO President Joe Tabbi’s post in the On the Human Forum got me thinking about the differences between practitioners and scholars. Not that his post discusssed those differences, but rather the follow up comments seemed to highlight at various junctions a somewhat sharp divide.
So I’m curious about what others, those lovely readers and writers of NetPoetics think of the following:
In the last few years, have the number of self-professed e-lit/digital poetry AUTHORS/ARTISTS increased or descreased (including venues for work and/or work published anywhere)?
In the last few years, have the number of self-professed e-lit/digital poetry THEORISTS/CRITICS increased or descreased (including books/articles/forums etc on the study of electronic literature)?
What about the differences between digital poets and digital fiction writers. I know these boundaries are murky. But are their divisions in the E-lit community along those grounds? And are there any trends in digital poetry or fiction?
Please do comment with an answer.
Jason
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4 Responses to “On the Human Forum”.
Thanks for posting these questions here, Jason.
In general, I think there are more critics and theorists than their have been. I think there have been new media/cyberculture/futurist kinds of critics working for a long time, but I think that, in terms, of actual criticism of electronic literature…. this is a field of scholarship that is emerging. As a scholar, I think it is healthy to see more and more people take note of this interesting aspect of human artistic endeavor.
As far as artists go, I don’t know if the actual numbers of artists matters all that much. What matters more than anything, I think, is that people continue to make work and that it continues to change, mature, develop.
To an artist it might sound shocking to say that a growth in the number of critics matters more than the growth in the number of artists… but to put my comments in perspective, I think that criticism is the easier of the two acts. Good criticism only has to be informed and attentive. Good art, on the other hand, happens beyond this. For example, there is one James Joyce…. but there are thousands of Joyce scholars. Or, better yet, there is one Ulysses, and hundreds of thousands of readers.
On another note, I also believe that critics and artists almost always work at cross purposes. Critics tend to screw things down, artists tend to set things free. I would hate to frame these tendencies as hostile to one another. Rather, I think artist should work and try not to worry about what critics think or say. When I write criticism, I am not writing for artists… I am usually writing for my students or for other scholars, showing them interesting ways of thinking about a particular piece of art. But this is always supposed to be in the context of a larger discussion about various ways of interpreting a really excellent piece of art. Hence, more critics are better than fewer… an abundance of critics destroys the consensus, keeps the interpretation dynamic, and ultimately saves the art from being a settled thing. And, from a pragmatic level, an audience that includes more than artists is a bigger audience.
I thought about your questions for a bit Jason.
so much so that I made 5 lines of inquiry.
http://www.clevercelt.com/5lines.html
thats me with the Dickie bow
& then wrote far too much waffle about it all here.
http://www.michaeljmaguire.com/index.php?q=node/46
wonderful 3 always enjoys me in an anectode:)
Jason,
On the question of artists and scholars, I have recently found very useful Brian Lennon’s review of The Program Era by Mark McGurl:
http://www.electronicbookreview.com/thread/fictionspresent/autoimmune
The issue you pose seems to me (as always) more about institutional context than the relative number of people who identify themselves as artists, scholars, or theorists. Most practicing new media literary artists nowadays (in the U.S. anyway) are supported by universities. So are most scholars obviously, but the discourse that literary scholars have developed over the past several decades has been taken up by only a few practitioners in only a very few CW programs.
This, in my opinion, is a great shame. And it could be a source of the ‘divide’ you note in your post. I agree with McGurl, that the segregation of artists from current discourse has the effect of /containing/ creative production, as if imaginative writing happens in a world apart.
Of course the separation’s entirely artificial, as is shown by the kind of conceptual writing produced by many contributors to netpoetic.com. I find certain strains of critical/creative writing in new media unlike anything I’ve seen in print. Though I also notice that the writers most comfortable, exploring new discursive formations in the context of new media, are not from the U.S. or, when they are from the U.S., they are not a part of “the program.”
What I try to notice, in a new field like e-lit, is not the count (numbers of artists versus numbers of scholars in any given forum), but the emergence of genres distinct from print practice, as they are produced by artists and identified/discussed by critical writers.
The fact that there are a lot of writers enrolled in a lot of CW programs throughout the U.S., does not mean that these writers are reading widely or deeply in the key works and conceptual innovations of their time. For the most part, the CW discipline is very presentist, very craft-oriented, and CW students are encouraged to read only what their friends are writing and the published work of a few very near contemporaries.
Scholarship by contrast, needs to focus on developing the infrastructure that will give artists and students a place to present their work, for sustained reading/viewing by a growing audience. The numbers are important – but more important in my view is to have a disciplinary and institutional framework for supporting e-lit scholarship by sustaining forums (like this one) for the recognition and discussion of works.
Getting back to onthehuman.org: I did notice that my essay attracted responses from around half a dozen e-lit artists – out of 35 responses altogether. That’s not bad, for a forum generally attended by professors. In the two or three other essays that I read earlier this year, I did not notice any posts delivered from a practitioner’s standpoint, but then it would be hard to tell because the editors at onthehuman.org don’t tag contributors by terms such as ‘author,’ ‘scholar,’ or ‘artist.’ Also they don’t make a big deal about university affiliation.
And that’s a good model, I think, for e-lit practice generally.
JPT
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