Scott Rettberg’s “Communitizing Electronic Literature”
scott and his cold, but happy offspring
But where Scott questions – rightly – the future popularity of e-literature – I can’t help thinking about the two classes I taught on digital poetry last year. These courses were brand-new and full from the first to the last day of class. I now have a waiting list for the digital poetry class I’m teaching in the fall. This is not testament to my teaching but rather to what these students tell me over and over again: thank god I’m finally learning something that’s relevant! Surprising considering how most conventional scholars view these same digital poems as esoteric and “weird.” The future of e-literature lies with these students who will force academic conservatives to make room for it. I hope.
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3 Responses to “Scott Rettberg’s “Communitizing Electronic Literature””.
Thanks for the link, Lori. I would be happy to engage in a discussion of any of the issues I bring up in that essay here.
Not to backpedal, but to clarify — I’m not really saying that I think electronic literature will be *un*popular as much as I think that it will continue to be marginal in comparison to more mass market forms of literature for the foreseeable future, and actually I think that’s largely a good thing. I think it will be unpopular in the sense that, for instance, poetry is unpopular. That is, largely appreciated by a community of people who pay a lot of attention to it, who read it and create it and care intensely about it. This is a small community in comparison to, for instance, the community of people who read Twilight novels, or who play World of Warcraft. That doesn’t mean that I don’t expect that the audience will grow a good deal. I think there is some degree to which the first or second generation of “digital natives” can understand digital poetry as a form uniquely suited to their own cultural practices, and that will progressively become more the case. Also, we are teaching this stuff, and it is working its way in curricula in a number of different settings at universities all over the world. I’ve recently had the experience of hearing from former students from the first courses I taught in electronic literature, who are now teaching courses of their own, or who are completing master’s degrees focused on the topic. It does my heart good to learn that e-lit is part of the curriculum of at least one high school in New Jersey.
Excellent article! Excellent points!
I think that the visibility problem within the academy is not so much based on ignorance of, or aggression toward digital poet(ry/ics) as it is an issue of institutional economics and what is perceived as a ‘vocational asset’ within… a misreading of the role of higher education perhaps, and from a humanities, cultural studies, liberal arts point of view certainly… This is something of a continuation of the the general administrative misconception within the academy that the humanities are (commercially/vocationally)’irrelevant’ to contemporary culture digital or otherwise.
Part of the problem, however, rests with electronic writers and scholars working within institutions. As I state in my essay “Beyond Taxonomy: Digital Poetics and the Problem of Reading” (New Media Poetics: Contexts, Technotexts, and Theories [MIT Press])
>so much of literary digital practice happens outside of (or out of reach of) the academy, outside of traditional literary values, without regard for formal genealogy or history that the practice, in general, could be viewed as a war machine resistant to institutional[izing] processes. What it was is not always what it is. The academic critic may register the nomadism, the taxonomadism that is considered a reality if not a positive quality in terms of creative practice, as a negative attribute in terms of generating an appropriate critique. This is a doubling of negativity. For the sake of authenticity in regard to a critique or theory of digital practice, taxonomadism as a condition of the field, of digital culture in general should be embraced, or at least recognized on the side of criticism, just as it is on the creative side of things.<
Don’t get me wrong, there is quite a bit of quality scholarship going on within and without the academy. That being said — the academy, scholarship enforces, forces certain operations upon its operatives. The close reading, the historical comparison, what have you… In effect, the continuation of these operations does not radicalize from within but maintains a sort of humanistic tradition and the academy can brush it off as ‘same old’.
The radicalization, as Lori pointed out, is happening at the level of the student. I have had similar experience to Lori’s. In a class I have taught the past two years called “Programming for Digital Art” it has not been uncommon to have students from the software engineering program, or from the more vocationally oriented media technologies program enrolled in the course. They are not necessarily taking the course because they are interested in becoming digital artists or writers, but because the word has gotten out that the assignments and projects in the course are ‘unusual’ from their point of view. They see the course as a challenge. Now, this would certainly go against the ‘vocational asset’ notion in regards to humanities-based technology courses. In this regard, though the institution may perceive its role as primarily get people jobs when they graduate (how many times have you heard – what sort of employment are your graduates trained for?) – and this is something that goes on EVEYWHERE – they are myopic about what sorts of course fall within the ‘training’ paradigm.
One more point, from the professional web development perspective. During my years working in this field some of the worst people we hired (and they usually didn’t last long) came out of vocationally oriented programs. The more creative, more productive employees tended to come out of art schools, humanities, etc.
Thanks Talan and Scott for your great comments – both are even more relevant to me as I just left a meeting where “we” were trying to decide how to reshape one of the gateway courses to the major. Over and over again, concern was expressed that students don’t know scansion or how to close-read – this may indeed be true but in the meantime, both the 20th and 21st centuries are passing by the traditional english department!
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