Notes and Quotes: Chapter 3

Notes and Quotes

Pressman: Chapter 3

The song in Dakota is Blakey’s “Tobi Ilu” and Dakota was published in 2002 (78).

…unlike anything you’ve seen before and yet also very familiar (78). What does she mean by all these assumptions?

Dakota promotes both speed reading and close reading…it demands that we adapt to incorporate both modalities (79).

Dakota demands attention to the medial aspects of the literary and even invites a comparative textual media approach to literary analysis (80).

Intends to show how traditional modes of critical analysis change along with their objects of study and, moreover, how literature itself promotes change (80).

YHCHI says little about their art, so what they do say is very significant (81).

Dakota is exemplary of digital modernism because it adapts modernism in order to challenge the status quo of electronic literature (81).

Young-hae Chang said his Web art tries to express the essence of the Internet (information) by stripping away everything but the text (81-82).

YHCHI feels that electronic literature is not taken very seriously. They attempt to rectify this by aligning their digital literature with a work in a canon that is taken seriously. They also dislike interactivity, apparently a lot (82).

YHCHI adapt the first three cantos because of their focus on media and materiality (83).

She argues that using a zero for an ‘o’ to show how closely related YHCHI’s work is to binary code, which shows their awareness of the difference between their own work and modernism (83).

While Odysseus continues into the depths of the Underworld, Dakota’s characters enter an American Underworld haunted by ghosts (84).

The jazz music in Dakota enhances the connection to modernism (85).

Neither beginnings (of Dakota and Pound’s cantos) prepare the reader for the experimentation that comes next (85).

Dakota depicts wastedness not as something that has been completely destroyed but rather as the ashes from which new literature arises (87).

Is Dakota parody or pastiche? (87).

Challenges boundaries between modernism and postmodernism, literature and film, and prose and poetry (87).

YHCHI are aligned with pound, who viewed genre distinctions as “rubber-bag categories” that academics use to “limit their reference and interest” (88).

The words and phrases flashing on top of each other instead of next to each other produces multiple and layered meanings to juxtaposition (88).

YHCI uses Flash to pursue minimalistic simplicity, even though Flash is a medium that enables extensive, multimedia animations (89).

They use this vector-based software against its will to highlight the role of the nonexistent fram in their textual montages (90).

In the age of computers, “here” means on the reader’s networked computer…wherever the reading machine is, that is where the work is happening and where Blakey’s recording is playing (92).

YHCI adapt the Homeric quest for a reader trained as a web surfer rather than a warrior, whose contemporary consciousness is shaped by global, transnational economics and digital technologies (92).

As the reader struggles to absorb the text being hurled at her, she is implicated in the act of consuming the work (93). Just like Pressman did to us on page 78. I do not enjoy being implicated when I’m reading something.

Should Dakota be aligned with lean, mean modernism or mass culture’s fast food? (94). She argues it is both (a.k.a. digital modernism) but in a very roundabout way.

Dakota’s relations to the Beat Generation and gender (94-95).

The poetic effect of replacing words onscreen registers a sense of layered meanings from modernism through the Beats and beyond which serves to associate Dakota with multiple possibilities and perspectives for interpretation (95).

YHCHI articulate a connection with literary modernism even though they have other connections in order to invigorate the current state of electronic literature (96).

Pound’s famous line, “I cannot make it cohere,” is a mantra that YHCHI take up (97).

John Guillory explains that the canonization of modernism by the New Critics depended on the difficulty of these texts, so that “difficulty itself was positively valued in New Critical practice, that it was a form of cultural capital” (97).

Dakota is evading clear equations (99). Much like McLuhan’s, “explore, not explain.”

YHCHI purposefully suspend Dakota’s objecthood through their final poetic decision to enable the loop and replay (199).

Notes and Quotes: Intro, Chapter 1, Chapter 2

Notes and Quotes

Pressman: Intro, Chapter 1, Chapter 2

Things that made me go "AHA!"
Things I did not already know
Things I want to remember
Things.

I understand modernism to be a strategy of innovation that employs the media of its time to reform and refashion older literary practices in ways that produce new art (3-4).

Making it new is not just about reinventing the past. It is also about using new media to do so (4).

Cinematic ways of seeing the world have become the basic means by which computer users interact with all cultural data (5).

Some media critics claim that modernism was the first electronic age (5).

Digital modernism is characterized by an aesthetic of restraint (7).

These writers pursue minimalism as a conscious act of rebellion (7).

Modernist literature is intentionally antipopular (7).

The web is actually the place here serious literature stages its rebellion and renaissance (9).

I seek to remind us of the transformative effects literature can have when we dedicate our attention to it and to close reading it (10).

Close reading contrasts to the speeding up of modern life due to new technology (11).

Deep reading implies a sustained focus on the words themselves and how they operate to produce a particular effect (13).

New Criticism: slow, close reading of the work itself rather than just the research around it (13).

I make the case for the continued importance of literature and literary criticism in an increasingly digital, visual, and networked culture (17).

Close reading demands renovation (18).

I contend that literary scholars need to pay more attention to the media aspects of literature and that media critics need to pay more attention to the literariness of electronic literature (19).

…close reading as a pedagogical means of training students to read not only specific literary texts but also to learn to evaluate and judge culture more broadly (21).

Wouldn’t it be ironic if the post-postmodern period heralds the return of aesthetic theory through digital literature? (23).

McLuhan doesn’t explain, he explores (39).

Precisely because ads seek to distract, one must pay particular attention to how they operate (42).

MucLuhan rejected a distinction between creative and critical writing (46). (Bold because it relates to my thesis and I'd like to research this statement further.)

Hot media: low participation. Cool media: high participation (51).

Machine poetics expose the reading machine to be a part of the literary process and thus subject to literary analysis (57).

Media archaeology’s main goals: to study what is underlying and guiding the development of media culture and to promote the excavation of ways in which these traditions and formulations have been imprinted on specific media machines and systems in different historical contexts (50-60). <-- I believe I screwed up this page number.

Subliminal advertising and concrete poetry were introduced as concepts at nearly the same time (63).

Concrete poetry: a work that loses a part of its meaning if it is rearranged or printed without the attention to the typeface and form which were a part of the poet’s original work (65).

The blank space of the page is never empty (65).

Literature has not kept up with new technologies like art and music have, according to Brown (70).

Reading has a medial history that is part of literature and literary history (72).

Reading machines not only enable access to literature but also inspire its creation and critique (77).