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).