Notes and Quotes: Reading Moving Letters (Roberto Simanowski)

Notes and Quotes

Roberto Simanowski

This book investigates literary innovations with respect to new ways of aesthetic expression triggering questions such as:

            Is there a new quality of literariness in digital literature?

            What are the terminological and methodological means to examine it? (15)

Digital literature deals with “digital birth” that carries the features of the “parents” such as connectivity, interactivity, multimediality, non-linearity, performativity, and transformability (15).

Real digital literature cannot live without digital media (15-16).

A more general definition therefore characterizes the literary as the arranging of the material or the use of features in an uncommon fashion to undermine any automatic perception for the purpose of aesthetic perception (16).

How do we look at experimental writing in new media that, as Koskimaa points out, are trying to create new conventions rather than to break the established ones? (16)

The “literariness” of digital literature undermines the identity of digital literature as literature (16).

If the features of digital technology are essential to the literary properties of the text, they inevitably more or less undermine the dominant status of the text (17).

“Real” digital literature proceeds beyond the linguistic layer of digitality (17).

When to call something digital art vs. digital literature (17-18).

Technosceptics vs. technophiles (18).

The overall task is to be aware of the historic continuities as well as discontinuities that materialize in digital literature or art respectively (18).

Digital literature is partaking of the literary tradition as well as other art genres and disciplines (18-19).

Wardrip Fruin distinguishes between “computationally variable” and “computationally fixed” digital literature (19).

Study of digital literature should not emphasize medial specifics at the expense of the concrete object (19).

Rigorous close reading starts with looking at the trees rather than the forest (20).

When thinking about digital literature, we must read both data and process (20).

Wardrip-Fruin’s five-part model and Koskimaa’s two-perspective model on page 20.

Is knowledge of code the same as having a background knowledge of art history when looking at a painting, or is the code rather the material or technique (paint, drawing, watercolor)? (21)

Among the results of Schafer’s and Gendolla’s discussion is the fact that literature does not work if it intends to work like “real life.” They give the example of a detective novel… in real life, if you went back to talk to someone again they might tell you something different (22).

Ensslin focuses on the human body as an integral part of the reading process (22).

Language to describe digital literature. Classical rhetoric isn’t exactly able to describe fully what is going on, so Saemmer develops her own terminology: kinaesthetic rhymes, kinetic allegory, transfiguration, interfacial antagonism, and interfacial pleonasm (24).

Aesthetics of frustration (25).

Lack of narrativity and meaning is also an element of digital literature and arts (25).

Even though a work of digital literature and art may be the unpredictable result of the audience’s interaction, the specific mode of interaction is designed and controlled by the artist (25).