Notes and Quotes: Reading Moving Letters (John Zuern)

Notes and Quotes

John Zuern

Self-definition and disciplinary legitimation are particularly urgent because of the poor shelter academic institutions have for this field and humanities in general (59).

Top of page 60 is Zuern’s objective.

The strictures of such an approach would demand that we ask ourselves whether computation as such is essential to the specifically li8terary properties of the text or essential only to the existence of the text as a particular kind of physical artifact (60).

Zuern wants to suggest that the history of comparative literature’s emergence contains an important caveat for the developing field of digital literary studies (60).

In reading these texts, a preoccupation with media specificity threatens to override our attention to aspects of digital texts that are analogous to aspects of print documents (61).

The author will attempt to describe how debates in comparative literary studies might contribute to things that have to do with digital literature (61).

He shows how an orientation to the study of digital literature that takes into account to the digital literature’s departure from the print tradition can open our eyes to vital dimensions of the digital literary artwork (62).

ELO defines electronic literature as work with an important literary aspect that takes advantage of the capabilities and context provided by the stand-alone or networked computer (62).

“When literature leaps from one medium to another…it does not leave behind the accumulated knowledge embedded in genres, poetic conventions, narrative structures, figurative tropes, and so forth” (63).

Spivak makes an appeal for literature by talking about the rhetorical effects literature has on the reader (63).

Spivak’s suggestion that the text’s impact on the imagination ought to be the focal point of comparative studies provides a valuable corrective to the preoccupations with “media specificity” that have taken a firm hold on digital literary scholarship (64).

How often do we find in any given computer-based literary artifact only what we’ve learned to look for? (65)

We need not choose only one among the alternative antecedents of “One.” In fact, holding them all in suspension intensifies the poem’s philosophical density (68).

The words in Lemcke’s poem are meant to be read as well as looked at (69).

Competing for attention… (69) This seems to be a very common trend in digital literature.

Autumn and The Uninvited employ their particular material configuration to call our attention to the potential moral agency of our own hands (71).

The Uninvited reminds us of something that critics of digital literature too often appear to be in danger of forgetting: that literary texts have on the whole tended to concern themselves with topics other than their own material conditions of possibility (73).

Zuern believes that digital literary studies should maintain a focus on the literariness of digital texts, as should comparative literature become more attentive to the material conditions of textuality and their impact on figuration (74).

Digital modernists, instead of referring to the flatness of print in terms of its dimensions, sometimes use this term to degrade work that happens to have been printed. This underestimates figuration, which the author concludes by explaining how dangerous that act is (75).