Version 7.0ish. Digital Humanities. Running. Pedagogy. Linux.

Here is my presentation from the annual NJCEA conference at Seton Hall. The Gaping Garments of Electronic Literature looks at how electronic literature has moved off the page and into the world around us. There is discussion of the works of Espen Aarseth, Jill Walker-Rettberg, Shelley Jackson, Roland Barthes, and more.

I posted the pdf as it stood when I read it at the conference. There may be citations missing, paragraphs crossed out, and parts where I go make lists to discuss in more detail in person. I wanted to preserve what I actually read that day.

As the summer goes on, I will post my notes from the different panels I attended at the conference.

Here is the room I spoke in at the conference.

Another shot of the room.

Jacket hangers on the wall…brilliant!

1. Laurie Halse Anderson-Speak
2. Laurie Halse Anderson-Wintergirls
3. Piers Anthony-Bearing An Hourglass
4. Paul Auster-Invisible
5. Donald Barthelme-Sixty Stories
6. Sissela Bok-Lying: Moral Choices in Public and Private Life
7. Roberto Bolano-2666
8. Alison Booth-Greatness Engendered: George Eliot & Virginia Woolf
9. Terry Brooks-The Druid of Shannara
10. Terry Brooks-The Elf Queen of Shannara
11. Terry Brooks-The Scions of Shannara
12. Terry Brooks-The Talismans of Shannara
13. Italo Calvino-Cosmicomics
14. Lewis Carroll-Alice In Wonderland
15. Tracy Chevalier-Girl With A Pearl Earring
16. Robert Coover-A Night At The Movies
17. Robert Coover-The Universal Baseball Association
18. Richard Dawkins-The Ancestor’s Tale
19. Richard Dawkins: The Greatest Show on Earth: The Evidence For Evolution
20. Richard Dawkins-The River Out of Eden: A Darwinian View of Life
21. Cory Doctorow-For The Win
22. Michel Foucault-The History of Madness
23. Sigmund Freud-The Penguin Freud Reader
24. Charlotte Perkins Gilman-Herland
25. Robert Graves-Homer’s Daughter
26. Henrik Ibsen-The Major Plays Volume One
27. Shelley Jackson-Half Life
28. Friedrich Nietzsche-The Birth of Tragedy & The Case of Wagner
29. John Perkins-Hoodwinked: An Economic Hitman Reveals Why The World Financial Markets Imploded
30. Mark Twain-Who Is Mark Twain?
31. Leonid Tsypkin-Summer In Baden Baden
32. Kurt Vonnegut Jr.-Cat’s Cradle
33. Kurt Vonnegut Jr.-God Bless You Dr. Kevorkian
34. Kurt Vonnegut Jr.-Hocus Pocus
35. Kurt Vonnegut Jr.-Player Piano
36. Kurt Vonnegut Jr.-Slaughterhouse Five
37. David Foster Wallace-Brief Interviews With Hideous Men
38. David Foster Wallace-Infinite Jest
39. Tim Weiner-Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA
40. Virginia Woolf-Mrs. Dalloway’s Party

For the second spring in a row, I have been published in The Quarterly Conversation. This time I wrote about Shelley Jackson’s career in and out of print and electronic literature. There are a lot of other interesting essays on Borges, Bolano, and Swift among others alongside of my piece in the new issue.

Prof Hacker’s end of semester checklist post suggested writing some sort of “End of the Semester Roundup” post so I thought I would write one up. This semester was one of great advancements for me. I taught my first college level courses and had a great time doing so. Originally, my schedule involved teaching two sections of Composition I but during the first week of the semester I ended up adding a section of Composition II as well.

Comp I was a lot of work, but well worth it. I saw a lot of advancement in my student’s work as the semester went on. I also saw a lot if disappointing efforts from others. Teaching writing and grammar also allowed me to sharpen my own skills and talk about some of the adventures I have had over the years as a student and academic. Check out the class weblog for more information.

Composition II was a great joy to teach. I got to teach a lot of my favourite canonical authors like Chopin, Gilman, and Ibsen.An unconscious theme of discussing gender and women’s liberation became a focus of our close readings as the semester advanced through short stories to plays (A Doll House, Othello) and then to poets like Plath and Dickinson. Immediately, a handful of students stood apart from the rest of the class but I also saw many others slowly begin to contribute more and more as they became more comfortable with their own close reading skills. My focus in class was on what my students wanted to discuss. Of course, I would bring lecture notes with ideas I wanted to highlight. However, after our daily, randomly selected, journal readers I would ask the class where they wanted to begin, what they wanted to discuss, and that is where we would start. I could talk for hours about most of the texts we read, but I am more concerned with what my students wish to discuss.

One student in particular started the semester off very slowly only to eventually be the first to raise their hand almost every class. Another only contributed on Fridays, somehow, but always blew our minds with their ideas. Almost every student in class had a day where they stood out and shone brighter than anyone else.

The week of my classroom observation by Dr. Alexander coincided with my favorite week of the semester: the week we discussed (post)modern authors like Borges, Coover, and Auster. I was very impressed with my students and their ability to tackle these difficult texts. I can’t wait to teach 102 again and hope I get a chance to pick up a section in the spring. Check out our course weblog.

This semester I ran our course weblogs on WordPress and am thrilled with the results. I have run WP on a number of websites, including this one, for the past four years and couldn’t be happier with the results. In the spring I think I am going to try the dreaded Blackboard for my classes. As an offsite alternative, I believe I am going to wade my toes into the world of Drupal as well. I am going to spend some time over break considering my options.

I also guest lectured for two classes in Dr. McCadden’s upper level class ENG203 The Origins of Literature. I presented two lectures: “Telemachus & The Search For the Ideal Son in Classical Greek Literature” and “The Odyssey & Nonlinear Reading.”

Another project I am going to finish over break is the long-awaited draft of my article on Shelley Jackson for The Quarterly Conversation. I was supposed to have this completed for the winter issue, but the hectic nature of the fall semester got in the way. Scott Esposito was gracious enough to give me an extension. I’m hoping to have something to him early in the new year.

I have a handful of journal article proposals that I need to send over break as well. A few of them are spinoff projects from my MA thesis and others are ideas that I have brewed for a period of time. Hopefully some of them will be publishable.

in the spring, currently, I am teaching two sections of Comp I. One is MWF, the other TT. This isn’t the most ideal schedule, but hopefully I will pick another Comp I, a Comp II, or another class. I am very happy to have a few weeks off to get some of my work done and prep for the spring. However, I am also excited to get back to Burlington and begin teaching again.

(inspiration)

During the fall of 2004, the following are guilty as charged of offering inspiration for what you are reading.

• Scott Rettberg’s hypertext fiction The Meddlesome Passenger.
• Jorge Luis Borges’ collection Labyrinths, especially The Library Of Babel, The Immortal, and The Circular Ruins.
• The literary weblog Conversational Reading, which, beyond generally getting me excited about literature, introduced me to the work of Gilbert Sorrentino, referenced in the penultimate lexia.
• Jill/txt was a daily, still, source of inspiration.  A conversation with Jill in real life inspired a lexia.
• Grand Text Auto in general.
• Shelley Jackson’s My Body a Wunderkammer, which made me cry more than once and pushed me to be brave enough to write about sexuality issues.
• Of course, The Unknown Collective’s The Unknown, which greatly influenced how I both read and write hypertext, and my aesthetic vision for hypertext fiction.
• Derik Badman’s, who I met on a Buffy The Vampire Slayer listserv, writing about constraints at the time I was writing War Prayers inspired me to try to write three hundred word, exact, entries.
• Although offline, Rettberg and Nick Montfort’s sticker novel Implementation was paradoxically what made me create a blog to document War Prayers.  I had to get my words onto a screen somewhere.  I even created a few summary stickers, one of which still is on a wall at The Richard Stockton College Of New Jersey underneath an Implementation sticker.

I have put together Toni & I’s notes from our collaborative presentation entitled What Is A Text? A Political History Of Texts From Gutenberg To Electronic Literature And Beyond into a single PDF for viewing. I am very proud of our work during the spring semester. We worked together and pooled our interests, both unique and similiar, to examine the political history of how “texts” are defined.

All of this will be going back into my MA thesis, which due to some financial constraints, has not seen much new research but a few new branches in my thinking have developed. More on that soon. I can happily announce as well that I started the first version of a rough draft a few days ago. Once I have something remotely resembling a semi-completed draft I will leave a continually updated link on the sidebar for those who would like to follow along.

I have created an annotated version of my presentation at Hypothesis?, the first ever Monmouth University English program symposium (which I organized with Toni Magyar). My presentation was titled Remixing The Canon: Electronic Literature & Distributed Narratives. After defining and offering examples of various forms of New Media and electronic literature I discussed the most recent evolutions in Barthes’ writerly text, including what Jill Walker-Rettberg has termed distributed narratives. I call for a look at “remixing” the canon to be more inclusive of electronic literature due to their often literary tone. The primaries examples I use comes from authors like Caitlin Fisher, Scott Rettberg, Nick Montfort, and Shelley Jackson. (PDF)