New Media Poetics - Dee Morris - The University of Iowa

Dee Morris
Class: Monday & Wednesday 9:30-10:45 am
Office: EPB 460
Office Hours: Mon. 11:00 am-noon & Thurs. 2:30-3:45 pm
dee-morris@uiowa.edu

Code. Use the computer. It's not a television.

Louis Lacook

This course provides an overview of the emergent field of literature composed, disseminated, read, and archived on computers. Working with a variety of print and electronic materials, we’ll explore the contexts in which electronic literature is created, played, and interpreted, survey its major genres, and examine some of the theoretical issues raised by the shift to digital means of processing and storing information.

In addition to cybertexts of all sorts, readings for the course will include examinations of the transition from print to digital discourse networks. We’ll look at literature created by hacking, file-sharing, sampling, mixing, and plundering, read algorithmic sonnets, click through on-line graphic narratives, play poem games, and construct a lineage of innovative poetics through these and other emergent phenomena can be understood. Theorists and cultural critics on our reading list will include such writers as Espen Aarseth, Walter Benjamin, John Cayley, Donna Haraway, N. Katherine Hayles, Lev Manovich, Talan Memmott, and McKenzie Wark.

To help us grasp the language of new media, course work will include regular responses to readings, class presentations, digital experiments, position statements on new media issues, and an annotated bibliography, prospectus, and final essay. Students should be comfortable with computers, have access to a fast internet connection, and relish the mishaps and discoveries involved in traversing new vectors of information.