New Media Studies

With the advent of digital technologies, new forms of electronic writing and art are challenging already-contested terms such as "literature" and "text" and further complicating boundaries between genres. New Media Studies in English includes an assortment of multidisciplinary classes that mix media production and theory. The topics of these classes range from New Media history and electronic magazine publishing to sound art and digital video. As learning increasingly intersects with digital technologies, we are finding new ways to explore the materiality of words, the sound of writing, and the image of thought.

Recent New Media Classes

Digital Rhetoric
How does language structure our opinions of the internet and its relationship to culture? The first part of the course pays special attention to issues of and interdisciplinary arguments about governance, identity, and community. The second part of the course focuses on recent digitally-inflected notions of narrative and interactivity. Graduate course.

Multimedia Writing
A look at the history of multimedia literature in the twentieth century, starting with literary experiments using sound and images in Europe in the 1920s, moving towards a look at recent multimedia fiction and poetry composed for and on the Web. Readings and critical writing, but students also try their hands at creating multimedia literature, using their own writing and learning to mix it with images and sound.

Radio Essays
A multimedia writing class in which students work closely with electronic media and audio production tools in composing texts intended for local broadcast on the web. Student work with voiceovers, record interviews, capture noverbal sounds and music, and integrate these various audio-based media with with their own spoken texts.

Video Culture
Modern image technologies have helped shape a society driven by representation and the desire to monitor, survey and visualize the world around it. Video Culture investigates the ways in which moving images have entered our consciousness and examines the role they are coming to play in realms which were once primarily textual. Readings include novels and selected theoretical texts that explore our culture’s obsession with and productive use of moving images.

Literary Ethnography
Explores selected modes of ethnographic representation by looking at classic works of literary and visual anthropology. Topics include the uses of oral history, the formation of subcultures, the rise of auto-ethnography, the photo essay, and the critique of class in documentary filmmaking. Required work includes a final ethnographic project of the student's own choosing.

New Media Poetics: Histories, Aesthetics, Institutions
Using the terms "histories," "aesthetics," and "institutions" to organize our reading, this class examines the convergence of words, images and sound in the work of prominent new media poets and explores some of the reading strategies contemporary critics have developed to receive this work.