Creative Writing In The Digital Age

Creative Writing in the Digital Age explores the vast array of opportunities that technology provides the Creative Writing teacher, ranging from effective online workshop models to methods that blur the boundaries of genre. From social media tools such as Twitter and Facebook to more advanced software like Inform 7, the book investigates the benefits and potential challenges these technologies present instructors in the classroom. Written with the everyday instructor in mind, the book includes practical classroom lessons that can be easily adapted to creative writing courses regardless of the instructor's technical expertise.

Can techniques traditionally thought to be outside the scope of literature, including word processing, databasing, identity ciphering, and intensive programming, inspire the reinvention of writing? The Internet and the digital environment present writers with new challenges and opportunities to reconceive creativity, authorship, and their relationship to language. Confronted with an unprecedented amount of texts and language, writers have the opportunity to move beyond the creation of new texts and manage, parse, appropriate, and reconstruct those that already exist. In addition to explaining his concept of uncreative writing, which is also the name of his popular course at the University of Pennsylvania, Goldsmith reads the work of writers who have taken up this challenge. Examining a wide range of texts and techniques, including the use of Google searches to create poetry, the appropriation of courtroom testimony, and the possibility of robo-poetics, Goldsmith joins this recent work to practices that date back to the early twentieth century. Writers and artists such as Walter Benjamin, Gertrude Stein, James Joyce, and Andy Warhol embodied an ethos in which the construction or conception of a text was just as important as the resultant text itself. By extending this tradition into the digital realm, uncreative writing offers new ways of thinking about identity and the making of meaning.

In an era of blurred generic boundaries, multimedia storytelling, and open-source culture, creative writing scholars stand poised to consider the role that technology-and the creative writer's playful engagement with technology-has occupied in the evolution of its theory and practice. Composition, Creative Writing Studies and the Digital Humanities is the first book to bring these three fields together to open up new opportunities and directions for creative writing studies. Placing the rise of Creative Writing Studies alongside the rise of the digital humanities in Composition/Rhetoric, Adam Koehler shows that the use of new media and its attendant re-evaluation of fundamental assumptions in the field stands to guide Creative Writing Studies into a new era. Covering current developments in composition and the digital humanities, this book re-examines established assumptions about process, genre, authority/authorship and pedagogical practice in the creative writing classroom.

"Writing History in the Digital Age began as a one-month experiment in October 2010, featuring chapter-length essays by a wide array of scholars with the goal of rethinking traditional practices of researching, writing, and publishing, and the broader implications of digital technology for the historical profession. The essays and discussion topics were posted on a WordPress platform with a special plug-in that allowed readers to add paragraph-level comments in the margins, transforming the work into socially networked texts. This first installment drew an enthusiastic audience, over 50 comments on the texts, and over 1,000 unique visitors to the site from across the globe, with many who stayed on the site for a significant period of time to read the work. To facilitate this new volume, Jack Dougherty and Kristen Nawrotzki designed a born-digital, open-access platform to capture reader comments on drafts and shape the book as it developed. Following a period of open peer review and discussion, the finished product now presents 20 essays from a wide array of notable scholars, each examining (and then breaking apart and reexamining) how digital and emergent technologies have changed the ways that historians think, teach, author, and publish"--

"At long last, a discussion of plagiarism that doesn't stop at 'Don't do it or else,' but does full justice to the intellectual interest of the topic!" ---Gerald Graff, author of Clueless in Academe and 2008 President, Modern Language Association This collection is a timely intervention in national debates about what constitutes original or plagiarized writing in the digital age. Somewhat ironically, the Internet makes it both easier to copy and easier to detect copying. The essays in this volume explore the complex issues of originality, imitation, and plagiarism, particularly as they concern students, scholars, professional writers, and readers, while also addressing a range of related issues, including copyright conventions and the ownership of original work, the appropriate dissemination of innovative ideas, and the authority and role of the writer/author. Throughout these essays, the contributors grapple with their desire to encourage and maintain free access to copyrighted material for noncommercial purposes while also respecting the reasonable desires of authors to maintain control over their own work. Both novice and experienced teachers of writing will learn from the contributors' practical suggestions about how to fashion unique assignments, teach about proper attribution, and increase students' involvement in their own writing. This is an anthology for anyone interested in how scholars and students can navigate the sea of intellectual information that characterizes the digital/information age. "Eisner and Vicinus have put together an impressive cast of contributors who cut through the war on plagiarism to examine key specificities that often get blurred by the rhetoric of slogans. It will be required reading not only for those concerned with plagiarism, but for the many more who think about what it means to be an author, a student, a scientist, or anyone who negotiates and renegotiates the meaning of originality and imitation in collaborative and information-intensive settings." ---Mario Biagioli, Professor of the History of Science, Harvard University, and coeditor of Scientific Authorship: Credit and Intellectual Property in Science "This is an important collection that addresses issues of great significance to teachers, to students, and to scholars across several disciplines. . . . These essays tackle their topics head-on in ways that are both accessible and provocative." ---Andrea Lunsford, Louise Hewlett Nixon Professor of English, Claude and Louise Rosenberg Jr. Fellow, and Director of the Program in Writing and Rhetoric at Stanford University and coauthor of Singular Texts/Plural Authors: Perspectives on Collaborative Writing digitalculturebooks is an imprint of the University of Michigan Press and the Scholarly Publishing Office of the University of Michigan Library dedicated to publishing innovative and accessible work exploring new media and their impact on society, culture, and scholarly communication. Visit the website at www.digitalculture.org.

"This Book is intended for all those who value literary studies and who sense the coming change in how books are read, discussed, and written about in the digital age. It is a collaborative project, produced by students of an advanced writing course at Brigham Young University taught by Gideon Burton in May and June of 2011. It is an experiment in Book creation and in twenty-first century literary criticism. Our adventure into digital literary study has been sudden and frenetic, and the ragged edges are likely to show. But we have pressed on, pushing bravely back against second thoughts, intent to launch our little volume into the marketplace of ideas where it may reach real people who are wrestling with the powerful disruptions to reading and writing now in play. A good book, can wake us like a blow to the head. So can a vigorous literary experiment. We feel a bit battered, but far more awake to the present moment and to the ongoing vitality of " Excerpt From: Gideon Omer Burton. "Writing About Literature in the Digital Age."

This Pivot investigates the impact of the digital on literary culture through the analysis of selected marketing narratives, social media stories, and reading communities. Drawing on the work of contemporary writers, from Bernardine Evaristo to Patricia Lockwood, each chapter addresses a specific tension arising from the overarching question: How has writing culture changed in this digital age? By examining shifting modes of literary production, this book considers how discourses of writing and publishing and hierarchies of cultural capital circulate in a socially motivated post-digital environment. Writing Cultures and Literary Media combines compelling accounts of book trends, reader reception, and interviews with writers and publishers to reveal fresh insights for students, practitioners, and scholars of writing, publishing, and communications.

"In addition to explaining his concept of uncreative writing, Goldsmith reads the work of writers who have engaged in 'uncreative writing'. Examining a wide rage of texts and techniques, including the use of Internet searches to create poetry, the appropriation of courtroom testimony, and the possibility of robo-poetics, Goldsmith joins this recent work to practices adopted by writers and artists such as Walter Benjamin, Gertrude Stein, James Joyce, and Andy Warhol. Yet, more than just a reconfiguration of texts, uncreative writing can also be suffused with emotion and offer new ways of thinking about identity, tha making of meaning, and the ethos of our time."--Publisher.