Digital Modernism

Electronic literature is still in its nascent stages, and so too is the field of literary criticism engaging it. While most critical studies of born-digital literature celebrate it as a postmodern art form with roots in contemporary technologies and social interactions, this book provides an alternative genealogy. Digital Modernism examines exemplary cases of electronic literature that renovate modernist texts and poetics as a means of critiquing contemporary culture. This study suggests that by referencing modernism, "digital modernism" reframes that earlier literary tradition around questions of media and technology. Grounding her argument in literary history, media studies, and the practice of close-reading, Jessica Pressman pairs modernist works by Ezra Pound, James Joyce, and Bob Brown, with major digital works like William Poundstone's Project for the Tachistoscope {Bottomless Pit}, Young-hae Chang Heavy Industries's Dakota, and Judd Morrissey's The Jew's Daughter. She demonstrates how the modernist movement of the 1920s and 1930s laid the groundwork for the innovations of electronic literature. Accordingly, Digital Modernism makes the case for considering these digital creations as "literature" and argues for the value of reading them carefully, closely, and within literary history. Moreover, this remarkable study details how and why one of the most maligned of literary spaces, the web -- one accused of fostering reading habits that destroy deep attention and devalue hermeneutic analysis -- is actually the place where serious literature stages its rebellion and renaissance. Even more importantly, perhaps, this book argues for the importance of literature, literary study, and close reading in our digital age.

New technologies have brought about radical changes in almost all areas of life. The Digimodern period has substantially affected the media as almost every point of life and caused great transformations. At this point, the main theme of the book is to reveal the structure of the media in the digital period.

The book investigates the theme of Modernism (1920-1960 and its epigones) as an integral part of tangible and intangible cultural heritage which contains the result of a whole range of disciplines whose aim is to identify, document and preserve the memory of the past and the value of the future. Including several chapters, it contains research results relating to cultural heritage, more specifically Modernism, and current digital technologies. This makes it possible to record and evaluate the changes that both undergo: the first one, from a material point of view, the second one from the research point of view, which integrates the traditional approach with an innovative one. The purpose of the publication is to show the most recent studies on the modernist lexicon 100 years after its birth, moving through different fields of cultural heritage: from different forms of art to architecture, from design to engineering, from literature to history, representation and restoration. The book appeals to scholars and professionals who are involved in the process of understanding, reading and comprehension the transformation that the places have undergone within the period under examination. It will certainly foster the international exchange of knowledge that characterized Modernism

Bringing together 17 foundational texts in contemporary modernist criticism in one accessible volume, this book explores the debates that have transformed the field of modernist studies at the turn of the millennium and into the 21st century. The New Modernist Studies Reader features chapters covering the major topics central to the study of modernism today, including: · Feminism, gender, and sexuality · Empire and race · Print and media cultures · Theories and history of modernism Each text includes an introductory summary of its historical and intellectual contexts, with guides to further reading to help students and teachers explore the ideas further. Includes essential texts by leading critics such as: Anne Anlin Cheng, Brent Hayes Edwards, Rita Felski, Susan Stanford Friedman, Mark Goble, Miriam Bratu Hansen, Andreas Huyssen, David James, Heather K. Love, Douglas Mao, Mark S. Morrisson, Michael North, Jessica Pressman, Lawrence Rainey, Paul K. Saint-Amour, Bonnie Kime Scott, Urmila Seshagiri, Robert Spoo, and Rebecca L. Walkowitz.

This book uses the discipline-specific, computational methods of the digital humanities to explore a constellation of rigorous case studies of modernist literature. From data mining and visualization to mapping and tool building and beyond, the digital humanities offer new ways for scholars to questions of literature and culture. With the publication of a variety of volumes that define and debate the digital humanities, we now have the opportunity to focus attention on specific periods and movements in literary history. Each of the case studies in this book emphasizes literary interpretation and engages with histories of textuality and new media, rather than dwelling on technical minutiae. Reading Modernism with Machines thereby intervenes critically in ongoing debates within modernist studies, while also exploring exciting new directions for the digital humanities—ultimately reflecting on the conjunctions and disjunctions between the technological cultures of the modernist era and our own digital present.

By analyzing appropriations of literary modernism in video, experimental film, and installation art, this study investigates works of media art as agents of cultural memory. While research recognizes film and literature as media of memory, it often overlooks media art. Adaptation studies, art history, and hermeneutics help understand ‘appropriation’ in art in terms of a dialog between an artwork, a text, and their contexts. The Russian Formalist notion of estrangement, together with new concepts from literary, film, and media studies, offers a new perspective on ‘appropriation’ that illuminates the sensuous dimension of cultural memory . Media artworks make memory palpable: they address the collective body memory of their viewers, prompting them to reflect on the past and embody new ways of remembering. Five contextual close-readings analyze artworks by Janis Crystal Lipzin, William Kentridge, Mark Aerial Waller, Paweł Wojtasik, and Tom Kalin. They appropriate modernist texts by Gertrude Stein, Italo Svevo, Louis-Ferdinand Céline, Guillaume Apollinaire, Virginia Woolf, and Robert Musil. This book will be of value to readers interested in cultural memory, sensory studies, literary modernism, adaptation studies, and art history.

Popular Modernism and Its Legacies reconfigures modernist studies to investigate how modernist concepts, figures, and aesthetics continue to play essential--though often undetected--roles across an array of contemporary works, genres, and mediums. Featuring both established and emerging scholars, each of the book's three sections offers a distinct perspective on popular modernism. The first section considers popular modernism in periods historically associated with the movement, discovering hidden connections between traditional forms of modernist literature and popular culture. The second section traces modernist genealogies from the past to the contemporary era, ultimately revealing that immensely popular contemporary works, artists, and genres continue to engage and thereby renew modernist aesthetics and values. The final section moves into the 21st century, discovering how popular works invoke modernist techniques, texts, and artists to explore social and existential quandaries in the contemporary world. Concluding with an afterword from noted scholar Faye Hammill, Popular Modernism and Its Legacies reshapes the study of modernism and provides new perspectives on important works at the center of our cultural imagination.

From cinema and radio broadcasting to the growth of new communication technologies, Modernism and Its Media is the first critical guide to key issues and debates on the changing media contexts of modernist writing. Topics covered include: · Key thinkers, including Walter Benjamin, Theodor Adorno, and Marshall McLuhan · Modernist film – from Eisenstein to the French New Wave cinema · Modernism and mass culture · The history of modernist media and communication technologies · Modernism's legacies for contemporary new media art With case studies covering such topics as the film writings of Joyce, Woolf and Eliot, popular art and kitsch, the Frankfurt School and the rise of the gramophone, this is an essential guide for students and scholars researching the relationship between modernism and mass media.