ENG 255 F ELECTRONIC LITERATURE

With the rapid rise of information and communication technologies as increasingly participatory and interactive phenomena, the network is more than ever viewed as the central organizing principle of twenty-first century global society. Our course responds to this popular paradigm by analyzing the influence of networks on how we read, write, and interpret literature in the Information Age. Asking to what extent and by what means networks are narrated, students will explore what happens to literature and its study when text moves from page to screen. With an emphasis on works of born-digital literature (composed digitally/for reading on digital platforms), we will consider how the speed and connectivity of an emergent network society affects the human capacity to enact change across diverse social environments from the 1960s to the present. In short papers and presentations, students will also chart the development of a uniquely “network narrative” form across varied literary and cultural contexts over the last four decades as attention spans alternately align with and resist the immediacy and ephemerality of touch-click technologies. Course readings will draw on a range of postprint texts (whether in part or whole) by authors and artists such as Walt Whitman, Glenn Ligon, Jorge Luis Borges, Richard Brautigan, Andy Warhol, Robert Altman, Ray Johnson, Michael Joyce, William Gibson, John Guare, Shelley Jackson, Aziz Ansari, Eli Horowitz, Patricia Lockwood, Joshua Cohen, Jennifer Egan, Mike Daisey, Alex Garland, Teju Cole, and Caryl Churchill. Note: No prior programming knowledge is necessary for this course; all course texts will be read via electronic interface