Section IV: "Teaching Electronic Literature as Digital Humanities: A Proposal"
After defining what they understand by E-literature, the author highlights that the scope of analysis for this work is that of “fiction such as a hypertextual or an interactive novel, or a multimedia piece of poetry that requires the scrolling, clicking and decision making of the user in order to be read.” (2) In the same vein, the author states that interacting with this sort of literature helps challenge established literary concepts such as “author,” “authorship,” “work,” and even the act of reading itself. An interesting conceptualization is the one built around how print literature often creates recursive loops. Katherine Hayles’s insight is evoked in this respect, especially the part where she proclaims that there are also recursive loops when it comes to E-literature but that the latter is more performative given that it “intertwines human ways of knowing with machine cognitions”. The most thought-provoking aspect of Hayles’ considerations is tied to the human experience of having to interact with machine-generated texts. She contends that by doing this we human beings become more liaised with our contemporary rhetorical situation and that computers cease to signify a technical practice only to become a method of exploring the dynamics of our contemporary digital situation, and our ways of creating art within it. We thus become, she says, “digital humanists”.
This serving as a preamble, the E-lit course in question at the university of Berkeley is built around a DH pedagogy based on practice, discovery, and building a sense of community. The most important premise is that of the social construction of knowledge. Knowledge is not devoid of meaning; much on the contrary it becomes transcendental when it implies other individuals in the process, regardless of the medium used to achieve this goal. In the same line of thinking, its central didactic component is set at the heart of pedagogical hermeneutics: it emphasizes experimentation and discovery (of digital tools and computational principles), but also, in the case of E-lit, the emerging poetic relations. To this end, the most common tasks include: interacting with poetic or narrative objects, and at the same time pay close attention to the material and technical conditions that make them possible.
Being an Argentine citizen, I was surprised to find that the course included a contemporary text like "Más Respeto que Soy tu Madre" by author Hernan Casciari. The text in question is not necessarily a canonical one but rather configures a challenge of social norms that still abound in conservative Argentine neighborhoods. But, fundamentally, this novel was written in the form a blog and then turned into a print book. On this blog, author Casciari would take on a persona and write about the somewhat crazy struggles of a middle-age wife who struggles to keep her family together. I was amazed by the way the book is utilized in this course. The course seeks to analyze changes in authorship models, questions of originality (the text is question is nothing but a remix), changes in textual ontology, variations in narrative structure. And for all these reasons, the course focuses on exploring e-lit works that enact these theoretical concepts, in tandem helping students enrich their learning experience.