Archive for September, 2019

Literary Criticism 2.0: Emerging Ideas

If web 2.0 is a place of participatory culture, user-generated content, interwoven and dynamic applications, and overall ease-of-use for the end-user, then literary criticism 2.0 must adapt. This cluster suggests…

Prescribed Print: Bibliotherapy after Web 2.0

When the organizers of this cluster asked us “how have paraliterary genres reframed ‘the literary,'” it was hard not to hear echoes of other paras: paramilitaries, -medics, -legals. That the…

Close Shaves with Content

On social media, there’s always something new to argue about. This January 13th, that temporary object of controversy — designed to infuriate and then be forgotten — was an advertisement for men’s…

Studying and Preserving the Global Networks of Twitter Literature

Given the rise of post-press literature and the continued creation of literary works in what Simone Murray has called the “digital literary sphere,” our seminar “explore[d] the transformative effects of…

The Handwritten Styles of Instagram Poetry

The most widely read poets today share their work on Instagram, where they reach huge audiences. Rupi Kaur, perhaps the most famous Insta-poet, has 3.6 million followers as I write this….

Do It for the Vine: Literary Reviews and Online Amplification

Margo Howard may not be a household name, but that’s because she comes from advice-column royalty. Advice columns are the realm of pseudonyms. Daughter of the original “Ann Landers” and…

The Participatory Cultures of Omenana: Reading and Writing on a Nigerian SF Website

For scholars working on African literature, the challenge in describing the “contemporary” moment very much lies in how to make sense of the impact that new digital technologies have had…

Multiplayer Lit/Multiplayer Crit

When scholars in the humanities try to imagine new scholarly practices — new forms of collaboration, new metrics of evaluation, and new modes of knowledge production — we are quick…

Web 2.0 and Literary Criticism

Web 2.0 is changing the literary. We all know this, and we have emergent fields of study based upon this knowledge: electronic literature, game studies, cultural analytics, digital humanities. Yet,…

Can Literary Theory be Participatory?

This cluster contemplates two core terms — contemporary literature and participatory culture — as they are influenced by web 2.0 platforms where they have flourished on a scale hitherto unseen…