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…
Contemporaries Essays
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…
A Creative Reading of Web 2.0 and Literary Criticism Using Voyant’s TermsBerry
To collect essays into a cluster, such as this one for Contemporaries, creates a casing for those essays to inhabit. Within this casing, the essays’s proximity to one another affects the…
Afterword: Tight Spots and Privileged Spaces
Soon after Bloomsday 2019, a spoken word poet in sparkling brown boots performed for an academic gathering in Dublin. Her lush Irish speech accented what she knows as a working-class…
The Public and Possible Institutions of Practice
Humanities in the Public In my research with literature festivals in India I ask: why have writers, translators, artists, academics, publishers, and concerned citizens come together to produce a network…