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Contemporaries Essays, The Stuff of Figure, Now

Producing Totality

 “We were like figures in the same plot, eternally fixed together.” —Saul Bellow, Dangling Man Recently, detail is in decay, as seen in Elif Batuman’s (“Short Story and Novel”; “Get a…

Contemporaries Essays, The Stuff of Figure, Now

Paper, Scissors, Stone

Language is fossil poetry.— Ralph Waldo Emerso WORDS DIE, THE WORLD IS ETERNALLY YOUNG.— Aleksei Kruchenykh Traditional rhetoric accorded two main functions to metaphor, the first functional and the second…

Contemporaries Essays, Web 2.0 and Literary Criticism

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…

Contemporaries Essays, Web 2.0 and Literary Criticism

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…

Contemporaries Essays, Web 2.0 and Literary Criticism

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…

Contemporaries Essays, Web 2.0 and Literary Criticism

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…

Contemporaries Essays, Web 2.0 and Literary Criticism

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….

Contemporaries Essays, Web 2.0 and Literary Criticism

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…

Contemporaries Essays, Web 2.0 and Literary Criticism

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…

Contemporaries Essays, Web 2.0 and Literary Criticism

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…