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…
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Contemporaries Essays, Web 2.0 and Literary Criticism
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…
Contemporaries Essays, Web 2.0 and Literary Criticism
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,…
Contemporaries Essays, Web 2.0 and Literary Criticism
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…
Contemporaries Essays, Web 2.0 and Literary Criticism
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…
Issue 3: Stoppage Time: Timescales of the Present, Peer Reviewed Articles
Photographic Futures
The first illustration in Lydia Millet’s novel Mermaids in Paradise (2015) depicts the back of a man’s head as he gazes down at his laptop. What could be more representative of…
Issue 3: Stoppage Time: Timescales of the Present, Peer Reviewed Articles, Uncategorized
Geek Temporalities and the Spirit of Capital
Jeff Bezos begged to appear on Star Trek Beyond. Sergey Brin drew inspiration from Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash. Elon Musk loves video games and cites Isaac Asimov, Douglas Adams, and…
Issue 3: Stoppage Time: Timescales of the Present, Peer Reviewed Articles, Uncategorized
Queer Times for the Straight Book: Maggie Nelson and Michel Serres
If you read a lot of Michel Serres – and you might: he’s written many books, about a lot of things – a conundrum emerges. On the one hand, he…
Contemporaries Essays, Public Humanities as/and Comparatist Practice
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…
Contemporaries Essays, Public Humanities as/and Comparatist Practice
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…