3,976 research outputs found

    Continuous, not discrete: The mutual influence of digital and physical literature

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    The use of computational methods to develop innovative forms of storytelling and poetry has gained traction since the late 1980s. At the same time, legacy publishing has largely migrated to using digital workflows. Despite the possibility for crossover, the electronic literature community has generally defined their practice in opposition to print and traditional publishing practices more generally. Not only does this ignore a range of hybrid forms, but it also limits non-digital literature to print, rather than considering a range of physical literatures. In this article, I argue that it is more productive to consider physical and digital literature as convergent forms as both a historicizing process, and a way of identifying innovations. Case studies of William Gibson et al’s Agrippa (a book of the dead) and Christian Bök’s The Xenotext Project’s playful use of innovations in genetics demonstrate the productive tensions in the convergence between digital and physical literature

    Fuster's Conception of Literature as a Social Practice

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    Joan Fuster's essays constitute the observatory from which he examined the world, human beings and the life of society. In this observatory-cum-laboratory, Fuster used linguistics, culture, aesthetics, the sociopolitical context and history to construct his theory of social reality. He often focussed on literary phenomena - authors, genres, movements, styles and publishing processes - in the context of the vast process of social praxis, an ambit in which no element can be innocently isolated from any other, from the whole in which all things are interrelated. Fuster's conception of literature thus adopts a perspective of complexity in which the idea of writers being socially engaged, of great influence at the time, is filtered by means of critical examination. This examination includes highly diverse and often contradictory factors that the author tries to balance against each other with an intellectual honesty that turns paradoxes into the driving force behind his writing

    Between particularity and the construction of the world: Mimesis in video games – levels, types, and contexts

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    The category of mimesis is not a very frequent subject of video game analysis. The literature within this field includes only a few studies devoted to it. In this article I will focus on various extents of mimesis in games as well as factors that have an impact on the mimetic relations. I will also propose several sub-terms, which can define specific types of mimesis in games: from particular mimesis through fractal to the holistic one. The selected games, both the up-to-date ones and those popular in the past, will serve as case studies

    Agential Fantasy: A Copenhagen Approach to the Tabletop Role-Playing Game

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    In 1974, Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson published the world’s first commercial role-playing game, Dungeons & Dragons. The tabletop roleplaying game provoked a new form of textual engagement: it entangled the fantastic tales of early 20th Century pulp fiction with the practice of play. The tabletop role-playing game initiated new perspectives on how classic texts could not only be read but also played. Our contemporary world is becoming increasingly gamified: digital media applications (from mobile phones to the personal home computer) have embedded game elements, structures, processes, and lexicons in our modern lives. Tabletop role-playing was a herald for, and catalyst, of this contemporary phenomenon. Espen Aarseth notes that tabletop role-playing games can be considered as an early from of the “cybertext,” a text that requires “non-trivial” effort for its engagement, and is “the oral predecessor to computerized, written, adventure games.”The project of this dissertation offers an approach of examining and understanding the practice of tabletop role-playing through Karen Barad’s concept of agential realism. Agential realism is based on concepts of Niels Bohr’s “Copenhagen Interpretation” of quantum phenomenon and its premise that nothing can be observed without changing what is observed. Agential realism requires us to accept and acknowledge our complicity in the creation, physical and sociocultural, of the realities which surround, bound, and interpellate us. This dissertation complicates the notion of singular authorship of isolated texts and realities by examining all the relationships necessary to produce a tabletop roleplaying game text. The first chapter of this dissertation introduces the concepts of agential realism while the second offers the historical context for the emergence of tabletop role-playing games. The third chapter analyzes the affective and aesthetic inspirations for Dungeons & Dragons to consider the conditions for the emergence of the first commercial tabletop role-playing game and how it would reconfigure the pulp and classic mythologies that inspired it. In the fourth chapter, I examine the rules for Traveller, an early science fiction tabletop role-playing game directly inspired by the practice of Dungeons & Dragons play, to consider how the procedural mechanics of games impact their authorship. The fifth chapter analyzes another mode of authorship for the role-playing game by analyzing its actual play; in this chapter, I examine specific game sessions from a campaign of the tabletop role-playing game, Call of Cthulhu. Throughout these chapters, we understand how the tabletop role-playing game text, like our physical and sociocultural realities, exist within states of radical possibility. Each mode of authorship, through a text’s inspiration, mechanical construction, and subjective interpretation are observations that fix the tabletop role-playing text into a specific manifestation – thought it may exist within any a priori of an observation. This dissertation advocates for an approach to consider realities, within and beyond the games we play, not as isolated moments of objective experience, but as the inevitable consequences of entanglements with all the authors (and players) that share them

    From Cap to Cloak: The Evolution of "Little Red Riding Hood" from Oral Tale to Film

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    As co-written with scholar and storyteller Angela Carter, Neil Jordan's The Company of Wolves (1984) represents a unique case of adaptation as it radically revises the figure of “ Little Red Riding Hood.” The Company of Wolves transforms the pervasive myth of coming-of-age folklore by stimulating hallucinatory visions embedded in a structure effectively simulating the unconscious logic of dream. This paper investigates the evolution of the mythos in the original Little Red Riding Hood fairy tale, its progression and eventual reworking in Carter's literary and filmic takes, as she shifts the focus from the frightened, naïve girl clad in red, reliant on male heroes to the sexually awakened, self-reliant young woman in a crimson cape. To make the texts transparent, this essay analyses The Company of Wolves and its sources through the lenses of adaptation theories including those by George Bluestone and Sarah Cardwell whilst exploring Angela Carter's relationship to fairy tale as chronicled by Jack Zipes. The mechanisms and symbols of the dream imagery manifested in The Company of Wolves distinguish Carter's and Jordan's feverish brainchild as an enticingly instructive exemplar of rendering unconscious desires visible and visceral on celluloid

    Pixelated Faces in IRL (In Real Life) Places: Exploring How "Textese" in Melissa Broder's "So Sad Today" Builds Community Among Confessional Women Writers

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    "So Sad Today" is a collection of personal and confessional essays by poet and essayist, Melissa Broder, that uses texting language to write about the intimate details of the author's life. In this paper, the author looks at Broder's work, and that of other confessional poets

    Jonna Eagle, War Games

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