Cyborg Reading: Transmedial Digital Poetry and the Cyborg Milieu
Date
2022-06
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Abstract
This study gives an overview of digital poetry as a transmedial creative practice calling for a transdisciplinary approach to literary criticism. It covers a range of digital compositional tools, from text generation and 3D printing to virtual and extended reality techniques, from the perspective of a critical posthumanism informed by cyberfeminist reading practices. The study consists of three parts and combines analytical strategies from several research methodologies—including autobiographical literary criticism, critical code studies, media-specific analysis, and research-creation—into a hybridized literary criticism responsive to the parameters of the poem at hand. The first chapter addresses poetry produced or consumed with a computer, arguing that computer mediation fundamentally alters the relationships between readers, writers, and literary texts. The second chapter takes up the influence of materiality on readers’ apprehension and interpretation of digital poetry and demonstrates the significance of features falling outside the domain of conventional literary criticism, like source code and interface design. The final chapter situates digital poetry in a wider cybernetic milieu that encourages readers to look beyond the poem as a singular artifact or experience. These arguments support my conclusion that reading critically ought to be treated as a modular, transdisciplinary practice. Cyborg reading fosters digital transliteracy: a confluence of reading, writing, and social skills necessary in an increasingly participatory culture. The ability to recognize and interpret meaning across a range of media and disciplines is of high value in an ever-changing and multivalent media ecology. By putting autobiography into dialogue with close readings of digital poetry and the discourse surrounding it, I position transliteracy, not as a revolution in literary criticism or a call to reform academic institutions, but as a form of literacy already incumbent on contemporary readers and writers.
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Keywords
Poetry, Digital poetry, Cyborg, Literary criticism, Posthumanism
Citation
Flemmer, K. (2022). Cyborg reading: transmedial digital poetry and the Cyborg milieu (Master's thesis, University of Calgary, Calgary, Canada). Retrieved from https://prism.ucalgary.ca.