Digital Modernism ─ Making It New in New Media

Electronic literature is still in its nascent stages, and so too is the field of literary criticism engaging it. While most critical studies of born-digital literature celebrate it as a postmodern art form with roots in contemporary technologies and social interactions, this book provides an alternative genealogy. Digital Modernism examines exemplary cases of electronic literature that renovate modernist texts and poetics as a means of critiquing contemporary culture. This study suggests that by referencing modernism, "digital modernism" reframes that earlier literary tradition around questions of media and technology.

Grounding her argument in literary history, media studies, and the practice of close-reading, Jessica Pressman pairs modernist works by Ezra Pound, James Joyce, and Bob Brown, with major digital works like William Poundstone's Project for the Tachistoscope {Bottomless Pit}, Young-hae Chang Heavy Industries's Dakota, and Judd Morrissey's The Jew's Daughter. She demonstrates how the modernist movement of the 1920s and 1930s laid the groundwork for the innovations of electronic literature. Accordingly, Digital Modernism makes the case for considering these digital creations as "literature" and argues for the value of reading them carefully, closely, and within literary history. Moreover, this remarkable study details how and why one of the most maligned of literary spaces, the web -- one accused of fostering reading habits that destroy deep attention and devalue hermeneutic analysis -- is actually the place where serious literature stages its rebellion and renaissance. Even more importantly, perhaps, this book argues for the importance of literature, literary study, and close reading in our digital age.

Jessica Pressman is a Visiting Scholar at the University of California, San Diego.