There's been a request for information on the short paper that is due later in the semester. Below is the basic assignment, which met with much success last year. It will give you the gist of what I have in mind, though I reserve the right to fiddle with it a bit. The "official" version of the assignment will be circulated at least two weeks before the due date.
Choose a single selection from either the short fiction or the long poetry section of the Electronic Literature Organization’s Electronic Literature Directory:http://directory.eliterature.org/
Write a 5-7 page paper that performs a close reading of the work you have selected.
Not all works in the Directory are equally interesting or equally accessible, so you should spend some time looking around and try to choose wisely; don’t be afraid to abandon your choice and look again if the first work you selected isn’t panning out.
For a brief explanation of close reading, see Jack Lynch:
http://newark.rutgers.edu/~jlynch/EngPaper/close.html
A few additional words about the goal of the assignment. Though unfashionable in the current day and age, a close reading exercise will allow us to take seriously the notion that words on the screen can be subjected to literary analysis that is every bit as rigorous and rewarding as words on the page. However, Lynch’s guideposts above—diction, verb forms, word order—are necessary but not sufficient for close reading on the screen. Some other aspects of the text to consider might therefore include: images, sound, links, motion/animation, code.
The most successful papers will be those that eschew general musings on the nature of electronic literature and instead dive right into a detailed close reading, filled with examples and quotations, perhaps even screenshots, of the text at hand. The emphasis throughout should be on interweaving description and interpretation. If you have the technical knowledge, you should also feel free to discuss the relationship between the language/software used to create the work and the way it performs as a literary text.
Incidentally, you may download a free trial version of a good screengrab program for the PC here: http://www.snagit.com
Papers submitted as online HTML are welcome, but not expected.
Last year the class published a selection of papers online. I'd like to do that again this year, if people are willing and interested.
Posted by mgk at March 11, 2004 09:16 AM