Postmodern, Posthuman, Post-Digital (original) (raw)
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Postmodern Perspectives: Navigating New Narratives in the Digital Epoch of Culture and Literature
African Journal of Biological Sciences(South Africa), 2024
This study examines how digital culture has changed how the younger generation writes, reads, and comprehends. Focusing on contemporary literature, it explores how technology influences stories, global viewpoints, and cooperative creation, gaining knowledge from surveys and interviews conducted with 200 Indian students between the ages of 18 and 25.Postmodernism witnessedvarious cultural, social, and technological changes. This paper mainly focuses on the new culture and practices that are taking place in postmodern literature and literary involvements. The rise and influence of digital culture have accelerated the evolution and expansion of traditional media, creating new narratives, cross-national thinking, and collaborative creativity. There have been significant changes in the new generation's traditional practices and understandings because of online culture. Technology has a diverse impact and influence on all aspects of human life. Digital culture has dominated all areas of our lives. The postmodern period brought a lot of new perspectives to the existing knowledge.
Posthuman Magazine, 2024
«A Finnegans Wake for the postdigital millennium, Kenji Siratori’s Blood Electric is probably the foundational text of the language-horror sub-genre: an evasive, esoteric and ultraexperimental writing style produced by the convergence of poetics and methods borrowed from avantgarde literature, electronic/noise music, synthetic abstract image generation, and severe—yet delicate—syntactic deconstruction. Siratori’s unique writing technique results in a hardcore-cyberpunk material account of a bio-techno singularity network in which flesh-code wetware and silicon-thriving software infold together into wave-multitudes of text-organisms. While most contemporary authors exploring the possibility of the blending of humans and machines focus on the extrapolation of logical and transcendental interactions (as in classical cyberpunk, from which Blood Electric initiates a radical breakup), Siratori’s language emanates directly from the contingent, rhizomatic, non-teleological, reciprocal disruption of several unstable and immanent modes of embodied (in)existence. In Blood Electric the text becomes an incantation demanding full abandonment, generating its own unpredictable rhythms as it enraptures you beyond reading, beyond yourself, like when participating in a rave.» — Germán Sierra «… Blood Electric is unreadable in anything other than short, migraine-inducing bursts.» — The Guardian «Following the publication of Kenji Siratori's Blood Electric, the Japanese cyberpunk writer perhaps pioneered a movement among all non-English speaking writers whose languages are radically dissociated from the dominant Latin-Anglo-Franco-German linguistic germ-line on the one hand, and are, on the other, enthusiastically seeking to contribute to the diversification of the English language whose centrality has already been sabotaged in the wake of emerging cyber-societies.» — Reza Negarestani, in 3:AM Magazine «Kenji is making rather more sense than usual. Perhaps the lad is finally coming into his own as the literary avatar of our times.» — Bruce Sterling «Kenji is a madman for sure, but if you scan his hallucinatory textual mashups in just the right frame of mind, they begin to make sense. And that's the scary part.» — Douglas Rushkoff «Contemporary Japan is exploding in slow-motion, and Kenji Siratori arranges the blood- and semen-encrusted deris with the finesse of a berserk Issey Miyake. Rendering English-language cyberpunk instantly redundant with his relenteless, murderous prose-drive, Siratori transmits his authentic, category-A hallucinogenic product direct to this reader’s cerebellum. A virulently warped amalgam of Tetsuo and cut-up era William Burroughs.» — Stephen Barber (author of Tokyo Vertigo) «Blood Electric is the black reverb of soft machine seppuku, a molten unspooling of sheet metal entrails and crucified memory banks into the howling void of violence. It is a cyborg crash nightmare of the new flesh, a final dispatch from mutant Hell where the embryo hunts in secret.» — Jack Hunter (author of Eros in Hell) «Siratori’s hypermodern project articulates the nonarticulation that currently dominates the substratum of much current discourse. Without the intense atomization of the individual, Siratori’s work does not resound. Yet, if we take pause, Siratori’s work resonates at a fever pitch, blaring at the limitless informational realm of our minds as it bursts the parameters of the skull. As a kind of accelerationist aesthetic, Siratori critiques technology by pushing it beyond its sensible potentiality; he cultivates alien cognitions where alternatives thrive, where semantic derangement is revolt, where epistemology uncoils. Ultimately, he uncompromisingly forces us to pause on the chaos of the glitch, to claim the instance where embodying the unquantifiable amounts to insurgency.» — Andrew C. Wenaus, author of The Literature of Exclusion: Dada, Data, and the Threshold of Electronic Literature
LiteraMorphosis. Digital Technologies and the Transformation of Literary Culture
Semicerchio, 2015
In presenting a special issue of “Between Journal” on Technology, Imagination, Narrative Forms (4.8, 2014), this article explores the varied interconnections between literature and technology in the contemporary age, and tries to define the contours of theoretical frameworks for a wider consideration of digital humanities. It does so by mapping some of their inflections in narrative at large, such as: the thematic or metaphoric representations of new or futuristic technologies in literature; the interaction between digital culture and more ‘traditional’ literary forms – from digital versions of classics to the use of IT technologies to facilitate experimental narrative techniques; the transformation of narrative under the influence of new mediascapes; the growth of intermedia or transmedia storytelling as a typical expression of the new convergent and participative culture.
E-Lit Works as 'Forms of Culture': Envisioning Digital Literary Subjectivity
Culture Machine, 2011
Building on J. Hillis Miller’s 1995 article ‘The Ethics of Hypertext’, Gary Hall argues in Digitize This Book! that digitization, open-access and web self-archiving interrogate the limits of cultural studies ‘by positioning the normal and the usual – in this case, cultural studies and the more conventional modes of “doing cultural studies” – in a “strange and disorienting new context”, thus helping us to see cultural studies again “in a new way”’ (2008: 202). A related compelling question that the present paper asks is whether a similar (but reverse) operation might be practicable, i.e., if by positioning our concepts of the machinic and of the digital/computational literary within the frame of cultural studies it might be possible to see new media studies again in a new way. If we were to apply Gary Hall’s analogy in a rigorous way, however, we should first look at the conventional modes of doing new media studies before putting them in the disorienting context. As Noah Wardrip-Fru...
Speech Before Our Eyes: Digital Poetry, Artists' Books, and the 'New Media' of Language
The meaning is not on the phrase like the butter on the bread, like a second layer of 'pyschic reality' spread over the sound: it is the totality of what it said, the integral of all the differentiations of the verbal chain; it is given with the words for those who have ears to hear. And, conversely, the whole landscape is overrun with words as with an invasion, it is henceforth but a variant of speech before our eyes. 1 [. . .] it is possible and even likely that one can have a confrontation with a word that is a significant as a confrontation with a tree, chair, cone, dog, bishop, piano, vineyard, door, or penny. 2
The Writer's Craft, The Culture's Technology
Journal of Pragmatics, 2007
The Writer's Craft, The Culture's Technology is a collection of articles derived from papers given at the Twenty-Second International Conference of the Poetics and Linguistics Association (PALA) at Birmingham in April 2002, which explored the connections between literary creativity and the new technologies available to text producers and text interpreters in contemporary societies. As the objects of analyses are not only literary productions but also other forms of cultural expression, such as hypertexts, web artworks, newspaper stories, television programs and online book reviews, the book is addressed to those who are interested in the interface between discourse analysis and new digital and multimedia technologies, and on how these new technologies impact the forms and functions of literary canons and other post-modern cultural products. Following a preface by Donald C. Freedman, the series editor, and an introduction by the two editors of this particular volume, the book is divided into four parts. Part I, The Writer's Web, includes four papers loosely connected by a focus on Internet genres. The first essay, ''Anti-Laokoön: mixed and merged modes of image text on the web'', by George Dillon, discusses how relations between text and image (and sound) are being created in contemporary web artworks, and argues for the centrality of the cross-modal link to the reader/viewer's processing of hypertexts. The relevant point argued by Dillon is that hypertext links allow users to create complex signifying structures by weaving together different textual fragments, an indication of the constant transformations in the interpretive rules and frames we use to make sense of the world. The second article, ''Personal web pages and the semiotic construction of academic identities'', by Carmen Rosa Caldas-Coulthard, follows the argument that, in late modernity, public discourses are being colonized by traces of discourses of the private world (Chouliaraki and Fairclough, 1999). In this particular case, the author investigates how web pages of individual staff members, linked to a broader institutional web page, are more and more influenced by discourses of the self, and how new forms of fictionalized identities are being created in the process. The third essay, ''Hypertext, prosthetics, and the netocracy: posthumanism in Jeanette Winterson's 'The Powerbook''', by Ulf Cronquist, also explores the issue of identity in discourse. The initial premise is that in the present technological age, essentialist and biological notions of sex and gender have been left behind, and that we have moved into a world where we are all cyborgs, our bodies representing the final frontier in terms of predetermined identity traits. To illustrate this premise Cronquist investigates an Internet novel, which offers the reader a chance to escape from her/his body, and through this e-novel examines issues of hypertextuality, prosthetics and the change from autocracy to netocracy in the postmodern world. The last essay