Skip to content
Week 1 – August 31 (Introductions)
Week 2 – September 7 (Reading and Reflection)
- Italo Calvino, If On a Winter’s Night a Traveler
- Peter Rabinowitz, excerpts from Before Reading (Blackboard)
- Johanna Drucker, “The Codex and Its Variations” from The Century of Artists’ Books, pp. 121-159 (Blackboard)
- September 6 is the last day to drop class without tuition penalty
- In class: Jason Shiga on making an interactive comic, Nick Montfort’s The Girl and the Wolf
Week 3 – September 14 (A Network of Lines)
- If On a Winter’s Night a Traveler
- Michel Foucault, “What is an Author?” from The Foucault Reader, pp. 101-120 (Blackboard)
- William S. Burroughs, “The Cut-Up Method of Brion Gysin” (Blackboard)
- In class: Raymond Queneau, One Hundred Thousand Billion Poems (1961)
Week 4 – September 21 (Databased Storytelling)
- Jonathan Harris and Sep Kamvar, We Feel Fine
- Jonathan Harris, The Whale Hunt
- Roland Barthes, “The Death of the Author” from Image-Music-Text, pp. 142-148 (Blackboard)
- Jorge Luis Borges, “The Garden of Forking Paths” (Blackboard)
- Marie-Laure Ryan, “Toward an Interactive Narratology” from Avatars of Story, pp. 97-125 (Blackboard)
- Lev Manovich, “The Database” from The Language of New Media, pp. 218-236 (Blackboard)
- In class: We Feel Fine Backend, Taroko Gorge
Week 5 – September 28 (The Writer and the Crowd)
- Don DeLillo, Mao II
- Elias Canetti, except from Crowds and Power (Blackboard)
- John Cawelti, “The Writer as a Celebrity: Some Aspects of American Literature as Popular Culture” in Studies in American Fiction (Blackboard)
- Tim Carmody, 10 Reading Revolutions Before E-Books in The Atlantic
Week 6 – October 5 (The Dying of the Author)
Week 7 – October 12 (This is not for you)
- Mark Z. Danielewski, House of Leaves
- Mikhail Bakhtin, “The Heteroglot Novel” from The Bakhtin Reader, pp. 102-112 (Blackboard)
- Johanna Drucker, “Experimental Typography as a Modern Art Practice” from The Visible Word, pp. 91-104 (Blackboard)
- Jorge Luis Borges, “On Exactitude in Science” and “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote”
Week 8 – October 19 (Pisces)
- House of Leaves
- Walter Benjamin, “The Storyteller” from Illuminations, pp 83-109 (Blackboard)
- Johanna Drucker, “The Artist’s Book as a Rare and/or Auratic Object” from The Century of Artists’ Books, pp. 92-120 (Blackboard)
- Annotation I due
Week 9 – October 26 (Flagstaff)
Week 10 – November 2 (Interactive Fiction)
Week 11 – November 9 (The Revolt against the Author)
- Salvador Plascencia, People of Paper
Week 12 – November 16 (Chance and Process)
- An assortment of procedural and combinatory writing
- Taroko Gorge and its remixes by Nick Montfort and others
- Jason Nelson, The Bomar Gene, I Made This. You Play This. We Are Enemies, Game, Game, Game, and Again Game, (3) This Is How You Will Die, Evidence of Everything Exploding, Sidney’s Siberia, and Weather Visualizer
- Annotation II due
Week 13 – November 23 (Thanksgiving)
Week 14 – November 30 (Do Overs and Remixes)
- Jonathan Blow, Braid
- Creative Project Due
Week 15 – December 7 (A Return to the Book)