Subcutanean (2020) is a queer coming-of-age novel by Aaron Reed. The narrator Ryan is an introverted college student whose love for his closest friend, Niko, goes unrequited. Subcutanean is a horror novel. Ryan and Niko discover a vast basement under their dilapidated off-campus house that branches into parallel worlds—the Downstairs. And they get lost in… Continue reading The Subcutanean Variorum
Tag: electronic literature
My 2025 Highlights
Unless you spend most of your time self-promoting, it's difficult to get word out about your successes, not to mention your interesting failures. There was a time, maybe 2009-2015, you could post about a new project on social media, or even your blog, and people would hear about it. These days, the signal-to-noise ratio on… Continue reading My 2025 Highlights
Five Theses on E-Lit Scenes
At the 2025 Electronic Literature Organization conference in Toronto I participated on a panel devoted to If/Then, a computational poetics group/workshop/collective/community that has been meeting monthly over Zoom since Fall 2020. Carly Schnitzler and Lillian-Yvonne Bertram, the organizers of If/Then were on the panel, as well as three members of If/Then's Community Advisory Board—Kathy Wu,… Continue reading Five Theses on E-Lit Scenes
Electronic Literature Think Alouds
2015 ELO Conference, Bergen
I'm at the Electronic Literature Organization's annual conference in Bergen, Norway, where I hope to capture some "think aloud" readings of electronic literature (e-lit) by artists, writers, and scholars. I've mentioned this little project elsewhere, but it bears more explanation. The think aloud protocol is an important pedagogical tool, famously used by Sam Wineburg to… Continue reading Electronic Literature Think Alouds2015 ELO Conference, Bergen
Closed Bots and Green Bots
Two Archetypes of Computational Media
The Electronic Literature Organization's annual conference was last week in Milwaukee. I hated to miss it, but I hated even more the idea of missing my kids' last days of school here in Madrid, where we've been since January. If I had been at the ELO conference, I'd have no doubt talked about bots. I… Continue reading Closed Bots and Green BotsTwo Archetypes of Computational Media
The Poetics of Non-Consumptive Reading
“Non-consumptive research” is the term digital humanities scholars use to describe the large-scale analysis of a texts—say topic modeling millions of books or data-mining tens of thousands of court cases. In non-consumptive research, a text is not read by a scholar so much as it is processed by a machine. The phrase frequently appears in… Continue reading The Poetics of Non-Consumptive Reading
no life no life no life no life: the 100,000,000,000,000 stanzas of House of Leaves of Grass
Mark Z. Danielewski’s House of Leaves is a massive novel about, among other things, a house that is bigger on the inside than the outside. Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass is a collection of poems about, among other things, the expansiveness of America itself. What happens when these two works are remixed with each other?… Continue reading no life no life no life no life: the 100,000,000,000,000 stanzas of House of Leaves of Grass
Electronic Literature after Flash (MLA14 Proposal)
I recently proposed a sequence of lightning talks for the next Modern Language Association convention in Chicago (January 2014). The participants are tackling a literary issue that is not at all theoretical: the future of electronic literature. I’ve also built in a substantial amount of time for an open discussion between the audience and my… Continue reading Electronic Literature after Flash (MLA14 Proposal)
CFP: Electronic Literature after Flash (MLA 2014, Chicago)
Attention artists, creators, theorists, teachers, curators, and archivists of electronic literature! I’m putting together an e-lit roundtable for the Modern Language Association Convention in Chicago next January. The panel will be “Electronic Literature after Flash” and I’m hoping to have a wide range of voices represented. See the full CFP for more details. Abstracts due… Continue reading CFP: Electronic Literature after Flash (MLA 2014, Chicago)
An Account of Randomness in Literary Computing
Below is the text of my presentation at the 2013 MLA Convention in Boston. The panel was Reading the Invisible and Unwanted in Old and New Media, and it was assembled by Lori Emerson, Paul Benzon, Zach Whalen, and myself. Seeking to have a rich discussion period—which we did indeed have—we limited our talks to… Continue reading An Account of Randomness in Literary Computing
Strange Rain and the Poetics of Motion and Touch
Here (finally) is the talk I gave at the 2012 MLA Convention in Seattle. I was on Lori Emerson's Reading Writing Interfaces: E-Literature's Past and Present panel, along with Dene Grigar, Stephanie Strickland, and Marjorie Luesebrink. Lori's talk on e-lit's stand against the interface-free aesthetic worked particularly well with my own talk, which focused on Erik Loyer's Strange Rain. I don't offer a reading of Strange Rain so much as I use the piece as an entry point to think about interfaces---and my larger goal of reframing our concept of interfaces.
Post-Print Fiction Reading List (the print stuff, at least)
I'm excited to announce the print side of my post-print fiction reading list: Italo Calvino, If on a Winter's Night a Traveler Don DeLillo, Mao II Mark Z. Danielewski, House of Leaves Salvador Plascencia, The People of Paper Anne Carson, Nox Each of these works offers a meditation upon the act of reading or writing,… Continue reading Post-Print Fiction Reading List (the print stuff, at least)
Post-Print Fiction Course Description (for Fall 2011)
Here is an early, tentative course description for my Fall 2011 senior seminar for the English Honors students. I welcome comments or reading recommendations! Post-Print Fiction (ENGL 400 Honors Seminar) For several centuries the novel has been associated with a single material form: the bound book, made of paper and printed with ink. But what… Continue reading Post-Print Fiction Course Description (for Fall 2011)
Electronic Literature is a Foreign Land
One of the more brilliant works of electronic literature I savor teaching is Brian Kim Stefan's Star Wars, One Letter at a Time, which is exactly what it sounds like. Aside what's going on in the piece itself (which deserves its own separate blog post), what I enjoy is the almost violent reaction it provokes… Continue reading Electronic Literature is a Foreign Land
Electronic Literature Course Description
A few of my English department colleagues and myself are preparing to propose a new Electronic Literature course, to replace a more vaguely named "Textual Media" class in the university course catalog. Here is an incredibly first draft version of the course description, building in part on language from the Electronic Literature Organization's own description… Continue reading Electronic Literature Course Description