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Global Perspectives on Digital Literature: A Critical Introduction for the Twenty-First Century explores how digital literary forms shape and are shaped by aesthetic and political exchanges happening across languages and nations. The book understands "global" as a mode of comparative thinking and argues for considering various forms of digital literature-the popular, the avant-garde, and the participatory-as realizing and producing global thought in the twenty-first century. Attending to issues of both political and aesthetic representation, the book includes a diverse group of contributors and a wide-ranging corpus of texts, composed in a variety of languages and regions, including East and South Asia, parts of Europe, Latin America, North America, Australia, and Western Africa. The book's contributors adopt an array of interpretive approaches to make visible new connections and possibilities engendered by cross-cultural encounters. Among other topics, they reflect on the shifting conditions for production and distribution of literature, participatory cultures and technological affordances of Web 2.0, the ever-changing dynamics of global and local forces, and fundamental questions, such as, "What do we mean when we talk about literature today?" and "What is the future of literature?"
List of contents
Introduction: Global Literary Studies and Digital Literature
Torsa Ghosal
I: REIMAGINING DIGITAL LITERARY STUDIES
- Textual Instability: Paradoxes of Literary Remix
Simone Murray
- Diverse Mappings of Electronic Literature: Expanding the Canon(s)
Mariusz Pisarski
- Ludonarrative Postcolonialism: Re-Playing the Colonial Discourse
Souvik Mukherjee
II. DIGITAL EMBODIMENTS AND DISABILITIES
- Games as Critical Literature: Playing with Transhumanism, Embodied Cognition, and Narrative Difference in SOMA
Cody Mejeur
- The Horror of Networked Existence: Affect, Connection, and Anxiety in Classic Creepypasta Narratives
Sara Bimo
- Networked Chronic Pain Narratives: Locating Disability through Fibromyalgia Facebook Community
Rimi Nandy
III. FORMS OF RESISTANCE
- The Erasing Impulse: Veiling and Unveiling the Poetic and the Political
Álvaro Seiça
- Digital Cartoons: Collaborative Activism in Hong Kong
Kin Wai Chu
- Between Two Screens: The January 25th Revolution in Egypt
Reham Hosny
- 'If this document is authentic': On Bill Bly's Archival Fiction
Brian Davis
IV. MEDIAL AND CULTURAL CROSSINGS
- From Oral to Digital and Back: Adinkra Symbols and Kweku Ananse on YouTube
J.B. Amissah-Arthur and Kwabena Opoku-Agyemang
- Bending Voices, Opening Ears: Voice, Music, Sound, and Affect in Digital Literature
Hazel Smith
- Intermedial Experience and Discursive Voice in Printed Text, Audiobook, and Podcast: H. P. Lovecraft's "The Statement of Randolph Carter"
Jarkko Toikkanen and Mari Hatavara
About the author
Torsa Ghosal is the author of a book of literary criticism,
Out of Mind: Mode, Mediation, and Cognition in Twenty-First-Century Narrative, and an experimental novella,
Open Couplets, and is the co-editor of
Fictionality and Multimodal Narratives. She has a PhD in English from the Ohio State University, where she was awarded a Presidential Fellowship as well as a John Muste Award for best dissertation. Currently, she is Assistant Professor of English at California State University, Sacramento.
Summary
Global Perspectives on Digital Literature: A Critical Introduction for the Twenty-First Century explores how digital literary forms shape and are shaped by aesthetic and political exchanges happening across languages and nations.
