In our discussion of combinatoric and generative literature this week, the class was divided over a central issue: how much does authorial agency matter in the ways that we interpret meaning in a text? Can we apply the same sorts of analysis to the code used to generate a poem as we apply to the poem the program produces? Is either comparable to, say, an interpretation of the poetry of Wordsworth?
One student wrote about how radically her understanding of the poem “Taroko Gorge” changed when she realized that it was being generated by a computer program. This article describes the reverse situation: an audience disappointed to learn that what they thought was nonsensical text generated by a Twitter spambot was in fact a literary experiment produced by two human writers.
What are the stakes of Twitter as a literary platform, given that it allows auto-generated spam, advertising, news, personal microblogging, and literature to share the same communication channel?
From the article:
“The point is, even if Twitter was intentionally designed for advertising purposes and even if many literary novelists who would prefer not to are now strongly urged by their publishing companies to use the network as a platform for self-marketing, that still does not sum up or circumscribe the ways that ordinary inhabitants of this city of language are choosing to express themselves.”
—“Literary Parkour: @Horse_ebooks, Jonathan Franzen, and the Rise of Twitter Fiction” by Alena Smith
(Thanks to Rachel for suggesting this link)
Literature In the Digital Age 