Modern Literature Commons^™

Machine Co-Authorship(S) Via Translative Creative Writing, Aaron Tucker

Journal of Creative Writing Studies

This paper argues that machine translation and a symbiotic ecosystem of authorship are central to the poetic works of Aaron Tucker and reveal larger ethical paths for machine-human relationships. In particular, the elements of chance alongside the intersemiotic translative acts that are the nature of human-computer relationships give space to a potential futurity that challenges a human-centric understanding of “reading” and “writing” and generates a type of literature that encourages a reader to better understand their own interactions within their daily digital environments.

The Many Authors Of The Several Houses Of Brian, Spencer, Liam, Victoria, Brayden, Vincent, And Alex: Authorship, Agency, And Appropriation, Zach Whalen

Journal of Creative Writing Studies

The Several Houses of Brian, Spencer, Liam, Victoria, Brayden, Vincent, and Alex is a computer-generated children’s book of 53,651 words and 350 unique illustrations arranged over 800 pages. The text is a cumulative poem in the style of the nursery rhyme “This is the House that Jack Built,” but with a house for each of the eponymous seven individuals, and with each of their houses containing many more types of things. These houses, these things, and these words were chosen by a Python script that I wrote, and the resulting novel--which can be viewed on my Github repository--is …

Atari, Creative Making & Zombie Computers: Robbo. Solucja., Piotr Marecki

Journal of Creative Writing Studies

In 1989, Janusz Pelc wrote the game Robbo on an 8-bit Atari, one of the first personal computers, which enjoyed a cult-like status in Poland before the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. Robbo, a small robot, collects screws and has to get through 56 planets. The game has achieved cult status, spawning hundreds of remixes and modifications. Beginning in the 1980s, fans (once mainly young boys, today adult men) played this game, collecting screws and running away from enemies such as bats, flying eyes, devils etc., while drinking beer, smoking cigarettes, eating crisps and telling jokes. One …

Digital Participatory Poetics And Civic Engagement In The Creative Writing Classroom, Liza D. Flum, Emily Oliver

Journal of Creative Writing Studies

This article explores the ways a team-taught course, “Public Poetry in a Digital World,” supported community-building through participatory action and digital creative making. Using digital texts responding to current events, this course fostered students’ civic imagination and invited them to make connections among their own lives, their communities and poetic civic media. This class facilitated critical community engagement through digital pedagogy and final projects in which students performed public scholarship. Ultimately, this course serves as a case study of how teaching born-digital texts with digital tools can expand the capacity of the creative writing classroom.

Toward Disruptive Creation In Digital Literature Instruction, Michael D. Clark

Journal of Creative Writing Studies

Given the multimodal and collaborative nature of digital literature along with the ways it often embodies the theories informing its artistic production, approaches to exploring both the creation and study of the form must abandon legacy pedagogies in favor of disruptive, student-driven course experiences. This work must further include explorations of digital culture, means of production, multimodal literacies, and connections with various definitions of literature ranging from print to auditory to visual forms. To accomplish this, instructors must move from more traditional hierarchical roles to those of facilitator and participant, committing consistently to returning decision-making work to the students.

Creative Writing Across Mediums And Modes: A Pedagogical Model, Saul B. Lemerond Phd

Journal of Creative Writing Studies

This is a creative practice (pedagogy) paper outlining the current formulation of my multimodal introduction to creative writing course. In this paper, I describe the course in detail, address the tensions, tradeoffs, and workarounds inherent in abandoning the traditional workshop model, describe instances of student engagement and success to illuminate this process, and endeavor to explain why high amounts of engagement and enthusiasm I get from my students concerning the content of my course is justified. My multimodal course is a generative course where my students are required to produce work in different creative modes on a near weekly basis. …

Introduction: What Is “Creative Making As Creative Writing”?, Kathi Berens

Journal of Creative Writing Studies

This special issue of the Journal of Creative Writing Studies centers on how creative writing changes when writers actively engage computers as nonhuman collaborators in “creative making.” Using examples from McGurl’s The Program Era, Emily Dickinson, and the crowdsourced “translation” of Melville’s classic into Emoji Dick, Berens suggests that creative writing methods have long been procedural and technologic.

There are many forms of creative making. This special issue features creative writers that

• Write code to output novels
• Redefine how we think of writing’s “container”
• Demonstrate aspects of the digital-first, multimodal writing classroom
• Modify or remix existing artworks

Berens supplies three …

La Literatura Latinoamericana Frente Al Nuevo Milenio: Idas Y Vueltas Entre Lo Local Y Lo Global, Félix Terrones

Artl@s Bulletin

Abordamos la literatura latinoamericana contemporánea en el ámbito global. En este sentido, nos detenemos en tres aspectos representativos. Primero, la emergencia de grupos como McOndo (Chile) y Crack (México), los cuales plantean una concepción y una práctica diferentes de la novela. Luego, la consagración internacional de la literatura de Roberto Bolaño, un autor que, hasta cierto punto, puede ser leído como heredero de cierta tradición novelesca latinoamericana. Finalmente, abordaremos la circulación internacional de la literatura latinoamericana en los últimos años, la cual no ha dejado de interrogar el caracter tanto nacional como latinoamericano.

Une Rose Des Vents Politique: The Southern Winds Of Jean Genet’S Poetic Compass, Joanne Brueton

Artl@s Bulletin

Iconoclastic French dissident, Jean Genet, notoriously channelled his hatred of the West as a way to discover the South. This article reads Genet’s admiration for the Palestinians as more than just a foil to the imperialist hegemony of a French homeland he reviled; but as a relation of equality that debunks the oppression of North-South dialectics. Tackling Éric Marty and Ivan Jablonka’s accusations of anti-Semitism, as well as criticisms of Orientalism, I use Genet’s 1982 essay ‘Quatre heures à Chatila’ to argue that his Palestinian texts radically re-orient the political compass where the North constructs and reifies a one-dimensional South.

Infidelity As Reality: Re-Staging The Global South With Abbas Kiarostami’S Close-Up, Sinan Richards

Artl@s Bulletin

In this article, we contend that, in the fields of art and visual culture, the Global South is both an elaborate lie and a radical opportunity for transformation. We investigate Kiarostami’s Close-up alongside Lacan’s psychoanalysis to show how Close-up’s filmic narrative evokes the same ‘polyvalence’ and ‘slipperiness’ as the notion of the Global South. We argue that Kiarostami’s Close-up retroactively changed Sabzian’s fate, and in so doing, Kiarostami’s re-staging actively overwrites History itself. We read the same narrative move in the concept of the Global South to suggest that the Global South adopts the Kiarostamian strategy of infidelity as reality …

Review Of Fly Already, Michael F. Russo

Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Odysseus Re-Imagined: Experimental Fiction Responds To The Call Of The Ancients- Technology And Science Fulfill Classic Epic Devices In Cloud Atlas And The Silent History, Debra Jeanette Freeland

Electronic Theses, Projects, and Dissertations

The timeless, lyrical poem of Ancient Greece, revered for its grand battles, supernatural forces and legendary heroes is a fading memory of a forgotten past. Many critics, scholars, and authors like Theodore Steinberg concur, “. . . “[the] twentieth-century epic” is oxymoronic, the epic died with Milton” (10). Yet, the echoes of the past resound in the present as the characteristics and literary conventions of the Homeric epic are easily found in contemporary genres, including fantasy, sci-fi, and dystopian fiction. What has emerged is not a repeat of the past, but something different, something new. The influence of science and …

The Ends Of Plot: Rupture And Entanglement In L’Amica Geniale, Victor X. Zarour Zarzar

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation employs narrative theory to contextualize Elena Ferrante’s successful saga, L’amica geniale, within the larger tapestry of European novelistic discourses. It engages with conceptions of narrative structure put forth by critics like Ortega y Gasset, Brooks, and Winnett to understand how L’amica geniale offers cutting commentary on our exegetic practices and advances a geometry of narrative entanglement. I contend that Ferrante recuperates and italicizes nineteenth-century modes of storytelling, displaying a form of epistemological tension rooted in a movement away from a belief in plot’s semantic potentialities and into the postulation of a poetics of smarginatura or rupture. I …

Short Stories Of Latin America From Antilles To Southern Cone, Mariana Romo-Carmona

Open Educational Resources

The study of the short story genre in Latin American literature. Literary currents in 20th century, from the Vanguards to The Boom, fiction of post dictatorships, exile, and entry into the 21st century.

Deaf Characters In Young Adult Literature, Kimberly Gangwish

Journal of Curriculum, Teaching, Learning and Leadership in Education

The multicultural literature movement has its roots in civil rights and the desire to give voice and representation to marginalized cultures. Literature is a societal artifact that can inform and influence the development of cultural identity. Deaf culture is a unique culture that is underrepresented in young adult literature. This underrepresentation places more importance on accurate representations of Deaf culture since young adult fiction may be the only exposure to Deaf culture that both hearing and deaf teenagers may have. Accurate representation in literature is necessary for deaf to see themselves in what they read and for hearing to better …

Review Of I Heart Oklahoma, Michael F. Russo

Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Female Experience Of Trauma And Mourning In Two Postconflict Novels Of El Salvador And Peru: Roza, Tumba, Quema By Claudia Hernández, And La Sangre De La Aurora By Claudia Salazar, Raquel Castro Salas

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation focuses on how literature approaches the Salvadoran and Peruvian armed conflicts and contributes with perspectives of the female experience while offering illustrations of mourning processes. It is based on a close analysis of two postconflict novels that emerged after the publication of the corresponding truth commissions final reports. These novels are Roza, tumba, quema (2017) by Claudia Hernández from El Salvador, and La sangre de la aurora (2013) by Claudia Salazar from Peru. The contributions studied in this analysis focus on two areas: (1) a problematization of the female experience of the armed conflicts, and (2) a focus …

Representations Of Domestic Workers In Modern Arabic Fiction, Samaher Aldhamen

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

In this study, I have examined the representations of domestic workers in a number of Arabic mid-century and contemporary novels, using feminism and intersectionality as my overarching framework. I employed several scholarships of feminism such as Marxist and postcolonial feminism to examine the discourse on working-class women. The initial assumption of this study is that there is a noticeable invisibility of domestic workers in Arabic novels. If these characters manage to find their way into a text, they are typically ahistorical figures whose subjectivity is not centered.

Among the Arabic novels I have examined, I found that the tradition of …

Gender In Apocalyptic California: The Ecological Frontier, Marykate Eileen Messimer

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Climate change is the consequence of ideologies that promote human reproduction and resource consumption by sacrificing human justice, nonhuman species, and the land. Both biology and queer ecologies resist this notion of human separation and supremacy by showing that no body is a singular, impermeable entity, that all beings are biologically and inexorably connected. My dissertation demonstrates that fiction writers use this knowledge to locate a utopian vision that can counteract the dystopian impotence of living within climate change. This argument is founded on novels written by women and set in California, a state that uniquely inhabits a utopian and …

A Sense Of Unending: Apocalypse And Post-Apocalypse In Novels Of Late Capitalism, Brent Linsley

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

From Frank Kermode to Norman Cohn to John Hall, scholars agree that apocalypse historically has represented times of radical change to social and political systems as older orders are wiped away and replaced by a realignment of respective norms. This paradigm is predicated upon an understanding of apocalypse that emphasizes the rebuilding of communities after catastrophe has occurred. However, in the last half-century, narratives that emphasize the destruction of human civilization without this restorative component have begun to overshadow the more historically popular post-apocalyptic models that were particularly abundant during the early days of the Cold War. In light of …