Course Detail

008:173:001 Topics in Digital Media

Department: English
Chair: Claire Sponsler
308 English Philosophy Building (EPB), 335-0455
Web site: http://www.english.uiowa.edu
General Catalog: http://www.registrar.uiowa.edu/registrar/catalog/liberalartsandsciences/english/

Rhetoric (or its equivalent by transfer) is a prerequisite for courses in this department.
Admin College: College of Liberal Arts and Sciences
Description:

This course provides an overview of the emergent field of literature composed, disseminated, read, and archived on computers. Working with a mix of print and electronic materials, we’ll explore the contexts in which electronic literature is created, played, and interpreted, survey its major genres, and examine a number of theoretical issues raised by the shift to the discourse network of the digital.

In addition to technotexts of all sorts, readings for the course will include examinations of the transition from orality to literacy, print to electronic information processing. We’ll look at writing created by hacking, file-sharing, sampling, mixing, and plundering; read algorithmic and procedural poems; click through on-line graphic narratives; engage imaginative structures built in virtual worlds; and construct a lineage of innovation in which these and other electronic literatures make sense.

Theorists and cultural critics on the roster include Espen Aarseth, Walter Benjamin, John Cayley, Donna Haraway, N. Katherine Hayles, Lev Manovich, Talan Memmott, and McKenzie Wark. Our four main texts will be:

Espen Aarseth. Cybertext: Perspectives on Ergodic Literature.

N. Katherine Hayles. Electronic Literature.

DJ Spooky. Rhythm Science.

McKenzie Wark. A Hacker Manifesto.

Course work will include regular posts on a discussion board, class presentations, travelogues from Second Life, digital experiments, position statements on new media issues, experiments with a wiki, and, for a final project, an annotated bibliography, prospectus, and essay. Students should be comfortable with computers, have access to a fast internet connection, and enjoy the glitches that happen in new vectors of information.

This course is taught by Dee Morris.

English majors may apply this course to the following area and/or period requirement. AREA: Literary Theory and Interdisciplinary Studies. PERIOD: 20th- and/or 21st-Century Literature.
Subtitle: New Media Poetics
Approved GE: None
Prerequisites: None
Corequisites: None


Course # Title Hrs Spe Req Cur Opt Status
008:173:001 Topics in Digital Media
Subtitle: New Media Poetics
Instructor: Adalaide Morris
Time & Location: 10:55A - 12:10P TTh 209 EPB
3 s.h. 19 30 Open