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My Digital Dickinson
Abstract
“My Digital Dickinson†is partly a productive misreading of Dickinson in relation to digital technologies and the idea of interface, but it also delves into work by the contemporary digital poets Mary Flanagan and Judd Morrissey/Lori Talley. In addition to reading Dickinson into the present moment and examining her relation to digital poetry today, it foregrounds the ways in which the digital now permeates our reading/writing habits and thus examines the ways in which our current cultural moment may be a productive frame for reading Dickinson.
In her article "Intermedial Strategies and Memory in Contemporary Novels" Sara Tanderup discusses a tendency in contemporary literature towards combining intermedial experiments with a thematic preoccupation with memory and trauma. Analyzing selected works by Steven Hall, Jonathan Safran Foer, and Judd Morrissey and drawing on the theoretical perspectives of N. Katherine Hayles (media studies) and Andreas Huyssen (cultural memory studies), Tanderup argues that recent intermedial novels reflect a certain nostalgia celebrating and remembering the book as a visual and material object in the age of digital media while also highlighting the influence of new media on our cultural understanding and representation of memory and the past.
Recent criticism of Dickinson's work, written by both manuscript scholars and poets, largely ignores her poems' use of meter in order to characterize them as experimental avant la lettre and predominantly visual in emphasis. Formalist poets, surprisingly, show equally little interest in Dickinson's metrical poems. This essay argues that Dickinson was an innovator of poetic meter. I suggest that by playing rhetorical dashes against the well-known templates of her favored shorter meters, Dickinson multiplies "ghosts of meter," thus revealing uncanny and even transgressive elements at work within the metrical project itself.
Twenty-first century literature is computational, from electronic works to print books created as digital files and printed by digital presses. To create an appropriate theoretical framework, the concept of intermediation is proposed, in which recursive feedback loops join human and digital cognizers to create emergent complexity. To illustrate, Michael Joyce's afternoon is compared and contrasted with his later Web work, Twelve Blue. Whereas afternoon has an aesthetic and interface that recall print practices, Twelve Blue takes its inspiration from the fluid exchanges of the Web. Twelve Blue instantiates intermediation by creating coherence not through linear sequences but by recursively cycling between associated images. Intermediation is further explored through Maria Mencia's digital art work and Judd Morrissey's The Jew's Daughter and its successor piece, The Error Engine, by Morrissey, Lori Talley, and Lutz Hamel.