Hypertext detractors

The second half of this century has seen the rise of three modes of electronic performance that happen to be short: the sitcom, the music video, and the sound bite.

New forms always attract critics, and these three have never lacked for detractors. Many have argued that these forms are debased by their brevity, and that electronic media are responsible for shortening our attention spans. In some quarters. These popular genres are dismissed as superficial spectacles that titillate and numb the debased tastes of the masses.

In the same vein, New Media -- notably hypermedia -- are widely assumed to appeal to the same demands for spectacle and brevity. Multimedia edutainment, for example, is praised by its supporters for its appeal to the "MTV generation" while detractors decry youth's loss of immersion in the pages of a good book.

But cultural observers always decry the debased tastes of youth. Our grandparents and great-grandparents fought for jazz and Joyce and D.H. Lawrence against the sneers of their elders. Young Romans flocked to hear Catullus and Ovid even as senators declared their poetry a threat to the commonwealth.

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Contemporary Poetics by Louis Armand

Exploring the boundaries of one of the most contested fields of literary study - a field that in fact shares territory with philology, aesthetics, cultural theory, philosophy, and even cybernetics - this volume gathers a body of critical writings that, taken together, broadly delineate a possible poetics of the contemporary.

In these essays, the most interesting and distinguished theorists in the field renegotiate the contours of what might constitute "contemporary poetics," ranging from the historical advent of concrete poetry to the current technopoetics of cyberspace. Concerned with a poetics that extends beyond our own time, as a mere marker of present-day literary activity, their work addresses the limits of a writing "practice" - beginning with Stephane Mallarme in the late nineteenth century - that engages concretely with what it means to be contemporary. Charles Bernstein's Swiftian satire of generative poetics and the textual apparatus, together with Marjorie Perloff's critical-historical treatment of "writing after" Bernstein and other proponents of language poetry, provides an itinerary of contemporary poetics in terms of both theory and practice.

The other essays consider "precursors," recognizable figures within the histories or prehistories of contemporary poetics, from Kafka and Joyce to Wallace Stevens and Kathy Acker; "conjunctions," in which more strictly theoretical and poetical texts enact a concerted engagement with rhetoric, prosody, and the vicissitudes of "intelligibility"; "cursors," which points to the open possibilities of invention, from Augusto de Campos's "concrete poetics" to the "codework" of Alan Sondheim; and "transpositions," defining the limits of poetic invention by way of technology.

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Political context

Literature and culture cannot be separated from their social and political context.

We must careful attention to both form and content in elaborating the political significance of cultural artifacts, and a strong commitment to the necessity for a utopian element in critical thought.

For instance, Jameson's work is marked by a sophisticated use of concepts from poststructuralist, psychoanalytic, and other forms of critical thought, but it remains firmly rooted in the Marxist tradition. It also provides an important methodological model in its insistence on the importance of a metacritical approach—that is, on criticism that not only discusses its object but also performs self-conscious critical examinations of the grounds of its own inquiry.

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See that post with different algorithms in metabole
See the journal French Metablog with today different posts

Writing as a one-way ticket

Writing is a task that no two people do the same way.

However, there are some logical steps that every writer seems to follow in the creation of a paper. The process described beneath this text outlines those basic steps. Keep in mind that these steps are not exclusive of each other, and at times they can be rather liquid. Also, writers will notice that most of these steps are reciprocal; that is, work done in one area may necessitate returning to a step that you have already "completed."

Invention
Critical
Thesis
Organization
Paragraphing
Word-Processing
RevisionDocumentation
Proofreading
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