Digital Modernism: Making it New in New Media

Digital Modernism examines how and why some of the most innovative works of online electronic literature adapt and allude to literary modernism. Digital literature has been celebrated as a postmodern form that grows out of contemporary technologies, subjectivities, and aesthetics, but this book provides an alternative genealogy. Exemplary cases show electronic literature looking back to modernism for inspiration and source material (in content, form, and ideology) through which to critique contemporary culture. In so doing, this literature renews and reframes, rather than rejects, a literary tradition that it also reconfigures to center around media. To support her argument, Pressman pairs modernist works by Pound, Joyce, and Bob Brown, with major digital works like William Poundstone"s "Project for the Tachistoscope: [Bottomless Pit]" (2005), Young-hae Chang Heavy Industries"s Dakota, and Judd Morrissey"s The Jew"s Daughter. With each pairing, she demonstrates how the modernist...