Jessica Pressman, Ph.D.

UCLA Department of English
jessicapressman@sbcglobal.net

.Current Book Project .

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Digital Modernism: Making it New in New Media
A prominent strategy in electronic literature is the appropriation and adaptation — the “remediation”— of literary modernism. Across narrative genres and programming platforms, I identify a sub-set of electronic literature that share a strategy of appropriating, adapting, and alluding to the poetics, politics, and seminal texts of literary modernism. These works claim a canonical literary heritage that validates their own formal experimentation and authorizes the challenge they pose to mainstream digital literature. The works I call “digital modernist” confront our expectations about electronic literature: they resist the extensive and expected possibilities of their medium— navigation, accessibility, and interactivity— in favor of foregrounding text, typography, and difficulty in narrative. In so doing, they reinscribe a focus on the “literary” into our digital culture and online reading practices. This dissertation examines how and why experimental electronic literature returns to the cultural principles and poetic practices of modernism as a means to "MAKE IT NEW" in new media.

*The dissertation version of this project (filed June 2007) was honored as the UCLA Graduate Division’s Humanities Nominee for the national Distinguished Dissertation Award.

To read a sample chapter (forthcoming in Modern Fiction Studies) click here; (you will need Adobe Acrobat Reader to access the pdf file).

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