Literature in the Digital Age

3 or 4 Credits · Level: Graduate, Undergraduate

Ours is the first generation to study literature in the digital age. E-books are outselling paperbacks; online scholarly databases are superseding library stacks; new works are being composed, distributed, and consumed electronically. How fundamental is this shift toward digitization? How does it affect the nature of the literary text, and how does it impact our work as readers and critics? Engaging with digital archives and computational techniques in literary analysis, we will ask what new insights we can gain into literature once it is digitized. Is the digital age making literature more accessible, more inclusive, and more interactive? Or will the digital age, with its many multimedia distractions, make literature obsolete? This course explores the interpretive and creative possibilities opened up by the shift from print to digital forms, as well as the social consequences of this transition. We will use computer-assisted analysis and visualization to ask new questions about literature. By studying the technical foundations for the production of digital texts, we will learn how the encoding of literary texts affects the questions we can ask of them. By analyzing digital-born forms such as webcomics, hypertext, interactive fiction, flash poetry, and video games, we will question how such texts alter the role of the reader, change the nature of narrative, and affect the task of interpretation.