The Digital Ecology of Canadian Experimental Writing
Quoi:
Talk
Partie de:
Quand:
8:30 AM, mercredi 15 août 2018
(1 heure 15 minutes)
Où:
Pavillon J.-A. DeSève (DS) UQAM -
DS-1420
Comment:
Discussion:
0
In the conclusion of *Literary History of Canada: Canadian Literature in
English* (1965), Northrop Frye asserts that there “is no Canadian
writer of whom we can say what we can say of the world’s major writers,
that their readers can grow up inside their work without ever being
aware of a circumference” (821). This paper will partly push against
this tendency in Canadian literary criticism and will consider a select
instance of Canadian electronic literature. In Frye’s terms, “Canadian
sensibility” is “profoundly disturbed” not only by “our famous problem
of identity,” which can be, in part, summarized by the question of
“[w]ho am I?,” but by the question of “[w]here is here?” (826). I claim
that *here* in the question of “where is here?” has become digital;
i.e., “we” (as in Canadian writers and critics) are now online and not
in the prairies or the lakes or the cityscapes and we live lives in
which our identities (along with the potentiality of a national
identity) have been outsourced to an indefinite electronic space.
Identity is experienced through the mirrors of technological avatars and
doubles in a mise en abyme of electronic spacelessness. I call it
“spacelessness” because the ontology of this “space”—the space of the
digital—is indiscrete and indefinite; it remains, to put it in the terms
of Alan Liu (when applying Derrida’s notion of the transcendental
signified to “data pours” [“59]), “transcendent” (62). Extrapolating
from Liu, the space of electronic literature should be conceived as
being “transcendent” as opposed to “immanent”—to use a Deleuzoguattarian
term—but this notion of transcendence is unique in that a materiality
of space is nonetheless configured through the complicated interplay of
technological and subjective doubling, which renders materiality in very
new terms and in a very new place. To put this argument differently, I
would say that the emergence of Canadian electronic literature is still
concerned with the question of “where is here,” but now the orientation
of here is situated in a very different notion of “environment.” This
new notion of environment is no longer a directly “Canadian”
environment—an environment of mountains, trees, fields, prairies, lakes,
and rivers that is inhabited by moose, geese, humans, and various other
non-humans—but rather an environment that features an extreme plurality
and a profound lack of both subjectivity and space. The electronic
environment that is presented by Canadian electronic literature is not a
void-space of subjective inexistence, but a material space of
sociocultural heterogeneity; in other words, it is a space that is
constituted as a vague, expansive, and indefinite commons.
This argument will be primarily grounded in an in-depth analysis of Darren Wershler’s *NICHOLODEON* and *NICHOLODEONLINE* (but many other examples will be considered as well). *NICHOLODEONLINE* is akin to an archaeological locale that requires nonlinear apprehension: the text does not progress in a linear fashion (as it does in the print version for example), but rather proceeds through the nonlinear processes of clicking through the various pathways of what could be called its “ganglion” (a term that is very important for bpNichol).
This argument will be primarily grounded in an in-depth analysis of Darren Wershler’s *NICHOLODEON* and *NICHOLODEONLINE* (but many other examples will be considered as well). *NICHOLODEONLINE* is akin to an archaeological locale that requires nonlinear apprehension: the text does not progress in a linear fashion (as it does in the print version for example), but rather proceeds through the nonlinear processes of clicking through the various pathways of what could be called its “ganglion” (a term that is very important for bpNichol).