E-Literature Without the E

Since beginning to teach my digital poetics class this quarter, I find myself spending a lot of time actually trying to make it less digital. First, I brought them into the rare books archive to think about twentieth-century forms of paper-based experimentation with the page, analog recorded sound, and non-serial modes of orientation. By this point in the class, when students are working on their hypertext poems, I'm willing to accept paper prototypes, once as Ted Nelson once mocked up hypertext with "card file, notebook, index tabs, edgepunching, file folders, scissors and paste, graphic boards, index-strip frames, Xerox machine and the roll-top desk."

I was also fortunate to have Jeremy Douglass and Mark Marino come in for a day with a "locative corpse" exercise that involved objects in the room, writing on paper, and tape. See this entry on WRT for more about the exercise.