French Literature Reviews - 2026
A. Morris and T. Swiss (eds), New Media Poetics. Contexts, Technotexts, and Theories
Poetry and Poetics
MORRIS, Adalaide and Thomas SWISS (eds), New Media Poetics. Contexts, Technotexts, and Theories, MIT Press, 2006, 416 p.
ISBN: 0-262-13463-2
New media poetry—poetry composed, disseminated, and read on computers—exists in various configurations, ranging from electronic documents that users can navigate and/or rearrange to kinetic, visual, and sound-based works featured in online journals and archives such as UbuWeb, PennSound, and the Electronic Poetry Center. Unlike mainstream print poetry, which presumes a bounded, coherent, and self-conscious speaker, new media poetry posits a synergy between human beings and intelligent machines. The essays and artist statements collected in this volume examine both the continuities and the ruptures between this synergy and traditional poetic practices, while also exploring its profound implications for the future.
By integrating new media poetry into the study of hypertext narratives, interactive fiction, computer games, and other digital art forms, New Media Poetics broadens our comprehension of the computer as an expressive medium. It highlights works that are visually striking, acoustically vibrant, and dynamic, while tracing the lineage of new media poetry through print and sound poetics, procedural writing, gestural abstraction, conceptual art, and activist communities forged by emergent poetries.
Contributors:
Giselle Beiguelman, John Cayley, Alan Filreis, Loss Pequeño Glazier, Alan Golding, Kenneth Goldsmith, N. Katherine Hayles, Cynthia Lawson, Jennifer Ley, Talan Memmott, Adalaide Morris, Carrie Noland, Marjorie Perloff, William Poundstone, Martin Spinelli, Stephanie Strickland, Brian Kim Stefans, Barrett Watten, Darren Wershler-Henry
Adalaide Morris is John C. Gerber Professor of English at the University of Iowa.
Thomas Swiss is Professor of English and Rhetoric of Inquiry at the University of Iowa.
This collection situates electronic literature within the broader history of avant-garde and experimental writing. By linking digital poetry to historical movements like conceptual art, concrete poetry, and procedural writing, the contributors demonstrate that digital creativity is not a sudden rupture but an evolution of older formal experiments. The volume explores how the transition from print to digital screens alters the relationship between the author, the text, and the machine. It introduces readers to key concepts in digital humanities, examining how code, kinetic typography, and interactivity redefine the boundaries of literary expression.
Scholars and students of contemporary literature, media studies, and digital art will find this book highly valuable. It addresses fundamental questions about how authorship and reading practices change when texts become interactive, multimodal, and algorithmic. By analyzing platforms like UbuWeb and the Electronic Poetry Center, the essays offer practical frameworks for interpreting works that merge sound, image, and code. Ultimately, the volume serves as an essential guide for anyone seeking to understand how digital technologies expand the aesthetic possibilities of language beyond the traditional printed page.