Plain Text

Dennis Tenen

Published by Stanford University Press 2017

Plain Text

The Poetics of Computation

Dennis Tenen

https://doi.org/10.1515/9781503602342

Overview
Contents

About this book

Plain Text offers a rich media history of software and hardware that reflects critically on the material contexts of knowledge production, that is, on the way we read and write today.

Author information

Dennis Tenen is Assistant Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University, where he is a Co-Founder of Columbia's Group for Experimental Research Methods in the Humanities.

Reviews

Ray Siemens:
"An essential read for those interested in text in its many contemporary cultural contexts and points of impact—Tenen moves from strength to strength across (inter)disciplinary points of engagement with a welcome personal acuity."

Matthew Fuller, Goldsmiths:
"Plain Text shows us that text is anything but plain—this is a sharp and imaginative contribution to the debates around what it means to produce, read, and process texts in the era of digital culture."

Johanna Drucker:
"Plain Text stands out as a media study that attends to the historical roots of debates about form and format in language. Tenen's valuable connections between long-standing critical engagements with poetic composition and current digital writing practices emerge from precise and informed attention to his sources."

Jan Baetens:
"This book is not just about opening the black box of digital reading and writing, the devices and programs we use to do so, or the digital turn of our culture. Written by an English and Comparative Literature professor who is also a trained engineer and a migrant having moved from post-Soviet Russia to the "global" North-West, Plain Text is a vibrant call to rethink the two culture debate in broad cultural and political terms."

James Edward Draney:
"Ask yourself: When I write on a computer, where does that writing reside? Is it there, on the word document, or is it buried deep inside the hard drive? Does literature actually end in cryptograms, in the layers of encoding deep beneath the liquid light of a laptop screen? These are the questions at the heart of Dennis Tenen's important and engaging book. We're lost among the copper, the cables, the formats, the terms and conditions. Tenen's Plain Text provides a lucid and legible map to our often vertiginous computational climate."

N. Katherine Hayles:
"Plain Text adds to the impressive work of such computationally savvy theorists as Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, Alexander Galloway, Alan Liu, Rita Raley, and others to make a clear, forceful case for computational poetics as a necessary literary practice in the digital age. "

Topics

Frontmatter Publicly Available Download PDF	i
CONTENTS Publicly Available Download PDF	vii
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Publicly Available Download PDF	ix
COMPUTATIONAL POETICS. An Introduction Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	1
CHAPTER 1. METAPHOR MACHINES Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	23
CHAPTER 2. LAYING BARE THE DEVICE The Modernist Roots of Computation Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	55
CHAPTER 3. FORM, FORMULA, FORMAT Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	93
CHAPTER 4. RECONDITE SURFACES Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	131
CHAPTER 5. LITERATURE DOWN TO A PIXEL Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	165
CONCLUSION. Human Grounds for Computation Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	197
NOTES Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	205
BIBLIOGRAPHY Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	231
INDEX Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	259

Language: English
Publisher: Stanford University Press
Audience: Professional and scholarly;
Pages
- Main content: 280
Keywords: technology; history; media; digital; literary theory; text; code; humanism; software; hardware

eBook

Published: June 20, 2017
ISBN: 9781503602342