Grammalepsy: Essays on Digital Language Art

by John Cayley

Overview

Collecting and recontextualizing writings from the last twenty years of John Cayley's research-based practice of electronic literature, Grammalepsy introduces a theory of aesthetic linguistic practice developed specifically for the making and critical appreciation of language art in digital media. As he examines the cultural shift away from traditional print literature and the changes in our culture of reading, Cayley coins the term "grammalepsy" to inform those processes by which we make, understand, and appreciate language.

Framing his previous writings within the overall context of this theory, Cayley eschews the tendency of literary critics and writers to reduce aesthetic linguistic making-even when it has multimedia affordances-to "writing." Instead, Cayley argues that electronic literature and digital language art allow aesthetic language makers to embrace a compositional practice inextricably involved with digital media, which cannot be reduced to print-dependent textuality.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781501363184
Publisher:	Bloomsbury Academic
Publication date:	03/19/2020
Series:	Electronic Literature
Pages:	312
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.65(d)

About the Author

John Cayley is Professor of Literary Arts at Brown University, USA. He has practiced as a poet, translator, publisher, and bookdealer, practices which have often intersected with his training in Chinese culture and language. In addition to his internationally recognized writing on networked and programmable media, he has written two printed books of poetic work, Ink Bamboo (1996) and Image Generation (2015).

Table of Contents

List of Figures
Preface
Acknowledgements

Introduction: Grammalepsy

01. Beyond Codexspace: Potentialities of Literary Cybertext
02. Pressing the “Reveal Code” Key
03. Of Programmatology
04. The Code Is Not the Text (Unless It Is the Text)
05. Hypertext/Cybertext/Poetext
06. Writing on Complex Surfaces
07. Time Code Language
08. The Gravity of the Leaf
09. Writing to Be Found and Writing Readers
10. Weapons of the Deconstructive Masses
11. Terms of Reference & Vecotralist Transgressions
12. Reading and Giving / Voice and Language
13. Reconfiguration
14. An Instance of Aurature at the End(s) of Electronic Literature

Bibliography
Notes

Editorial Reviews

An essential book for many reasons. The quality of the author's theoretical sharpness and reflection is of course one of them, and one will find in this book an in-depth but often somewhat polemic dialogue with all the major critics and theoreticians in the field ... One can only be admiring of the pioneering and visionary dimension of these essays, often much ahead of their times.
Leonardo Music Journal

John Cayley has already had a deep and lasting influence on the fields of new media studies, electronic literature, conceptual writing, and poetics - and this long-awaited volume elegantly frames his most important critical essays as well as his artistic practice. No one has done more to theorize, and translate, the philosophical and aesthetic complexity of digital language art, and this volume will endure as the definitive compilation of Cayley's work.
Rita Raley, University of California, Santa Barbara, USA

John Cayley has been a respected figure in digital language art since his first works appeared in the 1970s. For decades, his distinctive creative approach has combined with careful, critical, erudition to continually chart new directions in the field of emerging literary practices. This collection of essays, many of which are now canonical references, tracks twenty years of Cayley's thinking about poetics, code, and composition. As for this radical new concept-grammalepsy-- as a way to understand how language is "grasped and read"-it will no doubt have a long-term ripple effect through the multiple domains of linguistic discourse.
Johanna Drucker, Breslauer Professor of Bibliographical Studies, UCLA, USA

From the Publisher