Reading Writing Interfaces

"Emerson’s book is not only fascinating because of the richness of its close-readings or the thought-provoking frictions that it creates between historically, technologically, culturally, ideologically very diverse authors and practices. Its most appealing aspect is the political stance it takes towards its material."—Image (&) Narrative

"Reading Writing Interfaces draws our attention back to the materiality of digital languages, reveals the underlying processes of writing, and makes visible the interfaces through which we read/write our world."—The Literary Platform

"A useful contribution to the understanding of the digital."—CHOICE

"With cogent analyses of both analogue and digital literature, Emerson renders legible the historical and contemporary instantiations of the interface that have been masked from the user by the sleek celebratory language of marketing."—Jacket2

"This works succeeds in accomplishing the rare goal of being pioneering and engaging."—International Journal of Communication

Lori Emerson examines how interfaces—from today’s multitouch devices to yesterday’s desktops, from typewriters to Emily Dickinson’s self-bound fascicle volumes—mediate between writer and text as well as between writer and reader. Following the threads of experimental writing from the present into the past, she shows how writers have long tested and transgressed technological boundaries.

Reading the means of production as well as the creative works they produce, Emerson demonstrates that technologies are more than mere tools and that the interface is not a neutral border between writer and machine but is in fact a collaborative creative space. Reading Writing Interfaces begins with digital literature’s defiance of the alleged invisibility of ubiquitous computing and multitouch in the early twenty-first century and then looks back at the ideology of the user-friendly graphical user interface that emerged along with the Apple Macintosh computer of the 1980s. She considers poetic experiments with and against the strictures of the typewriter in the 1960s and 1970s and takes a fresh look at Emily Dickinson’s self-printing projects as a challenge to the coherence of the book.

Through archival research, Emerson offers examples of how literary engagements with screen-based and print-based technologies have transformed reading and writing. She reveals the ways in which writers—from Emily Dickinson to Jason Nelson and Judd Morrissey—work with and against media interfaces to undermine the assumed transparency of conventional literary practice.

Lori Emerson is assistant professor of English, as well as the founder and director of the Media Archaeology Lab at the University of Colorado at Boulder.

Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction: Opening Closings

1. Indistinguishable from Magic: Invisible Interfaces and Digital Literature as Demystifier2. From the Philosophy of the Open to the Ideology of the User-Friendly3. Typewriter Concrete Poetry as Activist Media Poetics4. The Fascicle as Process and Product

Postscript: The Googlization of LiteratureNotesIndex