Seminar in Digital Literary Studies

Digital Literary Studies

Class Readings

Patricia Cohen's "Humanities Scholars Embrace Digital Technologies" from the New York Times' Humanities 2.0 series, November 2010
To Read or Not to Read: a Question of National Consequence, a 2007 report by the NEA
"How Reading is Being Reimagined", a response by Matthew Kirschenbaum
"Agony on The Cave", from McKenzie Wark's electronic book "Gamer Theory"on if:book.
Franco Moretti's "Graphs, Maps, Trees" from the New Left Review, 2003.
Bruno Latour's "Beware, Your Imagination Leaves Digital Traces" from the London Times, 2007.
John Unsworth's "Scholarly Primitives" from a symposium at King's College London, 2000.
Reading Graphs, Maps, and Trees, a collection of responses to Moretti (Essays 1, 3, & 7).
Gerard Genette's "Introduction to the Paratext" from NLH 22, 1991.
My own annotated Moretti, for fun and function.
Our own review notes, from class on 2/29.

Nature and Significance of Play as a Cultural Phenomenon, by Johan Huizinga
The Game, the Player, and the World, by Jesper Juul
The Great Gatsby Game, by Charlie Hoey and Pete Smith
Jason Rohrer's Games (including Gravitation, Between, and Passage), from Sourceforge
Daniel Benmergui's Moon Stories Trilogy: I Wish I Were the Moon, Today I Die, and Storyteller (Requires Flash-- no iPhone/iTouch/Android)
Ian Bogost's Debt Ski, a flash-based web game
Daniel Benmergui's Storyteller (Requires Flash-- no iPhone/iTouch/Android)
A blog post describing how Storyteller works and what it attempts
Another blog post describing Storyteller's evolution towards narrativity and lying
A video of Storyteller winning a Nuovo award (and check out the competition!)
Spectre, a downloadable flash-based game for Mac or PC
My reading notes on Huizinga's concept of Play
Chapter Four of First Person: New Media as Story, Performance, and Game, edited by Noah Wardrip-Fruin and Pat Harrigan