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Digital Culture and the New Modernity

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Abstract

There is little to be gained from seeking to isolate any artistic form or movement from its antecedents and counterparts. Myopia is the product of critical segregation, wherein readers disengage practices from those contexts that have forged their contours. This might seem obvious, but there is value in rearticulating the axiomatic in times of transformation—when something “new” emerges, many of us fall into the trap of isolating our darlings, whether old or young, from all those other contexts that play a significant role in their construction. How does one look at electronic literature without considering the literary, the ludic, that which we can see, touch, and hear—how does one look critically at anything without such frames of reference, and how do we overcome natural limitations in capacity when attempting to do so? The best we can do is look to those who have gone before, build upon their foundation, and indeed, emphasise those aspects of an exploration we deem worthy of greater emphasis.

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O’Sullivan, J. (2019). Digital Culture and the New Modernity. In: Towards a Digital Poetics. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-11310-0_1

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