Wednesday, September 21, 2011

It's called pastiche ...

... Uncreative Writing - The Chronicle Review - The Chronicle of Higher Education. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

Today technology has exacerbated these mechanistic tendencies in writing (there are, for instance, several Web-based versions of Raymond Queneau's 1961 laboriously hand-constructedHundred Thousand Billion Poems), inciting younger writers to take their cues from the workings of technology and the Web as ways of constructing literature. As a result, writers are exploring ways of writing that have been thought, traditionally, to be outside the scope of literary practice: word processing, databasing, recycling, appropriation, intentional plagiarism, identity ciphering, and intensive programming, to name just a few.

1 comment:

  1. As much as I admire Mr. Goldsmith for many of his activities like Ubuweb, here he's mostly trying to justify what he wants to do, and he's on shaky ground.

    A few of the comments are quite pithy, because they point out the false premises that arguments like this are based on.

    A fascinating read, nonetheless, even though only half-convincing.

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