Timothy Wilcox has a PhD in English and studies computer-based writing, British Romanticism, imagination, and the wider context of literary shifts within the digital age.
Literature Yet to Come
Poetry has reacted to the digital age in many ways. Next week, we will be looking at some generative poetry, one approach to crafting a fundamentally computer-based poem. Even for crafting something for print, there are practices such as Flarf, mining search results to produce outrageous texts. Alternatively, Mez Breeze
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PreCursor Monthly — August 2020 If you have not been following along with my "Literature and Hyperconnectivity" posts, I recommend reading through them. On July 17, I sent out Week 2: Digital Mirrors, in which I discussed three digital epistolary narratives. This sort of writing – making significant use of
Literature Yet to Come
Heroic Twitter In 1981, William Gibson published a short story in which a man (the titular "Johnny Mnemonic") stores and transports data in his head. With the help of a cybernetically-enhanced woman and a cyborg dolphin, he takes on the Yakuza and starts to retrieve his own lost
Literature Yet to Come
One reasonable thought with anything new is: how might this ruin absolutely everything? We are focusing on the 2010s, but looking back to some cyberpunk predecessors, the genre is centrally dystopian. In cyberpunk, though, the technology is often a secondary factor in the anxiety: high-end technology expands economic inequality, it
Literature Yet to Come
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Last week, I introduced some of the general terrain of literature in the 2010s and the challenges which limit the turn toward writing which captures the texture of digital life. If you have not read that, you can find it here [https://www.precursorpoets.com/hyperconnectivity-week1/]. If the goal
Literature Yet to Come
If you have not yet seen it, here is the full syllabus for "Literature and Hyperconnectivity": Literature and HyperconnectivityTo receive the course content, sign up below for free: Your email address Subscribe Now check your inbox and click the link to confirmyour subscription. Please enter a valid email
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I wrote about three things this past month: * A strain in Samuel Taylor Coleridge's poetry of concern toward the upbringing and mental life of future generations. ("A Love of Future Existence") * A celebration of Bloomsday, focusing on James Joyce's vision of love and rebirth
Literature Yet to Come
A literary exploration of the art of cancellation as understood through Zadie Smith's "Now More Than Ever" and Evan Harris' Suspended. There are among us extraordinary artists, though the artistry of their craft is little acknowledged. We must occasionally review the scope of what we
Literature Past
Falling for, or falling with, "Sirens" in Ulysses and Finnegans Wake. The "Sirens" chapter of James Joyce's novel Ulysses opens with an overture. As is standard with Ulysses, each chapter is very distinct in style, in accordance with the form. Here the chapter is
Literature Past
Three glimpses into Romantic poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge's cottage in the late 1790s show us instead a vision of future generations. Coleridge published many poems in 1796, but particularly interesting are the two which critics group as the first of his "conversation poems." "The Eolian
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PreCursor Monthly — June 2020 I recently wrote about two novels from the Spring of 2019 both imagining a grand pause as the global Internet is wiped out. As I discuss there, it's fictional on the surface, true at the core. One year later and we're living
Literature Yet to Come
The Internet got wiped out last year, twice. Why? In March of 2019, Tim Maughan published Infinite Detail, and in June, Karen An-hwei Lee published The Maze of Transparencies. These two very different novels are structured around imagining a complete global collapse of the Internet and the far-reaching effects of