The Baroque Technotext: Literature in a Dgtl Mediascape

To date, most criticism of print and dgtl technotexts – literary objects that foreground the role of their media of inscription – has emphasized the avant-garde contexts of a text’s production. The Baroque Technotext opens new perspectives on this important and innovative literary canon, analysing the role of baroque and neo-baroque aesthetics in the emergence and possible futures of technotexts. Combining the insights of poststructuralist theory of the baroque, postcolonial theory of the neobaroque, and insightful critique of the prevailing modernist approaches to technotexts, The Baroque Technotext reframes critical debate of contemporary experiments in literary practice in the late age of print. Analyses of works from authors including Jonathan Safran Foer, Chris Ware and David Clark are matched with reflections on other media texts – film, visual art and interface design – that have adopted baroque aesthetic tropes.

About the Author

Elise Takehana is associate professor of English studies at Fitchburg State University in Massachusetts. Her research interests include composition and rhetoric, media studies, aesthetics and twentieth- and twenty-first-century text production.

Elise Takehana, assistant professor of English studies, teaches writing and twentieth-century and twenty-first-century literature at Fitchburg State University. Her research interests include composition and rhetoric, media studies, aesthetics, and twentieth- and twenty-first-century text production. She is currently researching baroque aesthetics and their application across contemporary print and dgtl literature. Forthcoming articles by Professor Takehana include 'Prying open the oyster: Creating a dgtl learning space from the Robert Cormier Archive' in The ALAN Review and 'The shape of thought: Humanity in dgtl, literary texts' in Comunicazioni sociali . Recent articles include 'Can you murder a novel?' in Hybrid Pedagogy , 'Baroque computing: Interface and the subject-object divide' in Design, Mediation and the Post-Human (Lexington Books), and 'Porous boundaries in Virginia Woolf’s The Waves : Anticipating a dgtl composition and subjectivity' in Cross Culture Studies .