The Literature of Exclusion: Dada, Data, and the Threshold of Electronic Literature

Wenaus, Andrew C.

ISBN 10: 1793614636 / ISBN 13: 9781793614636

Published by Lexington Books, 2021

May have limited writing in cover pages. Pages are unmarked. ~ ThriftBooks: Read More, Spend Less. Seller Inventory # G1793614636I4N00

Synopsis:

In the early twentieth century, the Dadaists protested against art, nationalism, the individual subject, and technologized war. With their automatic anti-art and cultural disruptiveness, Dadaists sought to “signify no thing.” Today, data also operates autonomously. However, rather than dismantling tradition, data organizes, selects, combines, quantifies, and simplifies the complexity of actuality. Like Dada, data also signifies nothing. While Dadaists protest with purpose, data proceeds without intention. The individual in the early twentieth century agonizes over the alienation from daily life and the fear of being converted into a cog in a machine. Today, however, the individual in twenty-first-century supermodernity merges, not with large industrial machinery, but with the processual and procedural logic of programming with innocuous ease. Both exclude human agency from self-narration but to differing degrees of abstraction. Examining the work of B.R. Yeager, Samuel Beckett, Jeff Noon, Kenji Siratori, Mike Bonsall, Allison Parrish, and narratives written by artificial intelligence, Wenaus considers the threshold of sensible narration and the effects that the shift from a culture of language to a culture of digital code has on lived experience. While data offers a closed system, Dadaist literature of exclusion, he suggests, promises a future of open, hyper-contingent, unprescribed alternatives for self-narration.

About the Author: Andrew C. Wenaus is assistant professor in the department of English and writing studies at the University of Western Ontario.

Bibliographic Details

Title: The Literature of Exclusion: Dada, Data, and...
Publisher: Lexington Books
Publication Date: 2021
Binding: Hardcover
Condition: Very Good
Dust Jacket Condition: No Jacket