I just submitted a proposal titled “Bridging the Gap: Close Reading Digital Poetry” for the NEH Summer Stipends grant program. Here’s the abstract:
This proposal seeks to introduce electronic literature into mainstream academia by writing two articles for publication in conventional, high-impact literary journals. Each article will perform a close reading of an electronic poem by David Knoebel, a poet and multimedia artist who publishes in his website Click Poetry since 1996. The poems “A Fine View” (2000) and “Thoughts Go” (2001) are intense lyrical experiences that challenge our preconceptions about poetry by reconfiguring the poetic line in space, time. The goal is to demystify electronic literature by employing a technique that is foundational to literary study, close reading, and updating it with media-specific analysis and critical code studies. Through these articles I seek to bridge the gap between generations of scholars raised with critical tools and texts devised for print and new scholars and students shaped by texts in networks and digital media.