Steve Ersinghaus

Dan Green writes:
I’d have to say that the discipline of literary study has become more than unmoored and confused. I’m afraid that “the overt hostility to aesthetic questions in certain quarters,” as Jonathan puts it, has become the mainstream attitude among academic literary critics. Some writers might still be valued because they can be used [...]

I wrote this in my second essay on Lust, Reading the Link II:
Pablo Picasso illuminated the object by examining an object’s numerous surfaces, making the object strange, disorienting, beautiful in its strangeness and multi-surfaced orientation. In doing so, he presented the object in an almost imperceptible light. For Picasso, the object is not just [...]

Later tonight I must clarify and fix the idea of “making the object imperceptible.” It’s not right. There’s something else going on with this, a problem with two competing ideas:
1. Complexity: the object or action is made more complicated, thus illuminated. This needs further analysis.
2. Confluence: the context of complexity.

I saw an amazing image on the news tonight. There was a story on a building where swastikas had been painted on its walls. A blotter had been used in the video to “erase” the symbol from the field of view. What was the digital blotter supposed to be hiding? Something, [...]

It’s time to do a little essaying, proposing an idea and a reading.
In Lust, a woman (and others within the space of this hypertext) struggles with the powerful force of memory and recounting. She’s encouraged to “Try” but fails to remember a significant event. She remembers other details related to it but can never [...]

Mary-Kim Arnold in Lust writes of John and Jeffrey. John has “sand colored hair and eyes of sea” and Jeffrey “had a past. He wrapped it around him like a blanket to keep him warm, to keep him safe from harm.” But “she” the unnamed point of view of Lust “has no need for [...]

This conversation between Mark Bernstein and J. D. Hollis is interesting. Hollis writes:
That’s why it surprises me that Tinderbox hasn’t replaced Visio et al as the de facto IA environment. Visio is for dead trees.
P.S.: I wonder the same.

I agree with this entirely, especially on the theme of editing for compressed intensity. The only difference with Sandoval was that the amount of text spaces made editing a several years process. There’s still much to do with novel, too. The editing never ends.

I’ve been writing swiftly through the first few essays on reading hypertext, and I have several beginnings on the next three issues on single readings, another diversion, and to the idea of character. But now I don’t know which one to run with first. I’d also like to go back and fix some stylistic issues [...]

Lots of people are worried about what to call the age we live in: is it post-post modern; the cyber age; the information age; the age of globalization; or is it just now, which doesn’t help? I have no idea. But I like to think about it. I disagree, number one, with periodization. The [...]

I started this Part Five on reading hypertext in exactly the wrong way: by beginning with a subject I’m really not interested in exploring at this moment: literary criticism. This is not a critique of criticism: I’m not really interesting in discounting an area of thought that for some may show evidence of appeal and [...]

In an essay titled Navigating Electronic Literature in Electronic Literature: New Horizons for the Literary, Jessica Pressman writes:
Navigating a nonlinear narrative such as a hypertext, or a related form like Andrews’s stir frys, demonstrates how electronic literature challenges expectations associated with and codified around print-based reading practices. Since hypertexts are structured as networks rather than [...]

Milton writes, “Of Mans First Disobedience, and the Fruit / Of that Forbidden Tree, whose mortal tast / Brought Death into the World, and all our woe” (I.1-3). These first few lines don’t make a lot of sense until the reader arrives at line 6, which begins “Sing Heav’nly Muse” and even then the [...]

As a literature teacher I have experience with all kinds of readers, people who enter the classroom with very few books and people who come with enormous background in numerous kinds of texts. All of them are fine people and they really don’t need my assistance with their lives or decisions. But the classroom comes [...]

A Series on Reading Hypertext
I’m going to begin this series with the phenomenon of the sentence. I can best boil down the rhetorical term to “a saying that has meaning.” The ad Herennium describes sententia as a figure of diction. It’s a grammatical unit of sense. Given this, a poetical line can be a sentence, [...]