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UC Riverside UC Riverside Electronic Theses and Dissertations Title Correspondence Fictions: Critical Literacies and Experiments in Writing Media After Computation Permalink https://escholarship.org/uc/item/4wm3w11m Author Gold, Rochelle Koryn Publication Date 2015 Peer reviewed|Thesis/dissertation eScholarship.org Powered by the California Digital Library University of California UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA RIVERSIDE Correspondence Fictions: Critical Literacies and Experiments in Writing Media After Computation A Dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in English by Rochelle K. Gold June 2015 Dissertation Committee: Dr. James Tobias, Chairperson Dr. Steven Axelrod Dr. Weihsin Gui Dr. Sherryl Vint Copyright by Rochelle K. Gold 2015 The Dissertation of Rochelle K. Gold is approved: Committee Chairperson University of California, Riverside Acknowledgements Writing this dissertation has been a deeply social process. I am thankful for the incredible community of scholars at UC Riverside who have inspired, shaped, and challenged the ideas presented here. First, I am tremendously grateful to Dr. James Tobias for chairing this project with so much warmth, wisdom, insight, and generosity, and, in the process, for providing an inspirational model of imaginative reading, intellectual fearlessness, and ethical scholarship that I have tried to emulate here. I am also deeply indebted to Dr. Steve Axelrod, Dr. Weihsin Gui, and Dr. Sherryl Vint for serving on the dissertation committee and offering so much thoughtful feedback, stimulating conversation, and good cheer along the way. I also thank the loose and rhizomatic group known as Critical Digital Humanities at UC Riverside, including Kimberly Hall, Sarah Lozier, Steve Anderson, and Eric Romero, for the many inspiring conversations that have shaped my views on digital humanities scholarship. Thank you also to Shannon Tarango, Melanie Sherazi, and Alice Contreras for reading my work and offering feedback at various times. The reference librarians at UC Riverside provided invaluable help at a key juncture in my research by locating and loaning out an old laptop that I used to read 1990s hypertext fiction. Moreover, the Graduate Division summer dissertation intensive and the English department dissertation retreat both provided important space for collaboration and community throughout this process. iv I also want to thank the institutions that have generously supported this dissertation. At UC Riverside, the Graduate Division Dissertation Year Fellowship Program and the English Department Summer Stipend together gave me six months to focus on writing. The Washington University in St. Louis Library Travel Grant offered valuable time to research 1960s educational television in the archives. The Simon Fraser University Publishing Workshop Tuition Scholarship along with the Graduate Student English Association Summer Research Award made it possible to spend a week researching collaborative digital literary composition in Vancouver. Part of chapter 4 will appear in an upcoming issue of Criticism. I have presented parts of chapter 1, chapter 3, and chapter 4 at Console-ing Passions, Society for Literature Science and the Arts, and the Pacific Ancient and Modern Language Association respectively. Finally, I want to thank my family and friends for their love and encouragement. To my parents, Marc and Cheryl, and my siblings, Lisa and Justin, I could not have done this without you cheering me along with unflagging love, encouragement, and support. To Danny, my partner, best friend, and most rigorous reader, your integrity, insight, and humor inspire me, and your love sustains me. v ABSTRACT OF THE DISSERTATION Correspondence Fictions: Critical Literacies and Experiments in Writing Media After Computation by Rochelle K. Gold Doctor of Philosophy, Graduate Program in English University of California, Riverside, June 2015 Dr. James Tobias, Chairperson This dissertation studies postmodern fiction, electronic literature, digital art, locative media, and everyday social media practices from the 1960s to the present. I argue that these experimental literary works and practices of media production serve as models of critical literacy, albeit imperfect ones, that might lead to increased agency, community-building, and self-sovereignty, especially for historically marginalized communities. The four elements of critical literacy I identify in this project are as follows: that critical literacy is non-instrumental, process-oriented, collaborative, and geospatial. Each chapter highlights one of these attributes at a time, emphasizing its specific value, as well as its potential limitations, within the context of critical literacy. Chapter 2 studies William Gaddis’s J R (1975), a novel that critiques the literalism of Wall Street and the instrumentalization of education while using its experimental form to propose playfulness, humor, and complexity as possibilities for ethical modes of reading and writing. Chapter 3 considers feminist short-form digital fiction like First Draft of the vi Revolution (2012), Digital: A Love Story (2010), and Quibbling (1993) that depict the process of reading as a complex negotiation between material and social constraints that produces the experience of resonance. Chapter 4 focuses on the values of critical cosmopolitanism and collaboration through a study of governance and representation in works of digital art and literature like “Minneapolis and St. Paul are East African Cities” (2003) and “Flight Paths” (2007). Chapter 5 reads the locative narrative The Silent History (2013) alongside satirical product reviews on Amazon as revealing the value and limitations of geospatial literacies emerging in contemporary literary forms. Lastly, the conclusion points to the practical and pedagogical implications of experimental media composition. Ultimately, the project attests to the ongoing importance of the literary as a site of local knowledge production and cross-cultural resonance in light of technologically- mediated, global flows, where the literary appears in a range of forms besides the print book. Moreover, the project demonstrates the potential for literary theory, from a critical and historically situated perspective, to offer valuable new models for understanding what digital literacy is now and for imagining what it might become. vii TABLE OF CONTENTS Chapter 1 Literary Social Media……………………………………………………………………..1 Chapter 2 A Networked Education: Big Data, Literary Experiments, and Correspondence Literacy in William Gaddis’s J R …………………………………………………………………27 Chapter 3 Reading as Fluid Process: Feminist Fictions of Digital Literacy………………………..76 Chapter 4 Reparative Social Media: Critical Cosmopolitanism, Collaboration, and Transnational Literacies in Digital Art and Fiction………………………………………………........132 Chapter 5 Reimagining Everyday Literacies: Geospatial Orientation and Literary Values……….179 Conclusion Critical Literacies, Pedagogy, and “Real World” Application.………………………...234 Works Cited…………………………………………………………………………….239 viii LIST OF IMAGES Figure 1 Screenshot from “Minneapolis and St. Paul are East African Cities”.…………………150 Figure 2 Screenshot from “Minneapolis and St. Paul are East African Cities”.…………………155 ix Chapter 1 Literary Social Media Yacub, an undocumented immigrant on his way from Dubai to London, falls from the storage compartment of an airplane mid-flight and miraculously survives. He lands in a suburban grocery store parking lot, where he has a strangely positive encounter with Harriet, a startled British housewife, who agrees to take Yacub home with her. This scene from Flight Paths (2007-), a collaboratively authored digital “networked novel,” offers hope and cross-cultural resonance in a narrative providing an otherwise gritty portrayal of globalization. Made up of text, image, and sound submitted via email by dozens of individuals from around the world, Flight Paths is an experimental hypermedia project that transforms established notions of the literary by demonstrating how social media practices, in this particular case email, and literary forms combine to create powerful new genres of transnational writing. Drawing on a range of innovative literary forms, including novels narrating displacement and belonging in global networks, experimental postmodern novels, hypertext fiction, digital art, and locative fiction, as well as on a range of literary practices operating within everyday social media use, this dissertation project proposes to read social media through the lens of literary value in order to trace a recent history of contemporary writing that I call “literary social media.” I use the term literary social media to encompass a wide range of literary forms that are fundamentally structured by technologies of social correspondence, including but not limited to phone calls, letters, 1 emails, and social networking. In this way, I seek to make visible the literary genealogy of social media, a term that is at once ubiquitous yet also difficult to precisely define. What is Social Media? In the introduction to The Social Media Reader (2012), Michael Mandiberg characterizes “social media” as an umbrella term that describes the increasingly blurred lines between media producers and media consumers in the 2000s. Other critics use their own terminology; for instance, Yochai Benkler refers to “peer-production,” a term that favorably contrasts our everyday media practices in the twenty-first century