A digital collage comprising elements from: a miniature from the British Library; the videogame Pentiment; Aleph Null 3.0 by Brad Pasutti and Karl Kempton

Please join us for a CuSPP Confirmation Presentation in person (BPB W3.03) and online on Thursday 21 August from 1-2pm. Please refer to the CuSPP e-mail or e-mail Thomas.Nulley-Valdes@anu.edu.au for the link.

Abstract:

Electronic literature (e-lit) and its digital literary aesthetics have been around since at least the 1980s but literary criticism still perceives them as new. This newness is typically conceived in terms of e-lit’s radical departure from literature’s mainstay of print—or else e-lit represents the remediation and renovation of bibliographical forms. In turn, overemphases on e-lit’s newness have produced criticism preoccupied with distinguishing screens from pages and questioning whether literature’s foundational paradigms can adequately address an apparently unprecedented digital literary aesthetics.

My thesis adopts, instead, a transhistorical approach to digital literary aesthetics that identifies its possibilities throughout literature’s chiefly bibliographical annals. In this seminar, I describe my transhistorical approach via the deconstruction of digital literary aesthetics as the hypermedialityof literary artefacts that demand the interpretation of not just verbal but multiple, intricately interoperating modes of aesthetic communication. As such, phenomena of hypermediality are neither inherently contemporary nor contingent upon digital media but rather conditioned to seemdigital. 

I engage affordance theory to disentangle contemporary phenomena of hypermediality from their conditional digitality. Affordance theory calls attention to how subjects, artefacts, and the contexts of their encounters co-constitute each other. As regards digital literary aesthetics, critics encounter e-lit in the context of the Digital Age and thus, I argue, tend to construe phenomena of hypermediality as uniquely digital because digital technoculture makes hypermediality not only more readily available but also possible to name. Understanding how digital media afford hypermediality and condition its digitality means conversely learning to recognise the diverse presence of so-called digital literary aesthetics in historic bibliographical texts from before computer screens. I compare Jon Bois’s 17776 (2017) to William Blake’s Songs of Innocence (1789) and present my thesis’s four case studies on various phenomena of hypermediality to show how some historic forms of literature might also be “digital.”

Speaker Bio:

Dylan Chng is a PhD student at ANU’s School of Literature, Languages and Linguistics, researching intersections between technology, experience, and thought in media aesthetics and the digital humanities. He will be presenting at the Humanities meets AI (Singapore) and Digital Humanities Australasia conferences (Canberra) in late 2025, and co-teaches a forthcoming MOOC on Southeast Asia’s transcultural art histories by the National University of Singapore. He also holds an MPhil in Digital Humanities from the University of Cambridge.