For this year’s Modern Language Association Convention, to be held January 4–7, 2024 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, I organized and will be moderating a roundtable on Twenty-First-Century Forms, featuring the following speakers: Andrew Ferguson, Aislinn McDougall, Élika Ortega, Kimberly Southwick-Thompson, Kaushik Tekur, Anna Torres Cacoullos, and Zach Wagner. I have included the information about the panel and, below that, full abstracts from each speaker.

119. Twenty-First-Century Forms

Thursday, January 4, 2024, 5:15–6:30 p.m. (EST)

If one might argue that the novel and lyric poem have become residual forms, what literary forms are emerging in contemporaneity? Panelists explore emergent literary forms of the twenty-first century and their relationship with, instantiation in, or remediation by other (digital) media: Internet writing, social media, print-digital books, film, television, and other hybrid and multimodal narrative and poetic forms.

Speakers
Andrew Ferguson (U of Virginia)
Aislinn McDougall (U of Regina)
Élika Ortega (U of Colorado, Boulder)
Kimberly Southwick-Thompson (Jacksonville State U)
Kaushik Tekur (Binghamton U, State U of New York)
Anna Torres Cacoullos (U of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign)
Zach Wagner (Binghamton U, State U of New York)

Presiding
Bradley J. Fest (Hartwick C)

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Panel Abstract: Twenty-First-Century Forms

Drawing upon Raymond Williams’s theory of cultural forms, critics such as Jonathan Arac have argued that previously dominant forms such as the novel and lyric poem have become residual (though certainly not trivial). If we grant this residuality and consider film, television, and new media among today’s dominant forms, what particularly literary forms are emerging and what is their role in twenty-first-century imaginaries? As part of a larger project begun at MLA 2021 and continued at MLA 2023 (with the goal of an edited collection or special issue), this roundtable continues an exploratory discussion of emergent literary forms and their relationship with, instantiation in, or remediation by other media. With the material transformations wrought by networked digital media, smartphones, new distribution methods, and readily available video capture, literary artifacts are manifesting in a variety of forms and media beyond traditional print ones. This panel will look in particular ways at what happens when literature intersects with internet writing, social media, print-digital books, film, television, and other new or multimodal literary forms, and ask broad questions about the relationship these forms have to “the literary.” Though studies in new media and electronic literature have paved the way toward an understanding of emergent literary forms, too often such scholarship has been cordoned off (in both directions) from the study of more traditional forms—novels and poems. This panel seeks to broaden our understanding of the literary and of form in order to again ask: What new forms has literary making produced in the twenty-first century?

Andrew Ferguson, “A Brief History of the Wave”

Ferguson’s paper documents a new form of maximalist cinematic remix, the wave, which went from a pandemic outlet for desperately bored and underemployed film pros to a creative movement with connections throughout the industry and indie scene alike. While one can find its precursors scattered throughout alleyways of experimental cinema, digital art, and textual transformation, waves proper emerged from the most generative outlet of the pandemic era: private film channels, primarily on the streaming platform Twitch. These spaces served not only as stand-in social spaces for friends starved for in-person interaction, but also—through the built-in chat channel—a space to get instant feedback on ideas and memes, as well as to host works skirting the edge of legality. (Even once pandemic conditions waned sufficiently to allow for live theater showings, they were still presented alongside a second screen showing the chat feed from the simulcast livestream.) The effect is something like Mystery Science Theater 3000 (1988–99, 2017–18), but for hyperstimulated, politically-aware gonzo remix art: an affective zone that has held from the first project, a vaporwave recut of Speed Racer (2008), through the development of a “radical art collective” taking the name Racer Trash from that film and gathering a cult following around their raucous all-night streams, and on to their dissolution in early 2022 and the continued development of the form by a range of splinter groups and fans inspired to create their own. The wave offers a space for complete creative freedom and experimentation: an artform that—as simultaneous exhibition, performance, critique, and community—is an ideal companion to and commentary upon our tumultuous times.

Aislinn McDougall, “’Why [Are] We All Writing Like This Now?’: Cyber-Consciousness and the Failures of Internet Writing in Patricia Lockwood’s No One is Talking About This”

In Patricia Lockwood’s autofictional novel, No One is Talking About This (2021), after the protagonist’s social media posts go viral, she doubles as author and reader of “the portal”—Lockwood’s term for the socially networked internet. The protagonist is both an avid creator and addicted consumer of social media content, and throughout the novel, her digital writing permeates her interiority such that the two converge, embodying what McDougall has previously termed “literary cyber-consciousness”: a post-postmodern “narrative strategy that exposes how human consciousness functions like the digital technology that so heavily mediates it through a productive tension between modern and postmodern formal features, predominantly postmodernist irony and self-reference, sincerity, and modernist stream of consciousness.” This paper argues that the ambiguity between the protagonist’s digital writing and interior thoughts exemplifies a post-postmodern cyber-consciousness best characterized by an ironic self-awareness. Yet, this convergence of digitality and consciousness is more crucially actualized in Lockwood’s actual narrative form—fragmentary in structure with various, brief, prose segments that all resemble the brevity and succinctness of quippy internet writing. Lockwood’s text amplifies its own protagonist’s irony by being a literary novel, composed in the style of internet writing, about the superficial victories and gut-wrenching failures of said internet writing. The novel meets its own irony with a sincere and devastating meditation on the role of writing in an internet-saturated now by asking without faith, “Why [are] we all writing like this now?” and then promptly answering, “Because . . . it [is] the way the [internet writes].”

Élika Ortega, “The Print-Digital Book: Conflicting Temporalities and Provisionality”

Since its beginnings in the 1980s, in the last twenty years the practice of creating and publishing literary works as print-digital books has increasingly become more common, particularly within independent publishing circles. Examples of print-digital books from the last two decades include Augusto de Campos’ Não Poesia (Brazil, 2003), Tálata Rodríguez’s Primera Línea de Fuego (Argentina, 2013), Amaranth Borsuk, Kate Durbin, and Ian Hatcher’s ABRA (USA, 2016), Chris Adrian and Eli Horowitz’s The New World (USA, 2015), J. R. Carpenter’s The Gathering Cloud (UK, 2017), and Vivan Abenshushan’s Permanente Obra Negra (Mexico, 2019). Print-digital books are conceptual units despite not always being material units. Moreover, print-digital books share the use of these two media facets, but they rarely share an aesthetic approach or project. That is, they can hardly be considered part of a cohesive literary movement or school. They have, however, a series of recurrent features that suggest the emergence of a new form—or at least that of a literary/publishing topos. Among them are the use of a media poetics/narrativity, the interrogation of form of the book in a growing media ecology, the use of “fastening” mechanisms ensuring the conceptual unity of the literary work, and the fact of being prone to obsolescence. In this presentation, Ortega will outline the characteristic of print-digital books as an emergent form using the examples mentioned above. She uses this characterization to interrogate their conflicting ontologies as print and digital media and as software applications/platforms and works of literature. Ultimately, she examines their clashing temporalities: distinct shelf-lives, accrual of symbolic/cultural value, obsolescence, and contemporariness.

Kimberly Ann Southwick-Thompson, “Why Emily Dickinson’s Genre Matter for Contemporary Forms; or, Teaching Dickinson through Dickinson”

This paper will discuss the Apple+ television show Dickinson (2019–21) and how viewing it as a hybrid text can help to explain hybridity’s role as a key component to contemporary genre. Teaching Emily Dickinson the poet in the twenty-first century should involve visiting the digital archives of her work and understanding how editors from the nineteenth through our own century have transferred and transformed her words to books/websites in ways that both and always mutilate and make legible those original texts simultaneously—and in turn, these editors have invented/reinvented her forms while solidifying her legend in American literature as simply a lyric poet. Dickinson uses archival images from Dickinson’s texts and facts from her life while also proving critical commentary on her writing. By re-creating the life of Emily Dickinson through a bombastic modern lens (with her saying things like, “Holy shit”) the show at the same time emphasizes that what viewers are perceiving is clearly fiction. Ultimately, these materials lead to a larger conversation of what genre means for and about our contemporary digital age. The forms and genres of the past inform the forms and genres of the future, and studying Dickinson alongside Dickinson helps us better understand this. Ultimately, Southwick-Thompson will use this television show and its relationship to Dickinson’s poetry to help determine what hybridity is and why twenty-first century texts often incorporate it—as well as how we can learn about the multifaceted genres of past texts, like Dickinson’s “lyric poetry.”

Kaushik Tekur and Zach Wagner, “Equiano’s Trace: Insta-Film as an Emerging Form”

In 2022, Stelo.Stories released an adaptation of Olaudah Equiano’s slave narrative as a film produced specifically for the Instagram Stories platform. Given the parallels between both slave narrative as rhetoric and Instagram stories as computability, Wagner and Tekur explore the dynamics of the author function in the slave narrative as it is adapted to a cybernetic medium. With the tensional nature of the author function in the slave narrative—as well explored by Henry Louis Gates Jr. and further complicated by Fred Moten’s notion of the resistant object—authenticity in its adaptation becomes less about fidelity and more about its ability to function as a tool for self-creation and survival. Considering Equiano.Stories as a hypertext utilizing computational hypertext protocol to transform Olaudah Equiano’s slave narrative into what Wagner and Tekur call an Insta-film, they utilize the works of Alexander R. Galloway, Fred Moten, Jeroen Gerrits, and others to scrutinize the protocological enclosures and algorithmic governance of the text to see if Equiano as Black being can still exceed in the extrarational breaks in a system otherwise designed to benignly circulate his image as pathos. Through a careful formal and aesthetic reading of this new and emerging literary-digital form—the Insta-film—Wagner and Tekur draw attention to potentials for irruption of the resistant object in such a medium. In exploring this new medium in relation to an old one, they build on scholarship on hypertext, looking for expanded ways of engaging with questions of fidelity, authenticity, and hyper-/hypotextuality that account for digital adaptations and the anti-Blackness intertwined with different kinds of “hypertexts.”

Anna Torres-Cacoullos, “‘Archeology of Residue’: An Archeological Media Poetics in Gabriella N. Báez’s ‘Ojalá nos encontremos en el mar’”

New literary-artistic forms have emerged within the context of perpetual ecological disasters and humanitarian crises in the twenty-first century, particularly in the Caribbean where hurricanes form only part of a long history of both natural and unnatural disasters, including colonial violence, austerity measures, and gender violence. If “to experiment” is to call into question the limit-experiences of any medium, from apparatus, to concepts and audiences, Gabriella N. Báez’s literary-visual work does just this in response to natural and unnatural disaster.

Gabriella N. Báez’s ongoing project, “Ojalá nos encontremos en el mar”/“Hopefully We’ll Meet at Sea,” forms part of the Whitney Museum’s exhibit “No existe un mundo posthuracán: Puerto Rican Art in the Wake of Hurricane Maria” (November 2022–March 2023). Following her father’s suicide months after Hurricane Maria’s destruction of Puerto Rico in 2017, Báez’s work interrogates grieving and memory amid natural disaster in unrecognizable environments. Turning to a what Torres-Cacoullos calls an archeological media poetics, she suggests that Báez experiments with format as a speculative tool to question erasure, record, and memory. Báez’s work is a multimodal, multiformat, and bilingual (English-Spanish) work encapsulating prose poetry alongside photography, video, and installation. Through its range of presentations, mixing text, images, sounds, and objects, Báez’s work expresses an urgency of relearning one’s past. Through its attention to her own failed suicide, places once inhabited, and her childhood experiences with her father, Báez situates her literary-visual work in relation to precarity and corporeal risk, permanence and ephemerality.