Global Perspectives on Digital Literature A Critical Introduction for the Twenty-First Century

Global Perspectives on Digital Literature: A Critical Introduction for the Twenty-First Century explores how digital literary forms shape and are shaped by aesthetic and political exchanges happening across languages and nations. The book understands "global" as a mode of comparative thinking and argues for considering various forms of digital literature—the popular, the avant-garde, and the participatory—as realizing and producing global thought in the twenty-first century. Attending to issues of both political and aesthetic representation, the book includes a diverse group of contributors and a wide-ranging corpus of texts, composed in a variety of languages and regions, including East and South Asia, parts of Europe, Latin America, North America, Australia, and Western Africa. The book’s contributors adopt an array of interpretive approaches to make visible new connections and possibilities engendered by cross-cultural encounters. Among other topics, they reflect on the shifting conditions for production and distribution of literature, participatory cultures and technological affordances of Web 2.0, the ever-changing dynamics of global and local forces, and fundamental questions, such as, "What do we mean when we talk about literature today?" and "What is the future of literature?"

Introduction: Global Literary Studies and Digital Literature Torsa Ghosal I: REIMAGINING DIGITAL LITERARY STUDIES Textual Instability: Paradoxes of Literary Remix Simone Murray Diverse Mappings of Electronic Literature: Expanding the Canon(s) Mariusz Pisarski Ludonarrative Postcolonialism: Re-Playing the Colonial Discourse Souvik Mukherjee II. DIGITAL EMBODIMENTS AND DISABILITIES Games as Critical Literature: Playing with Transhumanism, Embodied Cognition, and Narrative Difference in SOMA Cody Mejeur The Horror of Networked Existence: Affect, Connection, and Anxiety in Classic Creepypasta Narratives Sara Bimo Networked Chronic Pain Narratives: Locating Disability through Fibromyalgia Facebook Community Rimi Nandy III. FORMS OF RESISTANCE The Erasing Impulse: Veiling and Unveiling the Poetic and the Political Álvaro Seiça Digital Cartoons: Collaborative Activism in Hong Kong Kin Wai Chu Between Two Screens: The January 25th Revolution in Egypt Reham Hosny ‘If this document is authentic': On Bill Bly's Archival Fiction Brian Davis IV. MEDIAL AND CULTURAL CROSSINGS From Oral to Digital and Back: Adinkra Symbols and Kweku Ananse on YouTube J.B. Amissah-Arthur and Kwabena Opoku-Agyemang Bending Voices, Opening Ears: Voice, Music, Sound, and Affect in Digital Literature Hazel Smith Intermedial Experience and Discursive Voice in Printed Text, Audiobook, and Podcast: H. P. Lovecraft’s "The Statement of Randolph Carter" Jarkko Toikkanen and Mari Hatavara

Torsa Ghosal is the author of a book of literary criticism, Out of Mind: Mode, Mediation, and Cognition in Twenty-First-Century Narrative, and an experimental novella, Open Couplets, and is the co-editor of Fictionality and Multimodal Narratives. She has a PhD in English from the Ohio State University, where she was awarded a Presidential Fellowship as well as a John Muste Award for best dissertation. Currently, she is Assistant Professor of English at California State University, Sacramento.