The emergence of a reality organized around the Internet is provoking a profound crisis of identity in which the older principles of self-orientation and communitarian identification lose their effectiveness. What concepts, what methods do we need to understand the “knowledge space” in which we live an increasing part of our life? How can we orient our individual and professional identity within it? This course will study the reconfiguration of literary studies in the context of the transformation introduced by the use of Internet and digital technologies in our cultural, personal and social identity. At the same time, it will develop digital literacies in using and creating digital artefacts that will complement in a practical dimension the theoretical insights discussed in the first part of the course. Students will engage in new ways of reading, writing, translating and interpreting literary texts in an hypertextual digital environment.
Digital Cultures is divided in four modules. In the first one we will study in a speculative perspective the key terms in digital cultures: space and time, cyberspace, collective intelligence, network, hypertext, virtuality and actuality. In the second module we will engage the cognitive dimension of the computer technology focusing on digital research, topic modeling, textual analysis, close and distant reading. In the third module, we will address and perform the remediation of literature in social and new media. The last module will focus on the dark side of internet and address question of ethics, privacy and surveillance.
Finally will also discuss the future of the book and examine a variety of digital projects focused on the literature and culture of Medieval, Early Modern and Modern times, including (but not limited to) the Oregon Petrarch Open Book, the Pico Project, the Galileo Library project, the and the ARTFL Encyclopédie project. Students will have the option of choosing the didactic activities focusing on one specific RL language and one specific literary period.
Readings include selected essays by Marshall McLuhan, Gilles Deleuze, Pierre Lévy, James D. Bolter, George P. Landow and Daniel J. Solove.