My boyfriend was in the room with me as I viewed the new media texts on my laptop, and I bitched to him that I had signed up to be a literature major because I wanted to read books. We both had a good time making fun of this stuff, but then he asked me in all seriousness, “So how IS this supposed to be literature?” A serious question deserved a serious answer. I responded then that these texts were new ways of presenting a narrative, to get us to think about narratives in different ways.
Now that we talked in class about these texts, I want to refine my answer, but I’m not yet sure how. For one thing, some of these texts don’t have anything to do with narratives. There is no traditional story in Nelson’s “Conversation” (Conversation? What’s the MLA format for new media texts?). Some of these new media texts don’t even emphasize text. Harris’s “The Whale Hunt,” for example, relies on full-screen, high quality photographs to reveal the chronological events (we might even argue that it’s a story) of the whale hunt. Brief captions are available, but they are not a prominent part of the experience.
So if these new media texts don’t necessarily involve stories or rely on text, how can we justify talking about them in a literature class? I think we need to think about new media in broader terms, to analyze these new media texts as art pieces that don’t quite fit into the categories we already have (visual art, music, literature, etc.). For example, one of the articles we read in Pomo CoNo mentioned John Cage’s piece, “4’33,” which involves a conductor, an orchestra, an audience, and complete silence for four minutes and thirty-three seconds. We can’t accurately describe this as music, but we can consider it an interesting art piece that experiments with sound. Then there’s Marcel DuChamp’s “Fountain,” a piece of installation art involving a urinal, which Marcel displayed and signed “R. Mutt.” Neither of these pieces requires much “artistic skill” or even effort, but both demonstrate the kind of innovative thinking that the art world thrives on. These pieces force us to ask and attempt to answer the questions: What counts as art, and why?
I have to remind myself that we once rejected the novel and impressionistic paintings, and now we take it for granted that they are legitimate art forms. Maybe the same will happen with new media texts in the years ahead.
You don’t want to get me started on definitions of what counts as art (anything that evokes emotion or provokes a response, even if that response is “huh?” counts as an artistic endeavor in my book), but you do raise some good questions about new media.
I wonder how the class’s reaction would have been different if I had framed the new media texts not as the next stage of literature (which I actually didn’t do), but as a distilled form of the millions of images and snatches of narrative that circulate endlessly through the background of our daily lives. That is, what if we think of these digital works as somehow taking the “white noise” that makes up our media ecology, and focusing it, crystallizing it, and returning it back to us in a form that reveals something about the contemporary, hypermediated world?