This course considers literary experiment instigated by the Internet and exercised on both analogue and digital platforms. When we think of “hacking,” we frequently think of solitary computer programmers in dark rooms. But hacking also implies a culture of profane disruption that closely mirrors developments in literary experimentation over the last seventy years. In this course, we will explore how new media affects the potential for literary experiment in the form of the printed book and how digital explorations offer new ways of engaging with textuality. We will read literature of and about the Internet as well as older texts that serve as precursors for the literary experiments of today. Authors include John Barth, Jean Baudrillard, Jorge Luis Borges, William Gibson, Kenneth Goldsmith, Seth Grahame-Smith, Shelley Jackson, Tom McCarthy, Vladimir Nabokov, and Mark Sample. In this course, we will act as scholar practitioners, reading, writing, and thinking critically, but also experimenting with forms, media, and technology. We will become textual hackers ourselves, exploring literary experiment in a variety of hands-on forms. Assignments include two papers and four digital or analog “hacks”: a Twine hypertext story, a cut up literature experiment, a Time Mapper spatial project,
and a Twitter bot.