Event Title
SSM14 - The Procedural Sonnet: A Demo
Location
CB1-212
Start Date
4-11-2017 10:00 AM
Description
This talk and game demonstration introduces a long-term project called the "Procedural Sonnet." This project, located at the intersection of electronic literature, digital storytelling, gaming, and poetics seeks to connect premodern literary forms with contemporary digital platforms. Ian Bogost has declared that certain video games operated less according to a logic of representation—a category long fundamental to humanistic inquiry—but rather according to a "procedural rhetoric." For this presentation I will use Twine - a narrative hyperlink game platform - to "play" a sixteenth century sonnet. In doing this, I want to use Bogost's concept of proceduralist rhetoric to complicate a highly-recognizable poetic form. The "Procedural Sonnet" project prompts several questions: "To what extent does poetic form act as Bogostian 'procedure' or not?" "How does playing a poem on Twine foreground the procedures assumed by a largely narrative platform?" "In what ways does 'playing' a sonnet open up new interpretive frameworks for both poetry and digital games?" For Bogost, proceduralism is characterized by the fact that "in [such] games, expression is found in primarily in the player's experience as it results from interaction with the game's mechanics and dynamics." In foregrounding the "mechanics and dynamics" of a game over more the more traditionally-analyzed categories of visuality or textuality, Bogost, I argue, hits on fundamental questions not just about games but about poetic form - especially, in terms of the longue durée of English literary history, the sonnet. This talk and game demonstration juxtapose a new technology - Twine - with an old technology - the sonnet - to think about the conference's theme of "possible worlds." The titular possibility foregrounds a sense of futurity; my project's use of the sonnet form nonetheless complicates both Bogost's concept of "proceduralist rhetoric" and the narratively-oriented Twine platform. I thus suggest that we can look to "old things" to help us think about "possible worlds."
SSM14 - The Procedural Sonnet: A Demo
CB1-212
This talk and game demonstration introduces a long-term project called the "Procedural Sonnet." This project, located at the intersection of electronic literature, digital storytelling, gaming, and poetics seeks to connect premodern literary forms with contemporary digital platforms.
