Seventeenth International Conference on New Directions in the Humanities

Abstract

It’s been over ten years since Johanna Drucker suggested that Digital Humanities (DH) could only be fully understood by practice. More recently, in “Teaching Electronic Literature as Digital Humanities,” I proposed that the practical engagement with electronic literature (e-lit)—i.e.: prose and poetry written with digital machines—addressed humanistic and literary concerns, as it developed skills related to the mastering of digital literacies. In that article I described “digital literacies” as ways to learn competencies over content-learning that, much like learning a foreign language, could be transferred to other fields. Building on these beliefs, this talk looks at how to further implement “creativity” as an integral competence to “critical thinking,” turning Cornelius Castoriadis’s “radical imagination” into the kind of “critical creativity” that Christian De Cock, Alf Rehn, and David Berry have proposed. Framing e-lit as a practice and product of critical creativity reinforces the importance of applying humanistic (philosophical, literary) methodologies to DH programs. Further, the hybrid nature and un-canonized status of e-lit research and pedagogy should allow us to experiment creatively with the form, conventions (and, even, language) of scholarship on the matter. I suggest that pushing for the acceptance of creative e-lit practices—teaching, artistic production, and exhibitions, as well as a reinterpretation of criticism—as valuable and accountable forms of research is a rebellious act of the radical imagination, a necessary play to defend the humanistic interests of DH programs and projects today.