Form and Politics, Freedom and Necessity

Amid bunch of very interesting lectures at Future of Digital Studies, I’m particularly intrigued by yesterday’s talk on “Digital Literature and the Modernist Problem” from David J. Bolter (Georgia Tech) Maria Engberg ( Blekinge Institute of Technology, Sweden). They distinguish two concerns of the avant-garde — formal, and political — and tease these out in a subtle and (I think) useful way. It's already shifting my understand, for example, about essentialist skeptics like Laura Miller and Sven Birkerts and (in his Golden Age lecture) Robert Coover. A sign of a good talk is that it convinces you on subjects the speaker’s didn’t directly discuss.