Gender Dissent across Mediated Literary Works

Rule-guided Expression: Gender Dissent across Mediated Literary Works by Kristin Allukian and Mauro Carassai.

Published in Ada Issue #8. Ada is a journal of gender new media and technology.

“This paper is concerned with the examination of rule-guided cultural and thematic battles enacted by women writers in two historical moments—the late nineteenth- and early twenty-first centuries—against the dominant cultural institutions of their time. Such battles, evaluated in the Anglophone world of letters at large, bring to light women’s often inconspicuous strategies for legislating new mechanisms of written expression within the established authoring and reading practices of their times.

Both the mobility-limited late nineteenth century society and the apparently digitally-democratized twenty-first century seem to call for female writing subjects, who are often seen at the margins of the “social factory,” to intervene through specific literary acts of disturbance. Such acts of disturbance, when closely analyzed, can be seen as both exposing and altering the rule-based systems in which these authors are confrontationally embedded.

……

In envisioning the routes of such processes of imagination-based social practices moving from the ideally American radiating center, Dutch e-literature author Annie Abrahams, who has been living in France since 1987, and Australian codework poet Mary-Anne Breeze (also known as Mez) can be seen as modern Anglophone literary catalysts of the instances of the previously discussed nineteenth-century American writers such as Alcott, Phelps, Blake, and Jewett in a world increasingly imposing norms and standards both in digital labor and language-based technological expressions. Our brief analysis of works such as Abrahams’s Separation/Séparation or Mez’s _cross.ova.ing 4rm.blog.2.log 07/08 highlights how female electronic writing seems both to update the abovementioned three elements detected in the women’s career literature and translate them into the pragmatic dimension of digitally-mediated language expression.”

Filed under: Articles / Texts, Net art, Ada, e-lit, gender, Kristin Allukian, Mauro Carassai, Séparation

Italian “translation” of Separation / Séparation

Mauro Carassai and Renata Morresi made an Italian powerpoint and javascript translation (2012) of Separation/Séparation (2002). They didn’t have the flash source codes and so imagined how translation of this piece of E-lit could be done from its experience alone.

Translation, Mutation, Decay.

The powerpoint version is hilarious (after clicking through 184 slides it stops – the poem can’t be read completely).
The javascript version doesn’t work in all browsers and lacks some features, but does give an impression. ( View source: https://bram.org/separation/Javascript_Translation.html )

That’s what time can, will do with a piece of electronic art, I thought.
E-lit also is like grass, and all their glory is like the flowers of the field; the grass withers and the flowers fall.

Carassi and Morresi wrote an article about their adventure which appreared as Verbal Disengagements: Translating Language Games in Annie Abrahams’s Separation/Séparation in Translating E-Literature (2015). Eds. Regnauld, Arnaud and Abrioux, Yves. Bibliothèque de l’Université Paris 8 (Saint-Denis, France).

Filed under: Articles / Texts, e-literature, Net art, decay, e-literature, flash, Mauro Carassai, Renata Morresi, Séparation, separation, translation