createadaptdisrupt

McKenzie Wark, "A Hacker Manifesto [version 4.0]."

"What is Liberal Education For?: A Conference at St. John's College on the 50th Anniversary of the Santa Fe Campus," October 16-18, 2014. Conference program & media coverage.

Walter Benjamin, "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction."

Geoffrey Nunberg, "The Places of Books in the Ages of Electronic Reproduction," Representations 24 (1993).

Douglas Davis, "The Work of Art in the Age of Digital Reproduction" (1995).

Stephen Ramsay, "Who's In and Who's Out?" (2011).

Mark Sample, "The digital humanities is not about building, it's about sharing" (2011).

The Book of Genesis, Illustrated by R. Crumb, R. Crumb. Metamorphoses, Book X, Ovid; w/ Sir Orfeo, Anonymous; w/ Abattoir Blues/The Lyre of Orpheus, Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds. Paradise Lost (excerpts), John Milton; w/ Radi Os, Ronald Johnson. Leaves of Grass, Walt Whitman; w/ @tweetsofgrass. "Blood Music," Greg Bear. (1983 short story) He, She and It, Marge Piercy.

“Whatever code we hack, be it programming language, poetic language, math or music, curves or colourings, we create the possibility of new things entering the world.”

-McKenzie Wark, a hacker manifesto [version 4.0]

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“A book is a device to ignite the imagination.”

-Alan Bennett, The Uncommon Reader

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“The fictions ‘master’ and ‘copy’ are now so entwined with each other that it is impossible to say where one begins and the other ends.”

-Douglas Davis, ”The Work of Art in the Age of Digital Reproduction”

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“Only a few hints - a few diffused, faint clues and indirections, I seek, for my own use, to trace out here.”

-Walt Whitman, “When I read the Book”

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“Orpheus looked at his instrument And he gave the wire a pluck He heard a sound so beautiful He gasped and said O my God O Mamma O Mamma.”

“Hacking” calls up images of violence and of innovation; it evokes clandestine digital actions that operate outside the law. We call hackers criminals; we also celebrate them as creators. In this course we will be asking several related questions: What does it mean to consider great books as objects to be hacked? What gets created? What new forms might a “book” take? What new forms might we take? To delve into these questions, we will engage texts that probe issues of creation, adaptation, and/or disruption. These texts will come from a range of time periods, genres, and media. In tandem, we will also do some of our own hacking; we will use contemporary digital media to create, adapt, and disrupt right alongside the books we read. (Special computer or design skills are not required; we will hold workshops on all of the digital tools we will use during the semester.) Over the course of the semester you will hone a set of analytical skills and strategies for creating interpretations and making arguments.