What happens to literature in an age of digital technology? Regards Croisés: Perspectives on Digital Literature provides an answer, with a collection of cutting-edge critical essays on literature gone digital. Regards Croisés is an important addition to existing research on digital literature, and will appeal to scholars of electronic writing, digital art, humanities computing, media and communication, and others interested in the field. It offers a significant advance in the field through its wide-angle perspective that globalizes digital literature and diversifies the current critical paradigms. Regards Croisés shows how digital literature connects with traditions and future directions of reading and writing communities all over the world. With contributions by authors from eight countries and three continents, the collection presents points of view on a transcontinental practice of digital literature. Regards Croisés also opens dialogues with expanded critical paradigms of digital literature, beyond earlier critical concern with the aesthetics of the screen as a space of hypertext links. Many of the essays recognize a rich history and ongoing literary practice engaged with the basic fact of the computer as a programmable device. Other essays explore the latest developments in social media and Web 2.0 as venues for digital literature. Regards Croisés shows the vibrant engagement of writers and readers with literary practice in a digital world.
Philippe Bootz is Assistant Professor of Hypermedia and Multimedia at the University of Paris 8. Bootz holds PhDs in Physics and Sciences of Information and Communication and is the cofounder of L.A.I.R.E, a French collective in digital literature and Transitoire Observable, an international collective in programmed poetry.
Sandy Baldwin is Associate Professor of English and Director of the Center for Literary Computing at West Virginia University. He received his PhD from New York University and is a Fulbright Scholar. His work imagines the future of literary studies in a digital age. As coordinator of the Center for Literary Computing at West Virginia University, he facilitates interdisciplinary research projects in the poetics of new media and the media ecology of literary institutions, using web-technologies, multimedia, hypertext, audio/video, and virtual environments. He publishes on the poetics and philosophy of digital writing and his solo and collaborative creative work is widely published and performed.