Can the techniques we traditionally think to be outside the scope of literature, such as word processing, databasing, appropriation, identity ciphering, collaboration, and intensive programming, inspire a reinvention of writing? Writers now face a situation similar to that of painters in the nineteenth century. As photography forced artists to alter their approach to their medium, the Internet presents new challenges and opportunities for writers to reconceive ideas about creativity, authorship, and their relationship to language. Confronted with an unprecedented amount of available text and language, writers need to move beyond the creation of new texts to manage, parse, appropriate, and reconstruct those that already exist.
"Uncreative Writing: Managing Language in the Digital Age" by Kenneth Goldsmith
In addition to explaining his concept of uncreative writing, which is also the name of his popular course at the University of Pennsylvania, Goldsmith reads the work of writers who have taken up this challenge. Examining a wide range of texts and techniques, including the use of Google searches to create poetry, the appropriation of courtroom testimony, and the possibility of robo-poetics, Goldsmith joins this recent work to practices that date back to the early twentieth century. Writers and artists such as Walter Benjamin, Gertrude Stein, James Joyce, and Andy Warhol embodied an ethos in which the construction or conception of a text was just as important as the resultant text itself. By extending this tradition into the digital realm, uncreative writing offers new ways of thinking about identity and the making of meaning.