From erasure poetry to e-mash-ups, “reel on/ another! power!”

Abstract

This article builds on an analysis of Sea and Spar Between by Nick Montfort and Stephanie Strickland and Tree of Codes by Jonathan Safran Foer to examine print and digital forms of writing through resonance, replication, and repetition. It explores the plastic and textual space of the page and screen and focuses more specifically on the composition of fragments and the way they can be apprehended by readers. Conversely, digital borrowing is not a mechanical process of self-identical recurrence, and like its print counterpart, it is a gesture of differenciation and a play of singularities (Deleuze). In investigating the entanglement of a work with a source text, this article also explores how creative gestures initiate a “floating” space as theorized by Jean-François Lyotard, that is, a space at once rigid and flexible where the reader is both bound and floating.