Meredith's Week 3 Bring it to the Table

 When I read about modernist influence Ezra Pound’s goal to “renovate” literature, I immediately thought about how that can be applied to two things. The text references The Wasteland and Finnegan’s Wake as examples of literature that have intertextuality, but the first thing I thought of was how music artists now, especially rappers, sample old R&B tracks and remix them into something new. My mom thought she recognized one of Kendrick Lamar’s songs but it was the track he sampled, and it shows how music can extend through generations and develop through time. But the references Rettburg included made me think of books that have references to other pieces of literature like Romeo and Juliet or Frankenstein. I also learned the difference between modernists and postmodernists, who expanded on the formers’ work by exploring multilinear storytelling. I think multilinear storytelling becomes much easier with hyperlinks, because when we were younger, we would read books where you have to “flip to page 54” to continue on with the storyline you chose. I’m curious what CAVEs are, because they have been mentioned at least one or two times now in the text, and when I google searched 3D interactive CAVEs, it only came up with underground rock cave exploration virtual reality.  

I thought that the concept of Queerskins was super interesting, it’s a hypermedia novel that uses pages from a diary and spoken monologues, according to Rettburg. When Electronic Literature was published, the creator was still in the process of developing an adaptation of Queerskins for virtual reality, but when I checked it out online, it looks like they’re almost done with the adaptation. They’ve divided the work into four chapters and the last chapter is in production. Now, when you look it up, Google seems to just give the 2018 VR adaptation, but I added 2012, which led me to this explanatory article that the creator submitted to Huffpost. https://www.huffpost.com/entry/queerskins-a-new-multimedia-novel-that-looks-at-the-beginning-of-the-aids-epidemic_b_2106771 

Then, I realized that the original 2012 version was within the first part of the website and you have to go through the diary pages and monologues by clicking the tabs at the bottom. https://www.queerskins.com/