Andrew C. Wenaus - The subject-matter of this book is the ongoing battle in early 21 st century avant-garde literature between art and technology, specifically, between algorithmic calculations and creative inspiration, or between the elegance of proven scientific formulas and the probing, uncertain messiness of human agency. This 'battle' has a rich literary history that dates back to the French Symbolist poets of the 19 th century, who were characterized by an initial desire to "free the signifier from the signified."

Andrew C. Wenaus, The Literature of Exclusion: Dada, Data, and the Threshold of Electronic Literature, Lexington Books, 2021

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In the early twentieth century, the Dadaists protested against art, nationalism, the individual subject, and technologized war. With their automatic anti-art and cultural disruptiveness, Dadaists sought to “signify no thing.” Today, data also operates autonomously. However, rather than dismantling tradition, data organizes, selects, combines, quantifies, and simplifies the complexity of actuality. Like Dada, data also signifies nothing. While Dadaists protest with purpose, data proceeds without intention. The individual in the early twentieth century agonizes over the alienation from daily life and the fear of being converted into a cog in a machine. Today, however, the individual in twenty-first-century supermodernity merges, not with large industrial machinery, but with the processual and procedural logic of programming with innocuous ease. Both exclude human agency from self-narration but to differing degrees of abstraction. Examining the work of B.R. Yeager, Samuel Beckett, Jeff Noon, Kenji Siratori, Mike Bonsall, Allison Parrish, and narratives written by artificial intelligence, Wenaus considers the threshold of sensible narration and the effects that the shift from a culture of language to a culture of digital code has on lived experience. While data offers a closed system, Dadaist literature of exclusion, he suggests, promises a future of open, hyper-contingent, unprescribed alternatives for self-narration.

Andrew Wenaus’s ambitious monograph on avant-garde literature in the digital age explores algorithmic culture with remarkable scope and insight. Eclipsing the postmodern with the supermodern, Wenaus effectively uses a mosaic approach to study a range of canonical, fringe, and interstitial texts, theorizing how we are accelerating towards a thoroughly Ballardian future in which the technologies of Absurdity and Inevitability will have their way with us. Disarming, provocative, and edifying, The Literature of Exclusion breaks new ground and speaks the language of multiple scholarly disciplines. - David H. Wilson

This illuminating monograph captures the condition of hypermodern writing which takes narrative to the limits of aesthetic pleasure and traditional logic. Based on the study of analogue and digital experiments in algorithmic poetics—from gloomy absurdists such as Beckett to glitch visionaries such as Siratori—The Literature of Exclusion unravels the alienating potential of subject-less structures of the literary practice. Among many publications that challenge the notions around experimental writing, this book offers an affirmative insight into what the author calls “Dada Dataism” and its related sublime. - Ania Malinowska

The subject-matter of The Literature of Exclusion: Dada, Data, and the Threshold of Electronic Literature is the ongoing battle in early 21 st century avant-garde literature between art and technology, specifically, between algorithmic calculations and creative inspiration, or between the elegance of proven scientific formulas and the probing, uncertain messiness of human agency. This 'battle' has a rich literary history that dates back to the French Symbolist poets of the 19 th century, who were characterized by an initial desire to "free the signifier from the signified." Between 1915-1920, Dada artists further separated the word from the world and made the former a thing-in-itself. At the same time, Surrealists were using cut-up techniques to exploit the very context-free 'thingness' of words. Following WWII, the Letterists further reduced the word down to their individual sounds and letters, down to pure noise. The circle was completed when, following upon the Letterists' original tactics, the Situationists (neither group is mentioned in the book) pushed the cut-up techniques and Dada and Surrealism into what it called détournement, a poetic strategy originally associated with Symbolist poet Comte de Lautréamont. Détournement involved taking the free-floating vocabulary of mass media advertising and essentially hijacking individual words and phrases and placing them into a new and more politically-charged context. Over the last century and a half, the result of freeing language from meaning and signification has been a kind of super-modernist 'literature of exclusion' that now challenges the disappearance of human agency from the very ability to narrate our own lives. 2 In his compelling and densely-argued book, Andrew C. Wenaus, associate professor at the University of Western Ontario's Department of English and Writing Studies, considers what happens when our innately human desire to express ourselves creatively crosses over into the threshold of 'combinatorialism.' Combinatorialism is a philosophical theory of objective reality that considers all the ontological combinations (or recombination) of possible worlds based on already-existing terms. Let us be clear, though; although it is an otherwise elegant worldview that appears to favour endless combinations to create new ideas, combinatorialism actually operates as a self-optimizing entity that reduces the number of unique potentialities with each new algorithmic combination. By optimizing, standardizing and organizing the dissemination of multiple terms that already exist (including the language of mass media), the apparatus ends up advancing already-created data toward their teleological ends. As Wenaus points out in his introduction, a fundamental problem arises regarding "that of prescribed delimiting, rather than... - Edward Matthews   download full-text