The term ‘postdigital’ has in recent years been applied across a broad range of disciplines, including literary studies, to describe an era in which digital media and technologies have become the dominant, if not hegemonic, aesthetic, social, epistemological and ontological paradigm. New modes of literary production and consumption, the nascent reading practices and literary interfaces, and the inscrutable knowledge infrastructures, have become possible in this postdigital age. But the full effects of these epochal developments on literary studies—on our disciplinary identity and research methodologies, and how literary pedagogy is enacted ‘in the classroom’—remain unexamined, and the print-based assumptions of literary studies unchallenged.

1. A POSTDIGITAL PARADIGM
IN LITERARY STUDIES
Dr. Stephen Abblitt
Learning Designer Keypath Education Australia
Research Associate La Trobe University
Masters Student University of Edinburgh

2. “texts no longer corresponding to the ‘book’ form”
Jean-Marc Côté
Between 1899 and 1910
En L’an 2000: At school
Public domain

3. The human and a postdigital technics are mutually
constitutive (“through means other than life”)
Stelarc
1980
Third Hand
Aluminium, stainless steel, acrylic, latex,
electronics, electrodes, cables and battery pack

4. The print-based assumptions of literary
studies (“print is flat, code is deep”)
Michael Joyce
1996
Twelve Blue
http://www.eastgate.com/TwelveBlue/

5. At moments of radical social and cultural change
Jason Hopkins
c.2011
From Abhominal
Posthuman form supported within
a golden ratio structure

6. A partnership
between human
and non-human
agents
Baila Goldenthal
2008
Cat’s Cradle / String Theory
Oil on canvas