Flatt, Michael (Author)
Configurations: A Journal of Literature, Science, and Technology
Volume: 28
Issue: 1
Pages: 89-115
This essay problematizes readings of postwar poet Larry Eigner's work that overemphasize the role the typewriter played in his aesthetics, and proposes the use of contemporary poet Joey Yearous-Algozin's Air the Trees, a 2013 remediation of Larry Eigner's 1968 book of the same title, as a key by which to critique Microsoft Word. This reading of Yearous-Algozin, using a modified form of Bruno Latour's actor-network theory that takes ideological forces into account, will demonstrate a new way to interpret Eigner's relationship to his typewriter, as well as the relationship between contemporary users and Word. Ultimately, I argue that Eigner's understanding of networked environmental systems serves as an informative poetics for representing capitalist ecologies, such as those inherent to Microsoft Word.
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