Designed and hosted this panel, and presented a paper at Electronic Literature Organisation annual conference 2019
PANEL Literary Realism at the Peripheries of Electronic Literature: Representing theRealities of the Post-Digital AgeSøren Bro Pold & Malthe Stavning Erslev, Nathan Jones, and JR Carpenter
PAPER "Glitch Poetics: Critical Sensory Realisms in Contemporary Language Practice"Nathan Jones
 PANEL descriptionSince the nineteenth century, Literary Realism has been concerned with the"representation of reality" whether by exposing what is "beneath mere appearances", or depicting specific labour and social conditions by chronicling lives in detail (Chase1980). These are concerns that could be central to today's Electronic Literature -helping us understand the relation between media surfaces and the worlds theyrepresent, and the gap between techno-utopianist ideas and the experiences of digitalcapitalism at the peripheries of power. Realism itself however has become pushed tothe peripheries of the innovative literature project, associated with a literarymainstream still attached to outdated, pre-modernist models such as French bourgeois or English Victorian novels, and even with the colonial project of these periods (Anjaria 2013). This panel asks whether Literary Realism might be revisited in the context of the post-digital - where the relation between technology and the (social, labouring) body has become ever more complex - and the posthumanities, which shifts the centre of focus away from human subjects. Contributions to the panel discuss how critical media, data sciences, and interface studies can inform a new Literary Realism - acknowledging that it might be vastly different from the mainstream novel with which it has been heretofore associated. Among other things, the panel will suggest that the stylistic and formal assumptions of the Literary Realism inherited from the nineteenth century must be rethought in the context of the radically different technical conditions of today.
REFERENCESChase, R. (1980). The American novel and its tradition. Baltimore: The Johns HopkinsUniversity Press.Anjaria, U. (2013). The Persistence of Realism. Postmodern Culture, 23(3). p.p1 {margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Helvetica}