HTML Texts and the Dawn of Asemic Digital Literature: Exploring Dennis Cooper’s Ideas

Cameron Barrows

doi:10.18778/2083-2931.13.10

Authors

Cameron Barrows Independent scholar https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1507-8719

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.18778/2083-2931.13.10

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Keywords:

HTML texts, GIFs, Dennis Cooper, digital artefact, asemic digital literature

Abstract

Dennis Cooper’s HTML texts which use Graphic Interchange Format (GIFs) instead of traditional glyph-based text, exhibit the extremities of our times, both thematically and structurally, through the radical temporality of the GIFs. The digital geometry of these texts is constructed through the juxtaposition of GIFs. This has allowed Cooper to construct and explore a new pictorial language predicated upon metamorphosis, flow, and flux. Cooper’s HTML texts highlight the motifs of human fallibility, contingency, and finitude, culminating in a rejection of the rationalist and idealist conceptions of what a novel is. Focusing on the structural and hermeneutical aspects of the HTML texts, rather than the ephemeral content of the GIFs themselves, allows for the proposition of a new digital hermeneutics and skepticism necessary for literary exegesis in our increasing digital world. Through an examination of the theoretical implications of Cooper’s HTML texts, one can trace the future frontiers of digital literature and its necessary hermeneutics.

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Author Biography

Cameron Barrows, Independent scholar

Cameron Barrows is an independent scholar interested in the interrelationship between aesthetics, hermeneutics, and the history of ideas across mediums. Previous publications include: “Utopia and Biopolitics: The Need for an Ethics in Biotechnology” in Utopia and Biopolitics, edited by Patricia Stapleton and Andrew Beyers; “The Mystical and the Beautiful: The Construction off Plotinian Aesthetics of Film” in Plotinus and the Moving Image; “The Construction of a Queer Rhizomatic Hermeneutics Through an Exploration of Dennis Cooper’s HTML Novels” in Orbis Litterarum; “Contra Torrentem: Leo Perutz’s By Night Under the Stone Bridge and Central European Fantasy” is forthcoming in Jewish Fantasy Worldwide: Trends in Speculative Stories from Australia to Chile, edited by Valerie Frankel, to be released in 2023. He currently resides in Warsaw.

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