In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Reading Screens: Comparative Perspectives on Computational Poetics 11 255 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 John David Zuern on july 27, 1929, Lindbergh’s Flight, a cantata for radio written by Bertolt Brecht (2003), with a score by Paul Hindemith and Kurt Weill, premiered as a live performance at the Festival for German Chamber Music in Baden-Baden. At once celebrating and commenting critically on Charles Lindbergh’s historic solo crossing of the Atlantic two years earlier, the piece also advances Brecht’s famous appeal for an application of the relatively new technology of the radio that would go beyond the function of a few-to-many broadcasting system in the grip of a capitalist media elite to become a means of many-to-many communication for a society of equals. In its first performance, the soloist who played the role of the lone pilot also represented the individual radio listener; he sat alone on the opposite side of the stage from the orchestra and chorus, who represented the apparatus of the radio transmitting its accompaniment to the distant vocalist. Comprising largely duets between Lindbergh and personifications of the various elements that aided and impeded him on his journey—the Motor, the Fog, the Snowstorm, and Sleep—the cantata seeks to embody Brecht’s vision of the radio as a platform for dialogue and participation. I open this chapter on electronic literature by looking back to Lindbergh’s Flight because Brecht’s imaginative intervention into the emerging communication technology of his time makes him a notable forerunner to present-day writers whose works, leveraging the distinctive features of digitized text, are expressly written to be read on the computer screen. Brecht’s cantata also happens to provide an example of an early use of a screen to incorporate 256 JOHN DAVID ZUERN a significant amount of text into a multimedia artwork. As an experiment (Versuch) and a didactic exercise (Lehrstück), Lindbergh ’s Flight, like many of Brecht’s works, is more committed to demonstrating principles than to entertaining its audience. To drive home the work’s lesson, throughout the Baden-Baden performance , a short paragraph encapsulating its political philosophy was projected onto a large screen of stretched fabric covering the back of the stage. 1 In 1929, this screen, which allowed Brecht and his collaborators to integrate a graphically dramatic text into a predominantly acoustic artwork, was historically poised to advance into the forefront of twentieth-century textual, visual, and musical cultural production. Within a few decades, it would assume a far more technically sophisticated form as an integral component of a vast telecommunication system of which the radio was an early avatar. Four months after the premiere of Lindbergh’s Flight, at a meeting of the Institute of Radio Engineers in Rochester, New York, Vladimir Zworykin unveiled his kinescope, a prototype of the cathode ray receiver tube that would lay the foundation of the television industry (Abramson 1995, 84).Advances in computing technologies, accelerated during the Second World War, eventually adapted the television screen into the video terminal, through which programmers communicated with their machines.With the emergence of the Internet in the 1970s and the World Wide Web in the 1990s, the computer screen—by then widely available thanks to the mass-marketing of personal computers—took on its present role as a powerful medium for the production and reception of works of art of all kinds. 2 Beginning with Brecht’s 1929 production also signals this chapter’s principal argument, which maintains that a broadly historical and robustly comparative approach to literary production in digital media will offer us deeper insights into the aesthetic, ethical, and political dimensions of individual screen-based works. As I see it, a critical orientation that emphasizes electronic texts’ complex and sometimes occult relationships with counterparts in earlier media—without ignoring their very real innovations—is also likely to...

Share