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THE QUESTION
For this issue's Forum Kathy Lou Schultz and Robin Tremblay-McGaw address issues of class and poetics: "Thanks to the efforts of feminist poets, critics, and editors, it is now possible to identify a discourse -- both scholarly and creative -- of gender and poetics. In the 1980s, journals such as HOW(ever) put the spotlight on these issues, particularly as related to innovative or experimental practices and how these intersected with issues of publication, erasure, and canon formation.
A decade later, we find ourselves trying to define a vocabulary for addressing complex issues of class in the formation of an innovative poetics. As Kathy Lou Schultz asked in her Tripwire essay (N.1, Fall 1998 & appearing in this issue of HOW2), "What's a working class poetic, and where could I find one?" How do we make present the "absence" of class in discussions of gender and the poetics of innovation? Where are the intersections of race in discussions of class? How are these forces fused or CON-fused?
How do/can we picture/trace working class issues in formally innovative ways? What do the circumstances of literary production -- surrounding writers and the writing produced -- have to do with one another?"
The next FORUM question is posed by Wendy Tronrud: I would like to address what it may mean to locate oneself as both a reader and a writer of a graphically oriented and movable text (hypertext) within the parameters of cyberspace. The change in medium from book to cyberspace undoubtedly alters the physical experience of creating and finding meaning. The hypertext is an image linked within the greater structure of cyberspace. As readers, we not only read these images, but are capable of watching them perform.
In the essay "Virtual Topographies,"* Mark Nunes states that the hypertext is "not the writing of a place, but rather the writing with places, spatially realized topics." In the striated space of cyberspace, how may the hypertext rearticulate the textual landscape? If writing a hypertext also includes visually writing its architecture of place within the virtual medium of cyberspace, how may the act of writing and reading be rearticulated? Does this change in medium also effect our notion of stable spaces and is it perhaps envisioning a virtual city in which textual language acts as a structuring component? If so, how can we, as writers and readers, locate ourselves within this transphysical city of language?
*Cyberspace Textuality. Ed. Marie-Laure Ryan. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999.
Reader responses invited for publication in HOW2/ "Forum 3" c/o:
Wendy Tronrud <tronik@hotmail.com.>