The increasing use of computers and digital technology in the creation and publication/performance of literary texts now compels a graduate program in the Fine Arts to include coursework in computers and creative writing. Computers and Writers serves the combined purposes of introducting students to works of art created and displayed/performed through the new mediums of computer and digital technology and providing the instruction in these technologies necessary for students to pursue their art through these new mediums.
         In order to engage students with literary and artistic works in this new medium, we will survey a number of different genres of digital writing, including hypertext, Internet-based literary publication, and dramatic performance and poetry readings in the MOO (a multi-user domain, object-oriented virtual interactive space).  In our reading of hypertexts, we ask students to consider the different literary qualities structuring texts which are read by following links rather than turning pages.  How, for instance, do writers conceive the webbed relationships organizing links from segment to segment of text, and how do readers follow these organizational webs?  What, indeed, is the nature of the “text” when different readers, by tracing different paths of links, can read different versions of the text?  And how does this hyper-text make us reconsider the literary genres of print culture and imagine different textual forms and structures in a digital culture?
         Taking up the concern with the relation between form and content so important to poetry, students will also consider the differences between the semiotics of the page and semiotics of the screen: how is the line of poetry differently inflected by the logic of the link?  How does the addition of color, sound, and image in a fluid, interactive reading space change the relationship between word/meaning and between text/author/audience?  How do the different semiotics of the screen collapse the “viewing” traditionally associated with comprehending plastic art with the “reading” traditionally linked to comprehending literary art?  How do the differences between the size of viewing screens, Internet browsers (which can radically alter the visual representation of the textual screen), and the viewer/reader’s ability to alter the size and shape of the viewing/reading window change the meaning of text and margin, of inside and outside of the text, and hence radically reconfigure the relationship between form and content in literary art?
         Furthering these themes, students will attend a synchronous digital dramatic performance in a MOO (a multi-user domain, object oriented virtual interactive space) as well as write and perform their own MOO production.  Students will have the opportunity to develop their own websites and MOO realms as well as to participate with our online literary journal.  Computers and Writing introduces students to and teaches them how to compose mixed-media work, and the course’s website provides students with a number of invaluable resources for this.  All students will learn how to create and send pdf files, submit work to an online journal, and to use the Internet and various software and applications for their own artistic ends.