The Digital Future of English : Literary Media Studies

More than any other academic discipline, literary studies is the creation of print culture.How then can it thrive in the digital era? Early 1990s predictions of the book's imminent demise presented a simplistic either/or choice between the legacy of moribund print and triumphalist digital technology.Yet we have grown to experience the two media as complexly interdependent and even complementary.Clearly, digital does not kill print. But literary studies in the digital era cannot simply resume business as usual.It is urgently necessary to reconsider the discipline's founding assumptions in light of digital technology. The digital era prompts a rethinking of literary studies' object of study, as well as its methods, theories, audiences and pedagogical practices.What counts as literature necessarily shifts in an age of proliferating born-digital texts and do-it-yourself (DIY) online publication.Where should literary studies sit institutionally, and how might it graft contextually-oriented