Literary theory, sociology of literature, history of media and technology, computational approaches to the study of literature
Dennis Tenen's research happens at the intersection of people, texts, and technology.
His recent work appears on the pages of Amodern, boundary 2, Computational Culture, Modernism/modernity, New Literary History, Public Books, and LA Review of Books on topics that range from book piracy to algorithmic composition, unintelligent design, and history of data visualization.
He teaches a variety of classes in fields of literary theory, new media studies, and critical computing in the humanities.
Tenen is a co-founder of Columbia's Group for Experimental Methods in the Humanitiesand author of Plain Text: The Poetics of Computation (Stanford UP, 2017).
For an updated list of projects, talks, and publications please visit dennistenen.com.
Book Projects
Plain Text: The Poetics of Computation. Stanford University Press, 2017. Alienation of intellectual labor from the material contexts of the digital word.
“An Inquiry Concerning the Creative Limits of Artificial Intelligence.” Manuscript in progress. The fetishism of “smart” commodities.
Literature and the Experimental Humanities with Maria Sachiko Cecire. Under contract by invitation to “Literature and Contemporary Thought” series published by Routledge, ed. Ursula K. Heise & Guillermina De Ferrari. Manuscript in progress. Play, exploration, performance, and deviation from the established methodological procedures.
Peer Reviewed Journals
“Towards a Computational Archaeology of Fictional Space.” Forthcoming inNew Literary History (accepted in August, 2017).
“Laminate Text: The Strata of Digital Inscription.” Amodern. December, 2017.
“Unintelligent Design.” Boundary 2 44, no. 2 (May 1, 2017): 145–56.
“Book Piracy as Peer Preservation.” Computational Culture 4 (2014).
“Sustainable Authorship in Plain Text.” The Programming Historian (2014). Translated into Spanish as “Escritura sostenible en texto plano usando Pandoc y Markdown” by Víctor Gayol (revisado por Antonio Rojas Castro y Maria José Afanador-Llach).
“Stalin’s PowerPoint.” Modernism/modernity 21.1 (2014): 253–267.
“Three Notes on Mary.” The Nabokovian 46 (2001): 24-25.
Contributed Essays & Chapters
"Reading Platforms: A Concise History of the Electronic Book,” The Unfinished Book, ed. Alexandra Gillespie and Deidre Shauna Lynch. Oxford UP, 2020.
“Anonymous, Massively Collaborative, Trans-human,” forthcoming inRethinking Authorship in Comparative and Historical Perspectives, ed. Haruo Shirane and Tomi Suzuki. Iwanami Shoten, 2018.
“Digital Text” in Cambridge Critical Concepts: Technology, forthcoming as part of the Cambridge Critical Concepts in Literary Studies series, ed. Adam Hammond, Cambridge University Press, 2018.
“Archive” in Literature: An Introduction to Theory and Analysis, ed. Mads Rosendahl Thomsen, et al. Bloomsbury, 2017.
“Critical Computing in the Humanities” with John Simpson and Phillip Polefrone in Doing Digital Humanities: Practice, Training and Research, Ed. Ray Siemens. Routledge, 2016.
“Visual-quantitative Approaches to the Intellectual History of the Field” in Futures of Comparative Literature, ed. Ursula K. Heise, et al. Routledge, 2017.
“Blunt Instrumentalism” in Debates in the Digital Humanities, ed. Matthew K. Gold, et al. Minnesota UP, 2016.
“Travelogue as Fact and Fiction.” Imaginäre Topografien: Migration und Verortung, ed. Klaus Müller-Richter and Ramona Uritescu-Lombard. Transcript-Verlag, 2007: 99-111.
Book Reviews
“Dennis Tenen on Exposed: Desire and Disobedience in the Digital Age by Bernard Harcourt.” Los Angeles Review of Books (2016). Included in the The Digital Revolution: Debating the Promise and Perils of the Internet in the Last Years of the Obama Administration (LARB, 2017), ed. Michele Pridmore-Brown & Julien Crockett.
“What Is? Nine Epistemological Essays by Johanna Drucker.” Design and Culture, 7.2 (2015): 264-5.
“Writing Technology: The Circle by David Eggers and Mad About a Boy by Bridget Jones.” Public Books (2014).
“History and Poetics of Intertextuality by Marko Juvan.” The Slavic and East European Journal 56.2 (2012): 309.
“Vokzal, Garazh, Angar: Vladimir Nabokov I Poetika Russkogo Urbanizma by Yuri Leving.” The Slavic and East European Journal 49.4 (2005): 688–89.