Living Inside the Poem: MOOs and Blake's Milton

Notes

¹ Today's widely used synchronous communication derives from Internet software called MUDs and MOOs, first programmed in the 1980s and still in use. MUD stands for multi-user dungeon. The object-oriented programming in MUDs created the name MOOs or multi-user dungeons object-oriented. As the word "dungeon" indicates, these programs had their birth in role-playing games such as Dungeons and Dragons. Early MOOs were text-based chat spaces with room descriptions and interactive digital objects for characters to play with. Today, MOOs include a graphic web interface in addition to the text chat space.

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² These were not mimetic tours of the Lake District but rather a walk within poems. Miming the real world was and remains a common and problematic aspect of MOO environments. The degree of information in the world is hard to replicate in a MOO and calls attention to the digital environment's shortcomings. Conversely, MOOs as textual spaces are well equipped to emulate the textual space of poems.

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³ Such early performativity in MOOs is described in a web site "Romantic Text/ Electronic Text: Designing a New Pedagogical Practice for Romantic Studies" co-authored with William Ruegg. This material was presented at the North American Society for the Study of Romanticism Conference in Boston in November of 1996.

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⁴ Some of these examples draw from the work of Christopher Heppner's chapter "'Humpty Dumpty Blake': Reading Blake's Design," where he details gesturing in Blake's characters. In this section I combine Heppner's work with Deleuze's idea of folding from The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque.

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⁵ The idea of folds between reader and text found affinity with MOO scholarship in the 1990s which spent a considerable amount of time discussing the play of textual identity and the interplay between screen identity and the typist's "real life" identity. The fold between the physical self and textual self at work in Blake's book medium can be highlighted in MOOs by capitalizing upon the difference between typing person and player character.

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