In this interdisciplinary class, we will investigate what we’re calling Digital Graffiti Essays (NOT computer-based graffiti art), that is, creative writing created for digital devices/screens/cyberspace for the purpose of social intervention or provocation, similar to the unauthorized public nature of graffiti. Examples include social critique masquerading as Yelp reviews, queer love stories serialized as Tweets, crowd-sourced maps about evictions in the Bay Area, eBay listings for break-up tales. Course readings will begin with the popular Hermit Crab essay (playful or subversive essays that hide inside another form, such as a recipe or dating profile) and then engage digital literature’s antecedents and traditions, ranging from the impact of non-Western storytelling traditions on the oral history movement of the 1970s, to multimodal texts like video essays, Twine/gaming essays, and documentary poetry projects. Students will craft a class manifesto defining and assessing the genre, and have the option of producing their own Digital Graffiti Essay for a final project.

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