Aurature at the End(s) of Electronic Literature

Memory Bytes: History, Technology, and Digital Culture, 2004

Literary Studies in the Digital Age, 2013

¶ 1 This essay is part of the third iteration of the anthology. Since public review and commentary help scholars develop their ideas, the editors hope that readers will continue to comment on the already published essay. You may also wish to read the draft essay, which underwent open review in 2017, and the project history.

Poetics Today, 2010

Electronic literature is not just a "thing" or a "medium" or even a body of "works" in various "genres." It is not poetry, fiction, hypertext, gaming, codework, or some new admixture of all these practices. E-literature is, arguably, an emerging cultural form, as much a collective creation of terms, keywords, genres, structures, and institutions as it is the production of new literary objects. The ideas of cybervisionaries Paul Otlet, Vannevar Bush, and Ted Nelson, foundational to the electronic storage, recovery, and processing of texts, go beyond practical insights and can be seen to participate in a long-standing ambition to construct a world literature in the sense put forward by David Damrosch (2003: 5): "not an infinite ungraspable canon of works but rather a mode of circulation and of reading . . . that is applicable to individual works as to bodies of material." The model for such constructions may be not the global literary commerce envisioned by Goethe and adopted by Karl Marx, not the romantic tradition of poets as world legislators, and not the current model of a "world republic of letters." The model adopted in this essay, rather, is the literary practice of writing under constraint, developed long before the Internet but suited to its computational impositions and gamelike literary presentations. Instead of a canon of works preserved solely by the power of institutions, the essay presents a freestanding network of authors as precursors to, and models for, this potential world literature, namely, the Oulipo.

Volume 16 (2014) Issue 5 Article 2 T To ow wa ar rd ds a H s a Hi is st tor ory of E y of Elec lectr tronic Lit onic Lite er ra atur ture e U Urs rsz zul ula P a Pa aw wlick licka a

International Journal of Multidisciplinary Research and Development, 2024

With the advent of Electronic literature in the new millennium, the field of literature experiences a significant upheaval. In order to mark the beginning of a new age in literary expression, this study will investigate Electronic writing as a "curtain raiser" genre. This study explores how Electronic literature challenges conventional ideas of textuality, authorship, and reader interaction by examining its features, forms, and consequences. This research examines how Electronic literature influences modern literary discourse by utilising a variety of multidisciplinary viewpoints, such as literary theory, digital humanities, and cultural studies. The works of important authors, such as Chris Joseph, Mark Z. Danielewski, Kate Pullinger, Michael Joyce, Shelley Jackson, and Brian Kim Stefans, offer conceptual foundations for comprehending the distinctive characteristics of Electronic literature and its connection to more general cultural and technological changes. This paper demonstrates how the spirit of exploration and creativity in the digital age is embodied in Electronic literature. It is also evident that Electronic literature enhances and challenges our knowledge of reader-author connections, interactivity and storytelling. This study attempts to shed light on the relevance of Electronic literature as a trailblazing genre that influences the literary landscape of the twenty-first century by examining its consequences within the framework of modern literary theory and cultural studies. By looking at these issues, the research advances our knowledge of how digital technology may change the way that literature is expressed and how storytelling is changing in the new millennium.

2017

Why a paper on digital (or electronic) literature? Writers who are recognized as print writers, such as the French novelist François Bon,1 have been experimenting new literary forms on the Internet. In some respects, the Internet appears as an artistic laboratory or as a vast creative workshop.2 However, literary creation with and for the computer was not born with the Internet; it has been around for several decades. “Digital literature”, “electronic literature”, or even “cyberliterature”: the terminology is not fixed.3 Its authors aim at conceiving and realizing works which are specific to the computer and the digital medium by trying to exploit their characteristics: hypertext technology, multimedia dimension, interactivity... The productions of digital literature were of course not born ex nihilo. Genealogy lines can be traced which are acknowledged by the authors themselves: combinatorial writing and constrained writing, fragmentary writing, sound and visual writing.

What makes electronic literature interesting for researchers? Beyond its artistic and literary value, we can point out its heuristic value. Indeed electronic literature not only permits previous media to be reexamined (paper for instance), but it also allows several well-established notions to be questioned, such as narrative in narratology, text in linguistics and semiotics, figure in rhetorics, materiality in aesthetics, grasp in anthropology, memory in archivistics or literariness in literary studies. Exploiting the heuristic value of electronic literature has two consequences: - an evolution of some notions in certain scientific disciplines, and maybe of the disciplines themselves; - a revealing effect regarding both digital technology and interactive and multimedia writing.

Global Perspectives on Digital Literature, A Critical Introduction for the Twenty-First Centur, 2023

Every day thousands forms of writing are born and distributed on social media. As text-based and digital-born artifacts they are forms of electronic literature, regardless of their authors' intention or awareness (Flores 2019). Making sense of such prolific literary production and forming bridges between the current generations of digital natives and prior literary traditions is an enormous task. While existing classifications of e-literature greatly contribute to such task by bringing order into an ever-evolving field, the sheer scale of digital works offered to contemporary audiences encourages scholars to expand established categories, propose alternative source materials, and introduce new conjunctions. It is especially true if one wants to embrace the notion of electronic literature as both a global and a local phenomenon, as World Literature with divergent roots and multiple strands (Tabbi 2010, 20). Such diversification is necessary because despite having a global, common denominator-the emergence of digital technologies-the field of electronic literature witnessed processes of canon formation similar to those in the print world (Ensslin 2007, 4). Consequently, a pattern of relations between hyper canon, counter canon and shadow canon, a dynamic governed by the rule which David Damrosch described as "the richest of the rich get richer still" (Damrosch 2006, 40), could also be observed. Exposing divergent roots, variable timelines, and alternative classifications of e-literary practice might not entirely prevent some authors to raise to the "hypercanonical celebrity" (Damrosch 2006, 53) at the expense of others, but at least might point at a strategy of accompanying the most often discussed works of digital poetry and fiction by their counterparts from other languages and cultures. My goal in this chapter is to offer alternative approaches to the established genealogies, historical models, and typological frameworks within which global community of scholars and authors discuss and practice electronic literature. The existing historical models offer either a generational (first, second and third) or a web-based classification (pre-Web, web and post-Web) of electronic literature. In my overview of these models I will also pay attention to perhaps the most persuasive theoretical typology that distinguishes between modern and postmodern e-literature. However, if one wants to look at e-literature as a global phenomenon and takes into account-for example-unequal access to digital technologies, some of