Electronic Literature

Scott Rettberg

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781509516810
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literatura
• Subtopic: Crítica literaria

Electronic Literature considers new forms and genres of writing that exploit the capabilities of computers and networks – literature that would not be possible without the contemporary digital context.

In this book, Rettberg places the most significant genres of electronic literature in historical, technological, and cultural contexts. These include combinatory poetics, hypertext fiction, interactive fiction (and other game-based digital literary work), kinetic and interactive poetry, and networked writing based on our collective experience of the Internet. He argues that electronic literature demands to be read both through the lens of experimental literary practices dating back to the early twentieth century and through the specificities of the technology and software used to produce the work.

Considering electronic literature as a subject in totality, this book provides a vital introduction to a dynamic field that both reacts to avant-garde literary and art traditions and generates new forms of narrative and poetic work particular to the twenty-first century. It is essential reading for students and researchers in disciplines including literary studies, media and communications, art, and creative writing.

1
Genres of Electronic Literature

Imagine a book. That should be easy enough, you’re holding one now. The book is a particular reading technology, and it’s a good one. It took a long time to develop. The codex book is portable and can be easily lugged from place to place. It is addressable. It has page numbers so I can easily communicate with you exactly where any piece of information is within its volume: we can get on the same page and read the same words. The book has a complex and multifunctional navigational apparatus. There is a table of contents, there is an index, and so the book can be navigated nonlinearly. The book is verifiable. It has a copyright page with a publisher and a place and a year and an author. The book is fixed. If I put it on the shelf now and come back and pull it out ten years later, the same words will be on the same pages as when I last opened the book. While the book could be destroyed in a fire or flood or might slowly decay, there is a sense of permanence to it. One of its main functionalities is to get thoughts down in print and carry them through time.

Imagine that the book were different. Imagine it offered other affordances (see Norman, 1999) and material properties. Imagine that instead of turning pages you could make any word in the book a link to some other part of the book, or even some other book. Imagine it were bound on a spool, so that you could enter and exit anywhere; a book without beginning or end. Imagine what you would do with that as a storyteller. Imagine what it would mean if every time you put the book up on the shelf, the words in the book shifted order and rearranged themselves. Would it still be the same book? What would you do with that as a poet? Imagine if, when you pulled the book down from the shelf and opened up the first page, the book asked you in what direction you wanted to go, and would not begin to tell a story until you responded. Imagine if the book were a conversation, a novel that you had to talk to. Imagine that, as you read a poem on the page of the book, the words jumped off the page into three-dimensional space and began flying around the room, shifting form and regrouping in the physical environment. Imagine that when you opened the book, it was filled with threads connecting it to all of the other books in your library, which would make it possible to pull part of another book right into the text of the one you were reading. Imagine if the book could read the newspaper and change its content depending on the time of the day, or the weather, or the season. Imagine if you opened the book and found all those of your friends who were reading the book at the same time leaving their comments in the margins. Imagine that when you opened the book, those same friends were all writing the book simultaneously. Imagine the book as a network, always on, always connected, and always changing. Imagine what you could do as a reader. Imagine what you could do as a writer. Imagine the book as a networked computer.

People imagined all of these things, both before the computer and the Internet came along and after. The difference between the way that we imagine the book before and after the digital turn is that now the affordances of the computer and the Internet are readily available to us. We can actualize these affordances. But how can we figure out how to best use these capabilities effectively to develop new kinds of poetry, new types of stories? We need to experiment to find out. Those experiments are what the field of electronic literature is all about.

Electronic literature is most simply described as new forms and genres of writing that explore the specific capabilities of the computer and network – literature that would not be possible without the contemporary digital context.

Electronic literature is an area that has rapidly developed as a field of creative practice, academic research, and pedagogy over the past half-century, most intensively from the 1990s until the present. Computers and the network have radically affected many aspects of life for a significant proportion of people on the planet. Textuality and communication are now digitally mediated. This book examines literature that reflects our new situation through the work of writers and artists who consciously explore the potential of new media for new modes of storytelling and poetic practice.

The first question asked by beginning readers of electronic literature – and even experienced readers encountering a new text – is “how do I read this?” For electronic literature, this question is not only hermeneutic – it refers not simply to how readers might encounter the meaning, style, themes, and language of the work but also to how readers can operate the text-machine itself. As Espen Aarseth established in Cybertext: Perspectives on Ergodic Literature (1997), non-trivial effort is required from the reader of a cybertext in order to traverse the text – and this understanding of how to move through the text must happen before any kind of interpretative reading can take place (p. 1). One reason to consider genre in electronic literature is to simplify that aspect of the process, to give readers a set of tools to enable them to understand “how to read” as they encounter the new forms of digital writing that electronic literature comprises.

This book is intended to address a significant lack in the literature of the field: so far few books have attempted to constitute electronic literature in a broad sense as a subject in totality. Electronic Literature attempts to place the most significant genres of electronic literature in historical, technological, and cultural contexts to make the subject more readily accessible. Electronic Literature provides a genre-driven approach to the corpus of electronic literature, albeit one that calls for a reconsideration of what qualities distinguish a creative genre in contemporary networked culture, as this may differ from traditional notions of genre in literature, art, and media studies. Genre in electronic literature is complicated by the interdisciplinary nature of the field and perhaps most importantly by the fact that it is driven in equal measure by cultural and technological contexts. While the authors and artists working in the field are informed by the historical influence of other arts disciplines and practices, their work is equally shaped and delimited by technological innovation. The software and platforms used to develop works of electronic literature constrain and afford properties of these emergent genres in significant ways.

While electronic literature must be read from a standpoint of media and platform-specificity, these new literary genres did not emerge from a cultural vacuum, but in response to and in conversation with literary and artistic traditions. The various genres of electronic literature such as hypertext fiction, kinetic poetry, combinatory poetics, interactive fiction, networked-based collective narrative, locative narrative, interactive textual installations, and interactive cinema in fact owe significant debts to specific twentieth-century literary and avant-garde movements such as Dada, Surrealism, modernism and postmodernism, Situationism, Fluxus, and others. This book tries to frame the emerging genres of electronic literature within these historical contexts, enabling better understanding of the continuity of literary and artistic practice as well as the innovation enabled by new technologies.

Defining electronic literature

The term “electronic literature” is controversial within the field itself. Detractors of the term claim that it is not specific enough – after all “electronic” refers essentially to any device powered by electricity, and the boundaries of “literature” are equally murky. Others prefer that “digital literature” should refer to roughly the same body of work. John Cayley (2002) offers “writing in networked and programmable media” as a more specific term. “E-Poetry” and “hypertext” also have their specific adherents, and Aarseth’s “cybertext” is a narrower term for texts with specific interactive properties. A key advantage of the term “electronic literature” is its generality, and thus its ability to include those emerging genres that did not exist in the 1990s, when the term was first widely circulated. This may have contributed to the term’s longevity.

The establishment of the Electronic Literature Organization (ELO) in 1999 produced a need for a single term to be agreed upon, and the widespread adoption of “electronic literature” to refer to the types of work we consider and survey in this book likely has as much to do with the Electronic Literature Organization as with any innate quality of the term itself (Rettberg, 2014a). Even in the late 1990s, it was clear that the type of work writers were creating in digital media, using the specific computational properties of the computer and produced within cultural contexts of the global network, could not easily be pigeonholed into one specific category. At the time there was some distance between “hypertext fiction” and “E-Poetry” writing communities. I was one of the founders of the ELO and took part in the conversations that lead to the adoption of “electronic literature” as a term to establish our frame of reference. The ELO board wanted to use a term that could encompass work produced in both of those contexts and others, independent of literary tradition or form. Virtually any definition or specific typology for electronic literature would likely become obsolete within a decade. New forms were already emerging then that challenged established generic boundaries, and there was need for a term that would be open enough to encourage diverse approaches to writing in digital media. During this early period in the popular adoption of the Web, the ELO board was also trying to choose a term that might appeal to a general audience, one that would not sound so technical or jargon-heavy that it would scare away potential readers or writers who were coming from print traditions. During our discussion of the term at one of the first ELO board meetings, Robert Coover characterized the term as “charmingly old-fashioned.” The term was purposefully anachronistic from the beginning – intended to mark both a break and continuity between contemporary literary practices in digital media and hundreds of years of literary tradition.

In 2004, the ELO put together a committee, led by Noah Wardrip-Fruin, to try to establish once and for all a definition that would be applicable to the forms of literary practice that the organization centrally focused on. The result was this statement and list of exemplary forms:

Electronic literature, or e-lit, refers to works with important literary aspects that take advantage of the capabilities and contexts provided by the standalone or networked computer. Within the broad category of electronic literature are several forms and threads of practice, some of which are:

• Hypertext fiction and poetry, on and off the Web
• Kinetic poetry presented in Flash and using other platforms
• Computer art installations, which ask viewers to read them or otherwise have literary aspects
• Conversational characters, also known as chatterbots
• Interactive fiction
• Literary apps
• Novels that take the form of emails, SMS messages, or blogs
• Poems and stories that are generated by computers, either interactively or based on parameters given at the beginning
• Collaborative writing projects that allow readers to contribute to the text of a work
• Literary performances online that develop new ways of writing

The list was not intended to be exhaustive, but instead to identify existing threads of practice and to encourage new ones to develop. A distinction that has clearly remained important over time is that between “e-books” and “e-lit.” What we talk about when we talk about electronic literature is not primarily the digital environment as a new means of distribution for literature that could just as easily be printed in a book. There is no doubt that e-books have in the past two decades had significant effects on the way that literature is published, distributed, and consumed. E-books have brought some new innovations in their own right – such as social bookmarking of texts and “whispersync” features that merge the experience of text and audio-book across different reading and listening devices – but they are not essentially, to use N. Katherine Hayles’ term, “born digital” (Hayles, 2008).

Works of electronic literature are native to the digital environment – for the most part they could not easily be produced or consumed in print literary contexts. Stephanie Strickland argues that electronic literature “relies on code for its creation, preservation, and display: there is no way to experience a work of e-literature unless a computer is running it – reading it and perhaps also generating it” (Strickland, 2009). These works depend in some essential way on the computer. Electronic literature is fundamentally experimental literature: the writers and artists producing these works are centrally concerned with new narrative forms and poetic approaches that could not exist in the absence of this computational context.

Considering the ELO’s definition of electronic literature, Hayles (2008b) took particular notice of the phrase “important literary aspects,” pointing out that in some cases works of electronic literature operate in a literary context beyond the boundaries of what is typically considered literature. Some works refer to literature or inscription, without themselves operating in the same signifying apparatus as literature in print contexts. Some examples of works in the Electronic Literature Collection, Volume One such as Giselle Beiguelman’s Code Movie 1 (2006) or Jim Andrews’ Nio (2001) use language not as a direct semantic signifier, but instead as conceptual or visual material. The process of inscription and recoding, in Beiguelman’s work, or the relationship between letters as visual form and representation of sound, in Andrews’ work, take the place of representational semantics. The corpus of electronic literature is a literature of new literary forms, genres that have varying degrees of correspondence with those from previous traditions and contexts.

Novelty is undoubtedly central to electronic literature – its authors are trying out new tools and approaches and in some sense conducting experiments in the same way as scientists do in a lab, testing how materials work together, what sorts of reactions occur when new mixes of computational method and literary practice are cast into the ...