Before reading this chapter I really had no idea what electronic literature consisted of. I assumed it was blogs or online newspapers but it really is so much more. The chapter explained how it is more than just a blog but instead it is an art created through technological advances and the will to create art. One quote that I found particularly fascinating was, "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" (page 30). It is a constantly evolving genre that will keep changing until it becomes unrecognizable, and then change some more.
As many of us seemed to do, I came into this class completely blind. English and literature have been my passion in life for so long, and I wanted to take a class that can bring me back into my roots. Lucky for me, electronic literature perfectly amalgamates my passion for literature with my lifestyle of marketing and business. While I was unable to identify and define electronic literature previously, I am confident I have now grasped it. Throughout the reading, however, it was made clear that defining this term is not easy. It is difficult to properly assign a definition to a topic that combines two extremely broad words: Electronic and literature. While the true definition remained controversial within the community, the Electronic Literature Organization (ELO) produced guidelines and expectations for pieces that fit into this "box." Some of these included hypertext fiction, novels that take the form of emails, and computer art installations.
To expand on this further, I looked into Roberto Simanowski's Digital Art and Meaning. This piqued my interest because, even though it was written in 2011, it focuses on the digital age and the "takeover" that is coming with it. This felt very relevant for this period of AI domination we are living through. While I was unable to fully explore it, I noted that Simanowski's beliefs lie with the mind in understanding the mediated world and the mediated work. He draws a distinction between the two, focusing on the mediated world being a part of the mind reacting to media, and more of a bodily experience interacting with the work.
Going into this class with no knowledge of what this course entailed, reading the first chapter of Electronic Literature by Scott Rettberg and Katherine Hayes's article gave me a little bit more understanding. They both talk about the difference of what a physical form of literature is and what a digital form is. But they also talk about what is similar. They both use technology of some sort to be created and formed. E-lit is something that is constantly developing and changing. E-lit doesn't have a set genre and it's important that it doesn't. This allows E-lit to be limitless and allows creators the freedom to make anything.
The reference I chose to look further into is Nick Montfort's Twisty Little Passages: An Approach to Interactive Fiction. It gives a very well written introduction to the history of the interactive fiction genre. This book offers first time users of interactive fiction to approach this type of genre in a way that will lead to a more entertaining experience. Unfortunately, when I tried to read more into it, the website requires a sign up process. It does sound like an interesting book to read though.
https://direct.mit.edu/books/book/2907/Twisty-Little-PassagesAn-Approach-to-Interactive
The source I found and chose to dive deeper into was “Deeper into the Machine: The Future of Electronic Literature” by Katherine Hayles. In the textbook chapter I read something explaining that in order to be able to even interpret and read a piece of Electronic Literature, one must fully understand how to use the technologies and how the author intends the tech to be used or how the project should be read. The article by Katherine Hayles explains a little more into this specific concept of understanding the technologies and genres itself before the E-lit project is read. (https://culturemachine.net/the-e-issue/deeper-into-the-machine/)
Furthermore, the article ‘Electronic Literature: What Is It?” by Katherine Hayles contains lots of good information as well when it comes to understanding E-lit. She uses the term “digital born” to describe any E-lit project. She explains how this means a work is created on a computer and is meant to be read on a computer. It is emphasized that e-lit cannot be printed, otherwise you lose the "performance" of the coding, links, interactiveness, etc. It is very interesting how young e-lit is a genre, only starting in the 1990’s. “Hypertext fiction was the most popular at the start of e-lit until more platforms and genres were being used and created.
What is E-Lit?
As someone who had very little knowledge of electronic literature before today, the first chapter of Electronic Literature by Scott Rettberg and "Electronic Literature: What is it?" by N. Katherine Hayles proved to be very informative. Both Rettberg and Hayles discussed how electronic literature differs greatly from print literature because the digital text relies heavily on computerization - e-lit primarily exists in the digital world. E-lit works require experimentation, and consistently push the boundaries of what literature is, how we write it, and how we consume it. Rettberg even argued that works of e-lit constantly change, even when they are published - many projects can change as the readers are consuming them, which is what makes e-lit so interesting. Consuming and writing e-lit allows you to be experimental, creative, and expressive - and with new eras of technology, e-lit is constantly evolving, and that makes it more difficult to define.
In his first chapter of Electronic Literature, Rettberg mentions a work of e-lit produced by Judd Morrissey, titled "The Last Performance [dot org]". Morrissey's work was created after Goat Island, a performance collective in Chicago, wanted to produce a "last performance" in 2007. The project was open to public collaboration - people submitted lines based on the theme/construct - and the submitted words became lines of domes, spirals, lenses, and circles within circles - over 4,680 "glass lenses" made up the final product. Morrissey writes in his author description that "The lenses of the cupola have been transposed as compositional space that will be populated until the dome is complete. The dome writings are also processed as source material to create a constantly evolving textual landscape." Morrissey's project highlights the intersectionality that is key to e-lit; "The Last Performance" focuses heavily on architecture, but also community, and evolution - the performance itself is multilayered.
Unfortunately, you can't contribute to "The Last Performance" anymore - in fact, when I tried to click on the "begin" button, I was re-routed to a "page not found" screen. (The technology itself used in this project is dated, having been "live to the public" for only two years.) However, perhaps that is the point, and that is what makes this project, and e-lit as a whole, engaging and experimental; there is a limit to time, to art, and to digital literature ... their very nature is impermanent.
This video shows the performance and end product of "The Last Performance".
After reading Chapter One of Electronic Literature and Electronic Literature: What is it? I came to a better understanding about what is E-Lit. I had a hard time grasping what that was, and these two readings really helped me follow what was E-Lit and what was E-books. Which were discussed in Electronic Literature and stated the differences. E-Lit is born digital that is interactive for telling stories while E-books are just versions of a printed books transferred into a computer or software. Furthermore, the concept of genre was a discussion that the board of ELO had to decide what kind of boundaries they wanted to keep E-Lit in. They found the term genre to be "charmingly old-fashioned" due to the fact that digital media is such a big umbrella. Electronic Literature has so many aspects that it can hop from one genre to another. E-Lit is a more engaging way of the digital writing genre, it is interactive and lets more than one person control where the story goes. These works prepares a message on how users are answering or interacting with software, causing to have a different outcome for each person.
I choose Rio created by Jim Andrews for my reference. It is an interactive site that takes poetry and combines it into an audio. You can press on a letter and music pops up, adding more letters will add more audio and it will blend together. I found it interesting because it is a cool way to include words and music. I think that music goes go hand and hand with reading or writing. It creates the experience for poetry more engaging and creative.
Having experience in electronic literature from past courses, reading "Chapter One: Electronic Literature," by Scott Rettberg, and "E-Lit: What is it?" By N. Katherine Hayles, I feel as though my knowledge of electronic literature has become increasingly solidified as I rule out all technicalities of the term. The digital aspect of electronic literature is comparatively broader, as there is an understanding that the contextual aspect of E-lit is fluid, rather than the example mentioned, physical literature. E-lit, as referenced, also is a tool that seemingly "takes advantage of the capabilities and contexts provided by the standalone or networked computer." (Rettberg, p. 4) It "develops new ways of writing"(Rettberg, p. 5) and performances. Electronic literature is conforming to the idea that "textuality and communication are now digitally mediated" (Rettberg, p. 2) Which explains the complexity of the term and its use through the 90s to the present and how, as humans continue to coevolve with the tools, by providing more cultural and historical contexts, not only does electronic literature in a broad sense become more accessible, but it becomes strikingly more realistic as time progresses now with AI and generative tools. Returning to the idea that electronic literature is breaching into, "hopeful monsters" (Hayles, 2008, p. 4) as a sort of lens into the possibilities that e-lit holds in comparison to tools such as AI that have already passed the point of being defined as "monsters."
As some see electronic literature as difficult to define, I see that e-lit is an accessible, multidisciplinary form of literature that takes on digital elements to produce a unique form of storytelling.
With my experience in creating electronic literature, it not only illuminates the interactive element of a nonlinear storyline, but regardless, everything that is written IS intentional and strategically placed. As I realize a lot of the information being given about e-lit is from the 1990s, which I find fascinating, as networking and digital devices did not have a lot of information behind them. So, understanding those concepts of how early e-lit came to be was something that cleared up any confusion I had. Giselle Beiguelman's Code 1 Movie was definitely a piece of e-lit that left me perplexed out of the other pieces I used. Understanding the idea of hexa code and how that is implemented into the construction of new translations that can be morphed into other digital pieces explains the idea of this interconnection of networking and the connection that exists in electronic literature.
Even after reading through Electronic Literature: What is it? and the textbook chapter, I'm still not completely confident on my understanding of electronic literature, but I have figured out some guidelines to what it is. I think most important to note is that e-lit works must be presented digitally; they cannot exist on paper. Secondly, these digital works are a result of the evolutionary process of media and literature since the 1980s when user computers emerged. An e-lit work's most basic essence is that it must exist as code of some format on a computer, "writing in networked and programable media" as the textbook states. I found the textbook's note that e-lit also cannot exist without the "foundational" forms of previous literature, like poetry, novels, and metaphors and genres. While these foundational forms of physical media are fixed, e-lit is adaptable, and altogether "kinetic". Finally, I think it's important to note that e-lit exists as a "hopeful monster" as N. Katherine Hayles explains it. The e-lit phenomenon is a mutation of both human thought, technological expansion, and the human-technological relationship that is constantly evolving. The textbook's link to Nietzsche's remarks on how the typewriter changed "the very structure of his thought and its expression on the page" helped me understand this mutual human-tech evolution better. The electronic literature field is difficult to pin down, but from my understanding from the readings it is - at it's most basic - a human creative response to emerging technologies as a new, digital, and adaptable format of storytelling.
One question I had remaining was what differentiates an e-lit work from a game? N. Katherine Hayles definition of "interactive fiction" helped answer this question for me. Instead of a "player" you have an "interactor" in electronic literature interactive fiction. What makes these 'playable' digital works literature is that they have "novelistic components" and "clever modifications of traditional literary devices". Hayles uses Emily Short's Savoir-Faire as an example of interactive fiction where the interactor must use "inference" to link a door to a box in order to progress in the story. Hayles notes how this "resembles the operation of literary metaphor". I did read some reviews on Savoir-Faire. The work was praised for Short's attention to world-building, metaphors, and the entire design of the digital system of her interactive world. I started to play Savoir-Faire and found it to be very descriptive in the setting, and you were able to be interactive as the protagonist of the plot, almost as if you were reading a novel from the first-person perspective of a detective on a difficult case. It does cross between 'game' and 'e-lit', but I found it Hayle's explanation of it helpful in the distinctions between difficult digital formats and genres within the electronic literature field.
Hi! My name is Tristan,
I'm a last semester Senior completing a degree in Text, Business Writing, and Digital Studies. I've already completed my minor in Business Admin!
I aspire to work with nonprofit organizations in a legal capacity, potentially including writing grants. I've worked with several nonprofit orgs in the past, and I hope this base will allow me to continue in this field.
I'm an avid reader/writer, and when I'm not doing either of those or outside, I'm probably playing video games.
Hi! I'm Kacey. I love to write (hence why I'm an English major), along with reading, photography, and singing. This picture is of me and my senior cast of You're A Good Man Charlie Brown posing with bracelets that a middle schooler gave to us. I played Lucy. And just for a fun fact, I once sang the National Anthem at a UNH hockey game with my high school choir last year before I decided I was going here.
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