What is E-Lit?

     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.