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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
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.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2018
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For my parents, Paul and Barbara, my children, Jessica, Benjamin, and Aurora, and most of all for my wife, partner, and first reader, Jill.
Electronic Literature
SCOTT RETTBERG
polity
Copyright © Scott Rettberg 2019
The right of Scott Rettberg to be identified as Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
First published in 2019 by Polity Press
Polity Press65 Bridge StreetCambridge CB2 1UR, UK
Polity Press101 Station LandingSuite 300Medford, MA 02155, USA
All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.
ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-1681-0
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Rettberg, Scott, author.Title: Electronic literature / Scott Rettberg.Description: Cambridge, UK ; Medford, MA, USA : Polity Press, 2018. | Includes bibliographical references and index.Identifiers: LCCN 2018019604 (print) | LCCN 2018025325 (ebook) | ISBN 9781509516810 (Epub) | ISBN 9781509516773 (hardback) | ISBN 9781509516780 (pbk.)Subjects: LCSH: Hypertext literature. | Electronic publications. | Interactive multimedia. | Literature and the Internet. | Literature and technology.Classification: LCC PN56.I64 (ebook) | LCC PN56.I64 R48 2018 (print) | DDC 802.85--dc23LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018019604
The publisher has used its best endeavours to ensure that the URLs for external websites referred to in this book are correct and active at the time of going to press. However, the publisher has no responsibility for the websites and can make no guarantee that a site will remain live or that the content is or will remain appropriate.
Every effort has been made to trace all copyright holders, but if any have been inadvertently overlooked the publisher will be pleased to include any necessary credits in any subsequent reprint or edition.
For further information on Polity, visit our website: politybooks.com
Acknowledgments
Segments of Chapter 2, “Combinatory Poetics,” were adapted from “Dada Redux: Elements of Dadaist Practice in Contemporary Electronic Literature” by Scott Rettberg in Fibreculture 11 (2008).
Segments of Chapter 3, “Hypertext Fiction,” were adapted from Destination Unknown: Experiments in the Network Novel by Scott Rettberg, PhD dissertation, University of Cincinnati, 2002; “Narrative and Digital Media” by Scott Rettberg and Jill Walker Rettberg in Teaching Narrative Theory, David Herman, Brian McHale, James Phelan, eds, Modern Language Association, 2010; “The American Hypertext Novel and Whatever Became of It?” and “Post-Hyperfiction: Practices in Digital Textuality” by Scott Rettberg in Interactive Digital Narrative: History, Theory, and Practice, Hartmut Koenitz, Gabriele Ferri, Mads Haahr, Diğdem Sezen, Tonguç İbrahim Sezen, eds, Routledge, 2015.
Segments of Chapter 5, “Kinetic Poetry,” were adapted from “Bokstaver i begevelser” [“Letters in Space, At Play”] by Scott Rettberg, published in Norwegian in Vagant 2011:1.
Segments of Chapter 6, “Network Writing” were adapted from “All Together Now: Hypertext, Collective Narratives, and Online Collective Knowledge Communities” in New Narratives: Stories and Storytelling in the Digital Age, Ruth Page, and Browen Thomas, eds, University of Nebraska Press, 2011.
A short segment of Chapter 7 was adapted from the interview “Cavewriting” by Scott Rettberg, Jill Walker, Noah Wardrip-Fruin, Robert Coover, and Josh Carroll in The Iowa Review Web (July 2006).
I gratefully acknowledge the support of the Meltzer Research Fund, the University of Bergen, Brown University, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and particularly John Cayley and Nick Montfort, my hosts at Brown and MIT during my 2017 sabbatical when the bulk of this book was written.
Thanks to all my friends, collaborators, and colleagues in the Electronic Literature Organization and in the field of electronic literature, who are too many to name individually. It is fair to say that during the past two decades, my professional and social lives have become indistinguishable. I could never have hoped to find more creative, supportive, dedicated, intelligent, funny, and talented people in my life. The best way I can thank them is to note that most of their names can found in the pages of this book. Finally, thanks to my students and colleagues in the University of Bergen Digital Culture program and the Bergen Electronic Literature Research Group.
1Genres 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 same cauldron. But it is also the case that the new forms and thematic concerns of electronic literature do not merely emerge from the technology itself: instead they emerge from the interaction of new technologies with aesthetic concerns that have much longer histories. While the works this book addresses are born digital, they are not exclusively of digital lineage. They have particularly deep connections to experimental writing and avant-garde art movements of the twentieth century.
This book considers what is new and essentially digital about electronic literature, but also and perhaps even more importantly how these genres connect with and expand upon prior movements. Kinetic digital poetry could not exist in its current form without traditions in concrete poetry. Lettrism, visual poetry, and sound poetry emerged well before there was a computer in every home, much less a smartphone in most pockets. The aesthetics of combinatory poetry may not have been explored so extensively were it not for the Dadaist desire to overcome language, or the surrealist yearning to uncover the logic of dreams, or the Oulipian fascination with writing under constraint. Electronic literature not only takes us forward to explore new horizons but also on a retrospective journey that can lead to better understanding of how the past of literature propels us toward its future.
Reconsidering genre in electronic literature
Tzvetan Todorov begins his essay “The Origin of Genres” by observing that to “persist in discussing genres today might seem like an idle if not obviously anachronistic pastime” (Todorov, 1976, p. 159). Like the term “electronic literature” the concept of genre is one that might seem “charmingly old-fashioned” when we are discussing literary forms native to the digital media. Digital media are after all not only multimedia but also variable media, malleable and transcoded (Manovich, 2002). The general-purpose computer is defined by the fact that it can perform the tasks of any other machine if that machine’s processes can be understood as computable. Thus we no longer encounter computers as single-purpose devices. No contemporary computer would only be capable of calculating missile trajectories – with different software the same machine could be used to regulate traffic patterns, or emulate human speech, or to play Angry Birds, or to watch cat videos on YouTube.
The material aspects of electronic literature do not themselves determine genre – while we could speak of a sculptor working with marble, or bronze, or wood, or ice to be working within a particular medium, computational artists work with a medium that can function as many different media simultaneously. While we can speak of modalities of computational media – text, sound, voice, image, moving image, interactive image, etc. – those modalities can themselves be made to transform from one to the other. A text can be morphed into an image, which can again be transformed into sound. Because we can transcode from text strings, lines of code, into images, audio recordings, telephony, and video, computational media cannot be understood as fixed.
Perhaps it is folly even to consider “the work” of electronic literature. Many of the examples we will look at in this book are in fact better understood as “projects” than as works in the conventional literary sense. We usually consider a “work” of literature to have reached a state of fixity and of completion. The technology of the printed book exemplifies the quality of fixity. Writing in digital media on the contrary can and will change over time. A “publication” of electronic literature has at least one of the same effects as a publication in print, in that it involves something being brought forth to a public, but its publication does not imply fixity in the same way. The publication of electronic literature is not finished just because it has reached its public – it could change right before the reader’s eyes. Many electronic literature projects have multiple iterations that involve not only revisions in the text or the underlying code, but also the form and nature of the artwork itself. Judd Morrissey’s The Last Performance [dot org] (2007) offers one example – it is a collectively written database narrative project that has been variously presented as an online project, as a museum installation, and as a dance performance work (see Rettberg, 2010). The variety of venues for electronic literature also complicates the situation of genre. If the same work is presented first online for readers sitting at their computers, and then as a performance for a live audience, and then as an installation in an art gallery, can we even break its genre down into categories as basic as literary text, performance, or visual art?
Genre from a literary studies perspective
In this book I identify threads of practice and argue that these can be understood as genre, that it is useful to understand them as genre, but I do so with a keen awareness of the fact that most works of electronic literature are what N. Katherine Hayles has dubbed “hopeful monsters” (Hayles, 2008, p. 4). These new creations emerge not in a smooth and linear progression from existing genres but in a more chimerical fashion. I write separately of combinatory poetics and kinetic poetry, but many kinetic poems are also combinatory. Likewise, many works that could be described as locative narratives or literary installations are also hypertext fictions. So while literary genre in the sense that I will use it serves to concentrate our attention as readers on specific aspects that individual projects share within a group, none of these genres can be said to have fixed or immutable boundaries.
Literary studies has taught us to approach the idea of genre with caution and awareness that genres are better understood as situational framings rather than immutable categories that correspond to deep structures inherent in the literary work itself. Of course, that has never stopped thinkers from trying to devise systems that account as comprehensively as possible for categories of literary production dominant during their day – and ideas of genre dating back to the ancient Greeks still have substantial influence on the way that we experience and process literary experience today. In his Poetics Aristotle offered tragedy, epic poetry, and comedy as core genres and provided a detailed analysis of the dramatic structure of tragedies as they were written in his time (Aristotle, 1997). Neoclassical approaches continued to seek universally valid systems for classifying and describing texts (Barwarshi and Reiff, 2010). Northrop Frye discusses the archetypal mythos and the triad of comedy, romance, and tragedy within principal genres of rhetoric including drama, epos, fiction and lyric (Frye, 2000). While some works of electronic literature can be described in broad strokes as comic or tragic, dramatic, fictional, or poetic, the classic archetypal genres typically do not apply to electronic literature.
More contemporary discussions have treated literary genre as situated action rather than universally applicable typology. Todorov sees genre primarily as the result of institutional discourses that constitute norms. Individual texts are produced and understood in relation to those norms: “A genre, literary or otherwise, is nothing but this codification of discursive properties” (Todorov, 1976, p. 162). Todorov understands the origin of genres to be prior genres, and genre to be a process of continuous transformation: “by inversion, by displacement, by combination” (p. 161).
Jacques Derrida discusses “the law of genre” – the idea that genre has the function of imposing norms on literary and cultural practices: “As soon as the word ‘genre’ is sounded, as soon as it is heard, as soon as one attempts to conceive it, a limit is drawn. And when a limit is established, norms and interdictions are not far behind: ‘Do,’ ‘Do not’ says ‘genre,’ the word ‘genre,’ the figure, the voice, or the law of genre” (Derrida, 1980, p. 56). In Derrida’s view, genre functions more to exclude forms of literary practice than to elucidate them: “… as soon as a genre announces itself, one must respect a norm, one must cross a line of demarcation, one must not risk impurity, anomaly, or monstrosity” (p. 57). Electronic literature is considerably resistant to clear lines of demarcation. Hybridity and perhaps monstrosity (see Leclair, 2000) are par for the course in a multimedial field whose cycles of creation move at the speed of technological change.
After reader response theory and the rise of cultural studies, we can assert that genres are actions, as is any other kind of typology. Genres do not uncover a code or deep structure, but are the product of an active and interested process. These frameworks do not simply emerge from the culture; they are imposed. John Frow (2006) writes: “genre is not a property of a text but is a function of reading. Genre is a category we impute to texts, and under different circumstances this imputation may change” (p. 102). The “function of reading” that genre performs is particularly important to consider as we encounter electronic literature.
Frow describes “reading regimes” – institutions that comprise a cultural apparatus for reading: for example, schools, organizations, publishing companies, and marketing agencies that reify and regulate practice of reading. The reading regime of electronic literature has a complex composition. There are now institutions of electronic literature. There are organizations like the Electronic Literature Organization and the E-Poetry Festivals. In universities electronic literature is taught within various disciplines: English, comparative literature, creative writing, communications, art, and design. There are a number of publishers and online journals – such as the electronic book review, Dichtung Digital, Hyperrhiz: New Media Cultures, and The New River – that have made sustained efforts to publish electronic literature and criticism of it, and there are a few annual awards on offer, such as the Electronic Literature Organization’s Robert Coover Award for a Work of Electronic Literature and the New Media Writing Prize. At the same time the cultural apparatus of electronic literature is unstable in comparison to longer-established fields of literary culture: individual authors might forget to renew their web hosting or abandon web projects, functionally un-publishing them from the Internet; some of the most important journals in the field during the 1990s and 2000s are no longer online; technological platforms used to develop works might become obsolete as software companies go out of business or are acquired; and mechanisms of evaluation for digital work in both academia and in the culture at large are still insufficiently developed. The varying norms and standards of different electronic literature venues and audiences further complicate the reading regime of electronic literature.
Thomas O. Beebee (2004) proposes that generic difference is “grounded in the ‘use-value’ of a discourse rather than in its content, formal features, or its rules of production” (p. 7). We claim genres for particular purposes. The body of work we survey here has been described as “electronic literature” at least in part in order to make a claim that the work is literature and should be read as such. In distinguishing genres within electronic literature, we also make assertions about the use-value of those genres for writers and readers. Rather than understanding electronic literature as an undifferentiated mass of experimental literary practices in digital media, by naming these genres and linking them to historical contexts, we also make certain claims to legitimacy. These practices are not ahistorical and did not materialize from thin air with the dawn of the digital age, but are grounded in literary and artistic traditions. Jessica Pressman considers for example the work of Young-Hae Chang Heavy Industries and finds explicit connections to modernist poetry being used to serve a claim to cultural legitimacy, to “highlight their literariness, authorize their experiments, and situate electronic literature at the center of a contemporary digital culture that privileges images, navigation, and interactivity over narrative, reading, and textuality” (Pressman, 2008, p. 300). I argue that the connections between genres of electronic literature with modernist and postmodernist literature go deeper than that, as in certain cases both the thematic concerns and structural models of the works can be read as clear extensions of the same cultural projects.
Ultimately, the reason for reading electronic literature from the perspective of genre is pragmatic. Genre provides a map to a certain territory, even as the process of mapping also defines the territory. By considering electronic literature in terms of genre we develop a shared vocabulary and set of referents. When we identify, if not themes, then at least formal and stylistic qualities that a group of cultural artifacts and practices share in common, we establish a frame of reference. We establish an understanding of the conventions writers are working with and against. Genre provides students and researchers with a background that makes it easier to discern the particular qualities of whatever work is set into view. An understanding of genre begins to give us a sense of “how to read” and perhaps in the case of electronic literature, where and what to read, enabling movement past the interface to the content of the work that lies beyond its form and apparatus. Genre further provides writers with models that they might adopt or subvert. In some of the cases discussed in this book, even the source code of the work itself is publicly available to read and perhaps to modify and tinker with. Writers can study works of electronic literature in a very specific way, not only in terms of content or style, but also rules of operation, as represented in the code.
The technological apparatus plays a special role in the formation of electronic literature genres distinct from print literary genres. Joseph Tabbi (2009) notes that both genre and media are “being transformed concurrently – and those transformations (as much as the work itself) are what need to be tagged and traced.” Technology is not entirely determinative of genres of electronic literature, but the capabilities and limitations of systems, platforms, and software used to create and distribute electronic literature afford and constrain digital works in ways that are essential to understanding them.
Genre from a media and technology perspective
Our understanding of electronic literature must be informed by our understanding of the technological context in which it is produced. A central project for readers of electronic literature is more to deeply engage with questions of how technology is changing cultural practices in a more general sense. In Gramophone, Film, Typewriter Friedrich Kittler quotes Friedrich Nietzsche’s reflections, after he started writing with a typewriter, on how the writing technology he was using to produce his work was reflexively informing the very structure of his thought and its expression on the page: “Our machines are also shaping our thoughts” (Kittler, 1999, p. 249). During this period, Nietzsche’s writing style changed from the discursive style of The Birth of Tragedy and The Genealogy of Morals to the more epigrammatic and staccato style of his later work.
One of the long-standing debates in the theoretical discourse of technology has been the varying degree to which humans alternately shape technology through its social construction and in turn how humans may themselves become shaped by the technologies that structure their environment. Technological determinists argue that we are more shaped by our technology than vice versa. “Media,” Kittler writes, “determine our situation” (Kittler, 1999, p. xxxv). N. Katherine Hayles alternately proposes that we consider a process of technogenesis, in which humans and technology are coevolving in a process of mutual symbiosis (Hayles, 2012). That is to say that technologies determine our situation even as we determine our technological apparatus. The two processes are in a feedback loop and cannot be simply separated from one another. I concur with Hayles – while it would be inaccurate to characterize our situation as entirely determined by our technology, it would similarly be wrong to claim that we have complete control of our tools. We rather co-evolve with our technologies.
Bernard Stiegler describes the potential of digital media to be reciprocal media – anamnetic mnemotechnology. Our abilities to both decode and recode digital media are essential but threatened aspects of the creative potentiality of digital media (Stiegler, 2010). Many of the current genres of electronic literature are good representatives of anamnetic technology. At the same time, approaches to computing have increasingly moved to a market-driven model, in which the computer user is more driven to consume media, or to produce it within the templated confines of social networks, than to actually create independently in the medium. The iPad is a consumer device focused on catering to the needs of an information consumer rather than the engagement of creative users of the technology. It marks a move toward computational devices that we can easily read from but only write to with more difficulty. Lori Emerson notes that some works of electronic literature can be read as a kind of resistance toward the power relations implicit in the vanishing interface “by hacking, breaking, or simply making access difficult, they work against the way in which digital media and their interfaces are becoming increasingly invisible – even while these interfaces also increasingly define what and how we read/write” (Emerson, 2012). Authors of electronic literature work within the bounds of interfaces, and the interface must be understood as mediating both the writer’s creative process of production and the reader’s experience of the work. As Christian Ulrik Andersen and Søren Pold (2014) note, interfaces are not neutral: “Whether the interface mediates between man and computer, between computers or between humans it will always reflect a balance of submission and control. This balance is often conditioned by ideology.”
The technological environment constrains the genres of electronic literature not only through the form and capacities of software and hardware but also through codes in Lawrence Lessig’s sense – legal strictures, copyright regimes, and labyrinthine software terms of use that often involve deep surrender of personal rights (Lessig, 1999). For creators and users of electronic literature these codes constrain and limit the types of materials that can be used and in some cases the life span of the work itself. An important concern in the field is the effect that using proprietary technology and software can have on projects developed in those platforms. Once its corporate owner does not support a platform, works developed in that platform may become obsolete. Some of the classics of 1990s hypertext fiction made in Storyspace and interactive poetry made in Shockwave are now functionally inaccessible. In some cases, publishers of works of electronic literature have even held onto copyright and refused to let even the authors republish their own work, long after they have discontinued support of the work.
Gunther Kress (2010) and others have written on the semiotics of digital objects in their essentially multimodal nature. The general-purpose computer offers authors a full panoply of options to affect, change, and operate simultaneously mixes of modalities that could not be executed in analog media. This results in particular consequences as we consider genres of electronic literature: depending on the technology used to create and distribute a particular work, and on the context of its manifestation, we may for instance be called upon to read images, sounds, music, interface, interaction, design, layout, spatial situation, temporality, and perhaps even code as well as the surface text.
We read the poetics and language of works of electronic literature, but we may also read to understand their structures, rules of operation, platform, and algorithms. Nick Montfort and Ian Bogost have led a drive toward “platform studies”: scholarship that investigates the relationships between the hardware and software design of computing systems and the creative works produced on those systems (Bogost and Montfort, 2009). The MIT Press Platform Studies series provides examples of how platforms such as the Atari 2600, the Commodore Amiga, and Flash are developed in particular historical, economic, and cultural contexts and both those contexts and the technical capabilities and limitations of the platform itself play important roles in forming the creative works produced within them. Thus, while we can still think of poetry, fiction, and drama as genres involved in electronic literature, we can also think of Flash (platform) animated poetry, Processing (platform) interactive poetry, and HTML (platform) hypertext fiction. The platforms involved in the production of these works also must be considered formative of their genre. Mark Marino, Matthew Fuller, and others have pushed for “software studies” and “critical code studies” – these can be understood in relation to platform studies – if a platform is the system or operational layer which can be programmed, software studies focuses on the level of writing and creative practice of the programming itself. For analysis of computational literary works this would mean critical reading of the code underlying the surface text as it is experienced by the reader – to use the terms set out by Espen Aarseth in Cybertext, such reading entails the analysis of the textons of code underlying and operating the text-machine in addition to the scriptons manifested for the readers’ consumption (p. 63). While there is by no means a widespread consensus that a deep understanding of code is necessary for critical analysis of works of electronic literature – there may in fact sometimes be benefits to focused surface-only readings of works – critical code studies offers the opportunity to engage with works under the hood, not only as literary works, but as computer programs.
Overview of key theoretical, critical, and analytical work in the field
A substantial body of work in the theory and criticism of electronic literature has been published from the 1990s to the present. Early studies of electronic literature such as George Landow’s monograph Hypertext: The Convergence of Contemporary Theory and Technology (1992), the collection he edited Hyper /Text /Theory (1994), and the second edition of Jay David Bolter’s Writing Space: Computers, Hypertext, and the Remediation of Print (2001) introduced general concepts related to hypertext and related them to topics such as interface studies and post-structuralist theory. These texts made important theoretical contributions, if referencing only a few early works from a slowly emerging corpus of electronic literature. Some studies such as Jane Yellowlees Douglas’ The End of Books or Books Without End (2000) and her earlier work from the 1990s focused specifically on close readings of that relatively small body of early hypertext fiction. Michael Joyce’s essay collection Of Two Minds: Hypertext Pedagogy and Poetics (1996) offered the perspective of an author and writing teacher on the practice and poetics of the emerging form. A second wave of scholarly monographs such as Espen Aarseth’s Cybertext: Perspectives on Ergodic Literature (1997) and Marie-Laure Ryan’s Narrative as Virtual Reality: Immersion and Interactivity in Literature and Electronic Media (2001) recast the generic boundaries and conceptual dimensions of digital literature by moving the discourse of the field to more explicitly narratological territory, and by pushing the field toward broader categorical dimensions than hypertext alone, for instance encouraging the serious theoretical consideration of interactive fiction and computer games. Markku Eskelinen’s Cybertext Poetics: The Critical Landscape of New Media Literary Theory (2012) builds further upon typologies of cybertext and narratology. Loss Pequeño Glazier’s Digital Poetics: The Making of E-Poetries (2001) also attempted to expand the scope of critical inquiry to include emerging poetic practices specific to the Web, while situating them within experimental print poetry tradition. Brian Kim Stefans has written two critical books, Fashionable Noise on Digital Poetics (2003) and Word Toys (2017), that consider digital poetics as an element of broader movements in contemporary poetry.
A number of monographs about specialized subtopics and individual genres of electronic literature or focused theoretical approaches have been published in recent years. Nick Montfort’s Twisty Little Passages: An Approach to Interactive Fiction (2003) provides a thorough introduction to the history of that specific genre. Noah Wardrip-Fruin’s Expressive Processing (2009) considers the evolution of procedural narrative. Matthew Kirschenbaum’s Mechanisms: New Media and Forensic Textuality (2012) considers works of electronic literature from a forensic perspective, considering how even such contingencies as the physical storage media on which works are distributed and preserved can affect both our experience of a work and the material conditions of its survival. Lori Emerson’s Reading Writing Interfaces (2014) considers how writing technologies mediate the production of writing including electronic literature, and to some extent set poetic parameters for writers to work with and against. David Ciccoricco’s Reading Network Fiction (2007) examines hypertext fiction on and off the Web through network tropes. Belinda Barnet’s Memory Machines (2013) narrates a history of the development of hypertext and early hypertext fiction based on interviews with key actors with innovators responsible for its creation. Jessica Pressman’s Digital Modernism: Making it New in New Media (2014) explores a collection of digital works through the lens of historical modernism. Manuel Portela’s Scripting Reading Motions (2013) considers how combinatory and kinetic poetry self-consciously play with the processes and dynamics of reading and writing. Somewhat broader and more historiographical in approach are Chris Funkhouser’s two monographs, Prehistoric Digital Poetry: An Archaeology of Forms, 1959–1995 (2007) and New Directions in Digital Poetry (2012), that together establish a comprehensive record of landmark developments in the history of digital poetry. Sandy Baldwin’s The Internet Unconscious: On the Subject of Electronic Literature (2015) reframed “electronic literature” as the collective and alienating act of writing the Internet and becoming subject to it. David Jhave Johnston’s Aesthetic Animism (2016) makes an important contribution focused on the poetics of kinetic and interactive typography. Rita Raley’s Tactical Media (2009) situates electronic literature and activism in a digital art context. Roberto Simanowski’s Digital Art and Meaning (2011) wrestles with the balance between meaning and spectacle in a number of works of electronic literature and digital art. Jeremy Douglass, Mark C. Marino, and Jessica Pressman’s Reading Project: A Collaborative Analysis of William Poundstone’sProject for Tachistoscope [Bottomless Pit] provides an analysis of a single work by three different authors using three distinct analytical methods. Dene Grigar and Stuart Moulthrop’s Traversals: The Use of Preservation for Early Electronic Writing (2017) documents the process of archiving and documenting several early hypertext works and develops deep readings of the works concerned. A number of N. Katherine Hayles’ books, such as How We Became Posthuman (1999), Writing Machines (2002), My Mother Was a Computer (2005) and How We Think: Digital Media and Contemporary Technogenesis (2012) laid out theories of posthumanism and materiality important to the discourse of electronic literature and used works of electronic literature as tutor texts to support broader theoretical claims. N. Katherine Hayles’ Electronic Literature: New Horizons for the Literary (2008) is perhaps the book that has had the most impact in establishing an initial set of referents and laying out some forms that characterize the field. The first chapter of Hayles’ book provided a swift and solid introduction to genres of electronic literature, even as other chapters used electronic literature to weave together threads of Hayles’ theoretical project. I take the liberty of using Electronic Literature as the title for this volume in part because this book, written a decade later, carries on the first part of Hayles’ project to more extensively describe contemporary genres of digital writing and the discourses surrounding them to a non-specialist audience.
Edited collections have also been important to establish in the field of electronic literature. Collections such as New Media Poetics: Contexts, Technotexts, and Theories edited by Adelaide Morris and Thomas Swiss (2009); the First Person, Second Person, Third Person series edited by Noah Wardrip-Fruin and Pat Harrigan (Wardrip-Fruin and Harrigan 2004; Harrigan and Wardrip-Fruin 2007, 2009); The Aesthetics of Net Literature: Writing, Reading and Playing in Programmable Media edited by Peter Gendolla et al. (2007); Reading Moving Letters: Digital Literature in Research and Teaching edited by Simanowski et al. (2010); Beyond the Screen: Transformations of Literary Structures, Interfaces and Genres (2010) edited by Jörgen Schäfer et al.; Analyzing Digital Fiction edited by Alice Bell et al. (2014); Interactive Digital Narrative edited by Hartmut Koenitz et al. (2015); and Electronic Literature Communities edited by Scott Rettberg et al. (2015) gather together voices of critics, authors, and artists working in the field, and establish critical perspectives on niche aspects of the field. Electronic Literature as Model of Creativity and Innovation in Practice: A Report from the HERA Joint Research Project (Rettberg, 2014b) provides an extensive account of the most substantial Digital Humanities research project to date in the field. The Bloomsbury Handbook of Electronic Literature edited by Joseph Tabbi (2018) is the most recent edited collection of this kind, providing an excellent representation of approaches and debates that have defined the field in the 2010s. Research and teaching in the field also rely heavily on historical readers and reference works such as The New Media Reader edited by Noah Wardrip-Fruin and Nick Montfort (2003) and The Johns Hopkins Guide to Digital Media edited by Marie-Laure Ryan, Lori Emerson, and Benjamin J. Robertson (2014), which place electronic literature in broader digital culture contexts.
Joseph Tabbi (2010) argues that literature becoming a network is fundamental to its “renewal and emergence in the networked environment of computers, interfaces, and tagged content” (p. 40). I have gone in some length here at the outset to identify critical and theoretical works that have played important roles in developing the discourse of the field, both because I hope that readers of this book will want to dig deeper in specific genres and topics discussed here as well as to acknowledge that the present work owes a great deal to this network of prior research. More than establishing a new theory of electronic literature or bringing a single aspect of the field into sharp focus, this book is an aggregation of views, a portrait of genres of electronic literature that brings in a chorus of many voices from the field and serves as an invitation to an ongoing and multifaceted conversation centered on literature and digital media.
Why read electronic literature?
Electronic literature helps us to understand how digital technologies and digital culture impact writing in the broadest sense. The genres of electronic literature represented in this book are digitally native forms that involve the computational and multimedial properties of the computer both in the production of the text and in its traversal. In studying electronic literature we ask what it means to “read” computer programs as literary artifacts – and in so doing perhaps expand our notion of what the act of reading entails.
Electronic literature is experimental literature in the sense it functions much like basic scientific research: there is as much to learn from failure in this field as success. Studying electronic literature is less about tackling a canon than it is about building a collective understanding of the creative potentialities of digital media. Electronic literature drives us to consider how computation affords new modes of literature, at the same time as it constrains them in contextually specific ways. While some experiments in electronic literature are simply tests of the poetic potential of a particular platform, other works pioneer techniques later used in mainstream cultural production.
Electronic literature teaches us approaches to reading and writing digital media. In this sense it has applications not only for literary scholars and for creative writers, but for anyone interested in understanding or creating in digital media. The majority of the students who have moved through my electronic literature courses over the years have not gone on to become literary scholars or creative writers, but have instead found careers as web designers, as teachers, as journalists, as librarians, as marketers, as media consultants, and in information technology. As objects of study and as processes of creative production, works of electronic literature may be used to teach digital media skills, interactive media strategies, and new ways of understanding digital culture.
Perhaps the most important reason to read electronic literature is that the study of these works provides us with opportunities to consider what is happening to our situation within a world increasingly mediated by digital technology. As self-reflexive literary artifacts, works of electronic literature present us with crafted experiences that reflect changes wrought by the digital turn taking place in the nature of communication, textuality, society, and perhaps even the structure of human thought.
The structure and method of this book
Works of electronic literature referenced in the chapters of this book will include a balance of historical examples from the 1950s to the early 2000s and contemporary work produced in the last decade. The book focuses primarily on work written in English, but it is important to note that there are significant works and active communities writing in French, Spanish, German, Portuguese, Catalan, Polish, and many other languages. The selection of works will include some works that are now out of circulation but will emphasize those that remain accessible and available for study – particularly work from the three volumes of the Electronic Literature Collection. The majority of the chapters in this book have a roughly parallel structure, each approaching a different genre or set of related practices. Each core chapter of the book includes:
Consideration of how the genre is informed by and emerges from preceding cultural and artistic practices and movements;
Discussion of how each genre is shaped by a technological apparatus, by particular software and hardware platforms and the cultural contexts surrounding them;
Description of the particular medial and artistic properties that distinguish the focused group of digital literary works as a specific genre;
Presentation of the history of each genre, including an overview of key works, core theoretical concepts informing practice, analysis of how each genre has evolved and its potentialities for future practice; and
Suggestions of how the genre informs and opens up new ways of understanding contemporary media and culture.
The five chapters that follow engage substantively with core genres of practice in electronic literature: combinatory poetics, hypertext fiction, interactive fiction and other gamelike forms, kinetic and interactive poetry, and network writing. The majority of creative works presently shown and studied as electronic literature exhibit elements of one or more of these genres. The concluding chapter “Divergent Forms” briefly considers practices that have built upon these genres in ways that extend them to other environments and other disciplines, such locative narrative, augmented and virtual reality work, interactive installations, and expanded cinema.
2Combinatory Poetics
When scholars of electronic literature discuss its history, they often start with hypertext fiction, because hypertext was the first form of digital writing to receive sustained critical attention in the English-speaking literary studies context. We will instead begin with combinatory poetics, the oldest genre of electronic literature. Christopher Strachey’s Love Letters generator (1952) is most likely the first computer program made to generate literary text, and combinatory poetics have remained an essential genre of electronic literature through to the present day. Like many of the other genres considered in this book, combinatory writing has deep connections to experimental writing traditions and art movements of the twentieth century.
One way of understanding computers is through a paradigm of database and algorithm. Computer programs access and present data, whether internal to the program or provided by external sources and user input, and then through algorithmic processes, modify or substitute the data presented by the system. It is in this procedural substitution of data, and of language, that computation is most concretely connected to combinatory poetics in experimental writing traditions such as Dada, Surrealism, and Oulipo. In this chapter we will consider how elements of chance and procedurality served as the foundation for combinatory and generative art and literature. Combinatory poetics emerged in twentieth-century avant-garde movements, further developed in poetry generators in the early history of computing and remains today an essential mode of practice in electronic literature.
Artistic and literary contexts for combinatory poetics
Dada was a multimedia avant-garde art movement that began in Zurich during World War I and flourished in Berlin, Paris, and New York from 1916 until, roughly, 1920. Beginning as a disgusted response to the war and the blithely nationalistic bourgeois attitudes the Dadaists felt were at the root of the conflict, the Dadaists developed and refined the notion of “anti-art” as an expression of dissatisfaction with the dominant contemporary ideology. Although the period in which Dada was an active organized
