Tag: electronic literature

“Information patterns travel incessantly inside and outside the machine, from disk storage to active memory to output devices to other computer sites. At the end of their journey through cyberspace—each packet of information following its own itinerary—bit patters recognize themselves into letters, words, and texts. Hopefully into meanings. Sometimes the words on the loose become malleable substance in our hands, as we grab them with a hand-shaped cursor, move them, erase them, banish and recall them, pull more words from under words, cut them out and paste them into a new context; sometimes they become actors and dancers on the stage of the computer screen, animated by the script of an invisible program; sometime they fail to regroup at the end of their trip, and the screen fills up with garbage, dismembered text, visual nonsense, or surrealistic graphics. Whether we play with them or watch them perform for us, whether we control them or they rebel against us, electronic words never stand still for long, never settle down on a page, even when a copy is sent to the printer; for the printer merely outputs a lifeless replica, a still photograph of objects in motion”

— Marie-Laurie Ryan, “Introduction,” Cyberspace Textuality” (1-2)

“the appropriate model for subjectivity is a communication circuit rather than discrete individualism, for narration remediation rather than representation, and for reading and writing inscription technology fused with consciousness rather than a mind conveying it’s thoughts directly to the reader.”

(Hayles, Writing Machines, 130)

katiedidnt: preliminal: subjectivity as a circuit 

“the appropriate model for subjectivity is a communication circuit rather than discrete individualism, for narration remediation rather than representation, and for reading and writing inscription technology fused with consciousness rather than a mind conveying it’s thoughts directly to the reader.”

(Hayles, Writing Machines, 130)

katiedidnt: preliminal: subjectivity as a circuit 

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First up: Hayles

I posted some snippets from Electronic Literature a little while back. Now I’m onto Writing Machines. Here Hayles argues for a media-specificform of literary analysis. She positions this as a research approach better equipped to handle the influx of electronic media generally, electronic literature specifically, and the overall impact of digital media on writing and literature as a whole. Hayles is writing in 2002, so it may seem more obvious today to hear the call for attention to materiality, yet the importance in paying attention to materiality certainly has not faded. (Lord, was 2012 really ten years ago? Apparently yes.)

The piece that I would want to add to Hayles call for media-specific analysis (MSA)  is a reminder that we also need to be paying attention to cultural context. Hayles seems at times to position MSA as the missing piece to literary analysis. She argues that traditionally content and form have been the major foci for scholars, but that this needs to change now materiality “must be central, for without it we have little hope of forging a robust and nuanced account of how literature is changing under the impact of information technologies” (Hayles, 19). Given that this discussion also reflects broader attempts to reshape academic disciplines on order to adapt to and incorporate digital media, I would argue that discussion of materiality needs to deal with the broader context of these materials: who is able to produce, what forms of production are privledged, etc.

With this in mind, I’m working towards an issue that continues to frustrate me within scholarship on electronic literature: Where is the analysis on electronic literature and popular culture? 

Before I go further, however, I should issue a disclaimer. Obviously, at this point, I’ve only been doing piecemeal style reading into electronic lit. It’s quite possible I’m missing some obvious and important critical work that addresses just what I’m about to discuss. And if I have? And someone reading this can point me towards more readings? Please, please do.

In analyses of electronic literature that I’ve been exposed to so far, the projects seem to spend endless amounts of time focusing on hypertexts (very early elec lit research) or writing projects that were created in storyspace (a bit later). There’s usually talk of Michael Joyce’s early work and Stuart Moulthrop. Then Patchwork Girl gets a mention, and inevitably a link is made to print projects like House of Leaves to show how the digital is reshaping what we do with print. Then, some time in the early 2000s the great argument over video games and narrative started up and distracted just about everyone for a while. 

Hypertext stories, Storyspace, Patchwork Girl, House of Leaves, videogames… this is all great stuff, but it also doesn’t, to my mind, truly address the abundance of electronic literature out there. 

So, the question I’m leading towards is: Where is the electronic lit scholarship talking about fan work?

Since the earliest days of the internet, fans have been producing vast amounts of electronic literature and creative work online. There are countless novels and experimental projects, traditions of cooperative story construction, and ongoing practices of creative experimentation with moving across, as well as combining, various storytelling modes: visual, textual, moving image, aural, etc. So, with all of this in mind, creative fan practices, to me, seem an ideal place for electronic literature scholars to investigate the emergence and growth of electronic literature. 

There also seems to be a much larger political and ethical motive for incorporating analyses of fans and various forms of their creative production online. If literary studies is currently working to navigate the impact of digital media and determine what the future of literary studies looks like, it is important to move forward in a way that learns from past problems rather than simply repeating them.  Literature carries with it a history of celebrating and privileging certain traditions of authorship while silencing others. Much time has been spent in the last forty or fifty years trying to address these imbalances, but this is an ongoing process. If scholars of electronic literature focus only on certain, selective groupings of texts (those produced by other academics, produced by industry, or a select avant garde), rather than paying attention to the vast and diverse bodies of work actually taking place, then the academic process simply continues to replicate the systems of power, access, and privilege than have so impacted and distorted our creative history so far. 

So with these concerns in mind, I’m still wondering: Where is the electronic lit scholarship on fan work? I’m guessing at this point elect lit has started to talk about remix culture to some extent somewhere, right? 

If data differentiation broke the monopoly of writing [in the twentieth century], the computer at the beginning of the twenty-first century breaks the monopoly of vision associated with reading. Interactive text… stimulates sensorimotor functions not mobilized in print reading, including fine movements involved in controlling the mouse, keyboard, and/or joystick, haptic feedback through the hands and fingers, and complex eye-hand coordination in real-time dynamic environments. Moreover, this multisensory stimulation occurs simultaneously with reading, a configuration unknown in the age of print.

Katherine Hayles, Electronic Literature

So, obviously I’m totally into this, but I kind of wonder… could we say that the one area of literature that begins to challenge this sense that these things were “unknown in the age of print” might be the erotic and romantic genres of literature? And if so, that seems useful— at least to me, but y’all know where my interests lie. :)

Literature, conceptualized not just as print books but as the entire complex system of literary production… is permeated at every level by computation. The bellelettristic tradition that has on occasion envisioned computers as the soulless other to the humanistic expressivity in literature could not be more mistaken. Contemporary literature, and even more so the literary that extends and enfolds it, is computational.

N. Katherine Hayles, Electronic Literature (via k8inorbit)

Literature, conceptualized not just as print books but as the entire complex system of literary production… is permeated at every level by computation. The bellelettristic tradition that has on occasion envisioned computers as the soulless other to the humanistic expressivity in literature could not be more mistaken. Contemporary literature, and even more so the literary that extends and enfolds it, is computational.

N. Katherine Hayles, Electronic Literature (via k8inorbit)

Literature, conceptualized not just as print books but as the entire complex system of literary production… is permeated at every level by computation. The bellelettristic tradition that has on occasion envisioned computers as the soulless other to the humanistic expressivity in literature could not be more mistaken. Contemporary literature, and even more so the literary that extends and enfolds it, is computational.

N. Katherine Hayles, Electronic Literature (via k8inorbit)