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?