genre

Scott Rettberg will present his monograph Electronic Literature, which describes 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. 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. Rettberg will also present some of his own work and ask us to consider how digital literary art might help us to engage with contemporary societal challenges.

In a series of comparative essays on a range of texts embracing both high and popular culture from the early modern era to the contemporary period, The Ideology of Genrecounters both formalists and advocates of the "death of genre," arguing instead for the inevitability of genre as discursive mediation. At the same time, Beebee demonstrates that genres are inherently unstable because they are produced intertextually, by a system of differences without positive terms. In short, genre is the way texts get used. To deny that genres exist is to deny, in a sense, the possibility of reading; if genres exist, on the other hand, then they exist not as essences but as differences, and thus those places within and between texts where genres "collide" reveal the connections between generic status, interpretive strategy, ideology, and the use-value of language.

(Source: Penn State University Press catalog copy)

Genre is a key means by which we categorize the many forms of literature and culture, but it is also much more than that: in talk and writing, in music and images, in film and television, genres actively generate and shape our knowledge of the world. Understanding genre as a dynamic process rather than a set of stable rules, this book explores:

• the relation of simple to complex genres
• the history of literary genre in theory
• the generic organisation of implied meanings
• the structuring of interpretation by genre
• the uses of genre in teaching.

(Source: Routledge catalog copy)

Jacques Derrida discusses “the law of genre” – the idea that genre hasthe function of imposing norms on literary and cultural practices: “Assoon as the word ‘genre’ is sounded, as soon as it is heard, as soon as oneattempts 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 literarypractice than to elucidate them: “… as soon as a genre announces itself,one must respect a norm, one must cross a line of demarcation, one mustnot risk impurity, anomaly, or monstrosity” (p. 57).

(Source: Electronic Literature by Scott Rettberg)

Modern forms of literature frequently question our reading habits, and provoke us to re-define the act of reading and the book form. The “magic” of the book, described by Bezos as its ability to be an invisible device that disappears in the reader’s hands, permitting them to enter a story-world, is nowadays replaced by the “real magic” of non-invisible interfaces. The latest manifestations of these interfaces invite us to do things we usually do not do while reading: to touch, to shout, or to shake the device. In the other words, our reading becomes a very sensual and corporeal action and our “reading behaviour” is important for discovering the meaning of the work. That’s why we need a revision of poetics (Simanowski 2009), like Bouchardon’s theory of gestural manipulation as a literary figure (2014). 

In this paper, while examining literary works dedicated to mobile devices, I ask how adding playability to the story and engaging readers’ gestures and body in act of reading can be useful to “renovate” the literary canon, and to remediate it for today’s digital natives. My main case study will be iClassic collection, in which playability and reader gestures are not used only to make well-known works more attractive. Every story is re-told in a new, multimodal way, not only illustrated or enhanced with mobile media possibilities – particular narration aspects are translated into new media language. 

Contexts for analysis will derive from both, the mobile-literature field (e.g. different remediation of Around the World in 80 Days, Elastico Press apps) and non-mobile e-lit (e.g. works that re-write the canon in playable versions: Concretoons, Bałwochwał). This remediated canon will be also analyzed in context of modern “mobile-books,” literary apps that use haptic aspects as primary strategy for reading digital-born stories (e.g. The Incredible Tales of Weirdwood Manor). But the context of various “new” (not only mobile) book forms that re-fresh and re-new the traditional vision of the book will be important, too. Thus, I will use examples of AR-books or digi-novels (Level 26), step-in-book technology (wuwu&co), playable non-mobile texts (The Winter House), texts that use biofeedback (The Breathing Wall), as well as locative and physical narratives (Turnton Docklands). Important context will also be the traditional tension between a book forms typical for children’s and adult literature (and actual evolution in these divisions, provoked by new-media).

 The broader context for my research is a question about the actual evolution (remediation) of canonical genres and literary forms. Here one of examples can be the classic epistolary novel and its modern incarnations as email- or sms-novel and then twitterature or other (trans)literary projects on social platforms (blogs, FB, flickr).

(Source: Author's description from ELO 2018 site: 

The tropes of the detective genre have been challenged, subverted, re-appropriated by authors such as Jorge Luis Borges, Robert Coover, Thomas Pynchon, or Paul Auster, establishing what could be considered a new strain of postmodern detective fiction. In these stories, solving the case is not central to the story, and what the detective searches transforms or is derailed by becoming a discovery of something completely different. In some cases, the detective, along with the reader, explores an encyclopedic space in such a way that these stories have already been connected to hypertextual literature (Rosello 1994).

This paper will explore how digital games open up new territory in the genre of postmodern of detective stories. Digital games can have the player explore aspects of the narrative that may not be directly relevant to the mystery to be solved, or by creating a mystery that may be unstable and dependent on the choices of the player. In my presentation at ELO 2014, I discussed how video games have gone from trying to implement classical detective story models (Todorov 1977), encouraging the player to interpret the space and events to solve the case, to removing the challenge of all exegetic performance and letting the player carry out more trite, video game-like activities.

In further examination, I realized that the “vanishing exegesis” that I discussed then relates to postmodern literary detective fiction; both games and novels share a strong influence of cinematic noir and mystery films. While games like L.A. Noire (2011) attempt to put the player in the shoes of a traditional sleuth, some games experiment with the gap between the identity of the detective, narrative exploration, and how player’s choices affect the events of the story. The paper will focus on two games, Blade Runner (1995) and Deadly Premonition (2010).

Blade Runner takes place in the same time period as Ridley Scott’s film (1982), and provides the player with tools to perform exegetic work to solve the mystery. On the other hand, discovering who is an android and who is a human, which is part of solving the mystery, is determined randomly at the beginning of each game. Depending on the player’s attitude towards the non-player characters and their interpretation of whether the protagonist is an android or not, the game will have different resolutions.

In contrast, Deadly Premonition is a detective game with supernatural undertones, which also includes traditional detective work to solve a murder case. Heavily influenced by the show Twin Peaks, the game also lets the player digress and abandon detective work to explore the town where the play is set, from hanging out with the inhabitants to going fishing. The player character seems to address the player by the name of “Zack”, establishing the detective as a schizophrenic personality, whose perception of reality is unreliable. In both examples, the mystery, its resolution, and the identity of the detective are questioned and subverted as the player works on unraveling the mystery, bringing a rich interactive parallel with postmodern literary fiction.

(Source: ELO 2015 Conference Catalog)

In my dissertation from 2013 I close read pieces by David Jhave Johnston, mez and Johannes Hélden among others, with an interest in multimodal analysis and media philosophy.

Back then, I chose to characterize Electronic Literature metaphorically as a literary diaspora in continuation of historical literary avant-gardes. The title of this years ELO conference made me think of e-lit as a new diaspora in itself – a culture, a movement, a family with historical roots, traditions and habits but already with several branches, new subdivisions and blends.

The title of the conference also gave me the encouraging thought that I am still an e-lit scholar, though my current research project “Technologies of the Face in Contemporary Art” belongs to the tradition of visual art and new media art in a broader sense In my paper, I will closely analyze a piece that has proved to be a threshold between my two research projects and explain why.

The installation The Aleph is made by Kim Yong Hun and was displayed in the ELO 2012 Media Art Show. It consists of two computer screens producing the images of two faces. These are composed of 10,000 photographs from the Internet of people’s private photos of faces tagged with the words “Funeral” or “Birthday”. Each pixel borrows a part from a singular photo and it gives a blurred expression in the overall facial image. The collective funeral face looks like a smiling ghost. The work seems to suggest that there should be something in common in the respective joyful and sorrowful expression.

The Aleph thematizes the relationships between faces, identity and data. The work reads all the data, but it is linguistic data arising from the labels of the images placed by the original owners. The program cannot decide whether an image looks like a “funeral face” or not. It is possible for contemporary face detection technology to determine whether a mouth is turning up or down, but the algorithm in The Aleph bases its conclusions on linguistic data. Wittgenstein described how we (humans) never read the face as a sign – we recognize it immediately as sorrowful or joyful, without necessarily being able to describe specifically what features produce these feelings. The machine as interpreter does not have this sensibility (it can only read faces as structures, because everything must be translated into data that can be compared with other data).

I will among other things discuss The Aleph in relation to the German artist Hito Steyerls essay “Proxy Politics”, on contemporary photography and the disconnection of the face on the Internet: “An image becomes less of a representation than a proxy, a mercenary of appearance, a floating texture-surface-commodity. Persons are montaged, dubbed, assembled, incorporated.”

(Source: ELO 2015 Conference Catalog)