hermeneutics

From the publisher: How to interpret and critique digital arts, in theory and in practice Digital Art and Meaning offers close readings of varied examples from genres of digital art, including kinetic concrete poetry, computer-generated text, interactive installation, mapping art, and information sculpture. Roberto Simanowski combines these illuminating explanations with a theoretical discussion employing art philosophy and history to achieve a deeper understanding of each example of digital art and of the genre as a whole.

(Source: University of Minnesota Press catalog description)

from Project MUSE: A prominent strategy in some of the most innovative electronic literature online is the appropriation and adaptation of literary modernism, what I call “digital modernism.” This essay introduces digital modernism by examining a work that exemplifies it: Dakota by Young-hae Chang Heavy Industries. I read this Flash-based work in relation to its literary inspiration: the authors claim that Dakota is “based on a close reading of Ezra Pound's Cantos part I and part II.” The authorial framework claims modernism’s cultural capital for electronic literature and encourages close reading of its text, but the work’s formal presentation of speeding, flashing text challenges such efforts. Reading Dakota as it reads Pound’s first two cantos exposes how modernism serves contemporary, digital literature by providing a model of how to “MAKE IT NEW” by renovating a literary past.

Despite postmodern and deconstructivist studies in the field, interxtuality is still often viewed as a process of textual closure: in that vision a text refers to an older text, and once we have found the source, the intertextual interpretation is completed.

Riffatterre, for example, seems to suggest this in his article ‘Intertextuality vs Hypertextuality’ (1994). Riffaterre stated here that intertextuality and hypertextuality should be distinguished, since the former is finite, while the latter is infinite. He defines hypertextuality as ‘the use of the computer to transcend the linearity of the written text by building an endless series of imagined connections, from verbal associations to possible worlds, extending the glosses or the marginalia from the footnotes of yesteryear to metatexts’ (Riffaterre 1994: 780) Intertextuality, on the other hand, ‘depends on a system of difficulties to be reckoned with, of limitations in our freedom of choice, of exclusions, since it is by renouncing incompatible associations within the text that we come to identify in the intertext their compatible counterparts’ (ibid: 781).

I would like to demonstrate how this vision of intertextuality does not apply in electronic literature. Instead of ‘limitations’ and ‘incompatible associations’ some cases of e-poetry that will be showed and interpreted should emphasise how intertextuality in these texts is rather the explosion of meanings and of possibilities than a way of ‘exclusion’. Three of these ‘new’ functions of intertexuality in digital poetry shall be proposed and discussed in my presentation.

The paper discusses several problems that seem to define and determine the field of electronic literature in theory and practice and suggests several strategies to remedy the situation in the spirit that is both analytical and polemical.

Electronic literature has been around at least for 50 years and many of its typical ergodic ingredients share a cultural (pre)history that reaches back to classical antiquity and beyond (I Ching). Still, the cultural, economical, educational and even literary status and visibility of electronic literature is low and obscure at best despite occasional canonisations of hypertext fiction and poetry (the works of Michael Joyce and Jim Rosenberg), literary groups such as the OuLiPo that from very early on extended their orientation beyond print literature, and the efforts of an international or semi-international organisation (ELO) to promote and preserve electronic literature - not to mention multiple and more or less influential and comprehensive theories of electronic and ergodic literature.

The days of hype and claims of novelty are or at least seem to be things of the past and there are no great expectations anymore for whatever happens to emerge from the ghetto or cloister of electronic literature. Compared to many other cultural niches there are neither crossover successes attracting wider audiences nor popular forms and genres of electronic literature. This condition situates electronic literature in the position similar to various avant-garde movements although without the latter’s cultural impact and influence. The paper argues for the acceptance of the elitist-experimentalist-marginal status of electronic literature with the twist of choosing its academic, institutional and post-industrial allies and enemies accordingly.

The paper has three condensed parts: cultural, theoretical and practical. The first charts the socio-cultural infrastructure of the field and the three main circuits of distribution and dissemination of electronic literature: commercial publishers, the free market of the Internet, and the museum/art scene each with its own cultural and commercial logic. The position of electronic literature is further triangulated in relation to digital games (and their ergodic strength), journalism (a neighbouring field of writing) and electronic civil disobedience (for values’ sake).

The second part calls for the integration of theories of electronic literature to the continuously hegemonic theories of print literature. In the academic context electronic and ergodic literature could provide fresh theoretical challenges to literary scholarship rotting away under the dominance of cultural studies and a wealth of counter-examples to the presuppositions and false generalisations of implicitly or explicitly print-oriented and print-based theories. Integrative and isolationist approaches are compared and two forms of the former are isolated for further study. The preferred deep integration (made possible through modified cybertext theory) works at the level of theoretical and paradigmatic foundations of literature whereas cheap integration (cf. Murray and Ryan) sets conservative constraints derived from mainstream print literature as norms and values supposedly assisting the birth of more user-friendly electronic literature.

The third and more speculative part of the paper divides the field of electronic literature into four dimensions: poetry/prose, fiction/non-fiction, ergodic/non-ergodic and drama/simulation and then locates a set of theoretical and practical blind spots arresting the development and further expansion of the field.

Digital media is increasingly finding its way into the discussions of the humanities classroom. But while we have a number of grand theoretical texts about digital literature we as yet have little in the way of resources for discussing the down-to-earth practices of research, teaching, and curriculum necessary for this work to mature. This book presents contributions by scholars and teachers from different countries and academic environments who articulate their approach to the study and teaching of digital literature and thus give a broader audience an idea of the state-of-the-art of the subject matter also in international comparison.

(Source: Publisher's abstract)