hypertext fiction

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 hypertext fiction, combinatory poetics, 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, film, and creative writing.

(Source: Polity catalog copy)

Electronic Literature is the winner of the 2019 N. Katherine Hayles Award for Criticism of Electronic Literature.

Featured interview with David Kolb, a professor of philosophy and author of hypertext novels.

The talk reflects on the theoretical and practical aspects of collaboration in e-literature. Firstly a model of digitally enhanced collaboration that could encompass both its past and future instances is proposed. Matching several groups of categories (for example “production / negotiation / creation” against “material / story / discourse”) the model demonstrates that e-literature – even if we are really witnessing the end of it now – maintains its status of an important laboratory for any collaboration in digital environment.

Alongside acclaimed collaborative works (Forward Anywhere, The Unknown, A Million Penguins) several less known examples from Poland will be presented: Digital Green Eye (2012) and Bałwochwał (2013) – collaborative adaptations of Polish avant-garde classics – as well as Piksel Zdrój – a hypertext project by 8 authors published in 2015. The aim of the first part is to introduce both a universal analytical model and some rather unknown examples of e-literature to the international audience.

The second part, in which I draw from my own experience as an author and producer of several collaborative e-lit efforts, reflects on available tools. I will demonstrate that popular collaboration tools hardly match the complexity of teamwork fiction writing aimed at delivering not only a product, a perfect “text”, but also a cohesive world with events and characters that start “living” their own lives

As it turns out, even in the world of ubiquitous computing the ultimate, working models for collegial writing are to be found in the universal social activities that had long proved to be storytelling friendly. These archetypes of literary communication (for example the road trip, the campfire chant, the round table debate) might be as much important for setting up a good collaborative environment, as technological affordances of software and hardware. Lastly, I will try to shortly predict possible directions in digital collaborative writing.

(source: ELO 2015 Conference Catalog)

This presentation asks what we can learn about a foundational work of electronic literature – Shelley Jackson’s Patchwork Girl – by porting it to a new platform. More than this, it asks what we can learn about the source and target platforms of such a porting exercise.

Thanks to a great deal of path breaking work, much scholarship on electronic literature now makes use of what Katherine Hayles calls media-specific analysis (MSA). The field has followed the lead of scholars such as Hayles, Nick Montfort, Matthew Kirschenbaum, Terry Harpold, and many others in assuming that the materialities at play in a digital artifact actively shape expression and interpretation. We no longer treat the screen as another page. Work adjacent to electronic literature has asked these same questions, attending to the role of software and hardware in digital expression. Platform studies offers one version of this line of inquiry, and it asks how a given computational platform shapes and constrains creative processes and products. Much like the tenets of MSA, platform studies insists that the various computational machines at work in a given piece of digital media act as more than a conduit or background to expression. Scholarship on electronic literature has already begun to engage with platform studies, most recently by way of Anastasia Salter and John Murray’s study of Flash. In their book-length study of this platform, Salter and Murray take up a number of works of electronic literature by authors such as Jason Nelson and Stuart Moulthrop.

This presentation will continue that work by porting Shelley Jackson’s Patchwork Girl to the Twine platform. When Chris Klimas released Twine, it immediately drew comparisons to Storyspace, the platform used to create Patchwork Girl and many other works of electronic literature. Where Storyspace has guard fields that set up conditions by which text can be hidden from or revealed to the interactor, Twine implements an “if” Macro. Where Storyspace allows authors to group together lexia with “paths,” Twine offers a similar function called “tags.” Further, both platforms offer the writer a kind of “node-and-edge” view of the writing space. However, the very fact that these pieces of software were created two decades apart, by different developers, and in different media ecologies suggests that there are important differences between the two. In order to shed light on the differences and similarities of these platforms and also in the interest of returning to Patchwork Girl, this presentation will walk through what we learn from a Twine version of Jackson's work.

Hayles describes MSA as a kind of game: “Using the characteristics of the digital computer, what is it possible to say about electronic hypertext as a literary medium?” In this presentation, I propose a different version of Hayles’s game: What do we learn about a work of electronic literature, its native platform, and the target platform when we port it to a new platform?

(source: ELO 2015 Conference Catalog)

Electronic literature exists in a perpetual state of flux, due to its reliance on digital technology; with the rapid progression of processing power and graphical abilities, electronic literature swiftly moved from a reliance on the written word into a more diverse, multi-modal form of digital arts practice. The literariness of early electronic literature is manifest: the work was primarily textual, the centrality of reading paramount. The current crop of electronic literature--with its audio-visual, multimodal nature--calls into question the literariness of this work, however, as is evidenced by this year's call for papers. I propose that this ambiguity as regards literariness and written textuality in electronic literature disadvantages the field, in both academic circles and in the search for a wider reading audience. If electronic literature as field is to assert and validate its position within the greater literary tradition, links between electronic literature and past literary achievements need to be uncovered and illuminated. In this paper, I will explore the connections between works of postmodernism (in particular, experimental authors such as William Gaddis and Thomas Pynchon, and authors explicitly critiquing their own craft, such as Paul Auster), and electronic literature. In doing so, I hope to uncover a richer, more nuanced background for the literary in the traditions/practices of print and oral cultures, rather than in arts where the literary may or may not be present. Literature qua literature is currently present only as a minority element in works claiming the status of electronic literature, and it is therefore unlikely that literary studies will set itself up for reading just this sub-genre within an as yet minority arts practice. Turning to the works of Tom LeClair and Joseph Tabbi, postmodern novels are seen as coming into existence at a time when the world was on the brink of the globalized, world system. LeClair writes of the art of excess, in which the "recognition of radically new and massive information in the world and the impulse to represent this information are. . . the ultimate motives for the art of excess" (48) in postmodern novels. Tabbi, building off of LeClair, understands Gaddis and Pynchon as not only accurately representing a globalized world of excessive information, but also as representing the cognition developing out of this world system. My paper will explore how we can understand our own contemporary world system through works of electronic literature. If postmodern authors turned to their own material supports--the written language marked on a page through the course of a particular writer's thinking--then how are we to understand electronic literature as representing a certain mode of consciousness, especially considering electronic literature's distinct marginalization of the written word? My paper will offer close readings of earlier works of hypertext fiction and new works of electronic literature (published in 2012), in an effort to uncover the uniquely literary accomplishments of chosen texts/authors writing in a medium in which the literary is not always evidently manifest.

(Source: Author's Abstract)