Jorge Luis Borges

Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges has been styled as one of the precursors of electronic literature, and his influence has been explored in a multitude of projects, especially when referring to the development of hypertextual structures (Manovich) or posthumanist theories (Herbretcher, Callus). Rather than tracing Borges’s overall influence in electronic literature, this talk presents a series of recent works of e-lit that that engage with Borges's particular figures of infinity as described in The Library of Babel (1941), The Aleph (1949), and The Book of Sand (1975). In each of these works, Borges’s figures of the infinite can be conceptualized as their own media object/process, inasmuch as they shape the limits (or lack thereof) and the form of their own particular “infinite”--very much in the same way that the media configurations of a work of electronic literature. Within this framework, Nick Montfort’s Taroko Gorge and Dan Waber’s Sestinas are presented as generativist works with the potential to run forever. Matt Schneider’s Babelling Borges is read as a looping Twitter bot whose loops signal infinity as a conceptual motif, in a similar manner to the multilingual looping translations we see in Luis Sarmiento’s Babel’s Monkeys. Laura McGee’s Infinite Notebook opens up the reading canvas to a rhetoric of zooming in and out as a way of navigating infinity in spatial terms. Finally, David Hirmes’s Infinite Wonder, Infinite Pity, and Jim Andrews’s Globebop take these explorations into the vastness of social media mining as apps that serve as windows into the universal--like the original Aleph. Although all these e-lit examples are different in terms of computation, interface and interactivity, they all engage directly and indirectly in a dialogue with Borges’s figures of infinity by enacting them structurally, but also conceptually—that is by the process they unfold and the output they produce, either computationally by means of non-stop algorithms or other mechanisms, or collectively and socially by drawing on our ever growing electronic output. Further, the impossibility of ever reading them completely highlights both the instantiation of Borges's media figures and the enactment of our reading, determined not by the bounds of the literary work, but by our own human-machinic condition: human exhaustion as well as the material conditions of the machine (electricity, connectivity, obsolescence, etc.). Borges sustains that literature embodied in the library will endure illuminated and infinite, independent to--and extending beyond--human life. But he also gives back a certain degree of agency to the reader, however, offering her the capacity to stop, forget, and begin to read again. Thus, it is reading what draws the boundaries of the infinite, negotiates the possible, and in a way keeps it under control. At the same time, it is the infinity of these works of e-lit what suggest their potential long-term relevance beyond machine lifespan and hardware and software obsolescence. This talk is part of the larger No Legacy project that explores the use of computational and digital technologies in literary production in the networked world and its material connections with 20th-century Latin American and Spanish technologized approaches to literature like Futurism, Concretism, Creationism, Stridentism, Magical Realism, and others.

Linda Carroli reviews Michael Joyce on networked culture, whose emergence changes our ideas of change.

This paper argues that attending to the tropes of circularity featuring in print-based literature proves to be a useful foil for an analysis of electronic literature. Based on the idea that digital literary mechanisms do not obliviate previous circularity-inducing structuring motifs in analog literature, such as labyrinths, chess, rivers, and clockwork, this argument arrives at a crucial time for literature, which is currently the object of intensified debates on beginnings and ends, especially in the context of digitality and multisensory perception becoming central to some aspects of its processes. Accordingly, circular motion is here analysed in its depiction and actuation across several kinds of literary / literal machines, in reflection also on how sensory perception both mediate and is mediated. If literature is conditional upon a series of unique, though interconnected, mechanisms, it seems reasonable not to discard a certain circularity of the senses that is brought into play there and, indeed, given both thematic and formal substance in analog and digital works. In other words, representations generated at the confluence of both biological and technological bodies cannot but instigate a circularity on which they are dependent: an idea which this article examines and critiques with reference to canonical and electronic literature, particularly Borges, Beckett, and Joyce.