literariness

The central objective of this paper is to provide a new conceptual theoretical framework starting from the role of new new media in shaping a new kind of literature, which I call Cosmo-Literature. Towards this, I start working from Levinson’s differentiation among old media, new media, and new new media to arrive at the difference among the variable types of media. Next, I address the role of new new media in establishing world democracies and changing the social, cultural, and political world map. After that, I investigate the terms of “global village” and “cosmopolitanism” in relation to literature. To clarify what I mean by Cosmo Literature, I will investigate two new new media novels: Only One Millimeter Away, an Arabic Facebook novel by the Moroccan novelist Abdel-Wahid Stitu, and Hearts, Keys and Puppetry an English Twitter novel by Neil Gaiman, to infer the characteristics of Cosmo literature in general and Cosmo narration in particular.
What I mean by Cosmo-literature is all forms of literature produced by the capabilities provided by new new media. These include digital works but also examples where the digital artifact is printed or presented in other media.
Cosmo literature is derived from the political, social, and cultural context that the whole world lives in nowadays. Appiah’s cosmopolitanism as “universality plus difference” is the most significant term to refer to the pluralistic and universal society of today. Respecting diversity, caring about each other, and kindness are the moral principle of the cosmopolitan society according to Appiah. My project builds on Appiah to argue that digital media facilitate the cultural co-existence of the peoples of the cosmopolitan society. As long as such a society has its own morals and identity, it is logical to have its own literature, which I believe to be Cosmo-Literature.
The investigation of two new new media novels: Only One Millimeter Away, an Arabic Facebook novel, and Hearts, Keys and Puppetry an English Twitter novel, has shown many features of Cosmo-Literature in its relation to cosmopolitanism. At the heart of these features are interactivity, multilingualism, multimediality, suspense, new literariness, blurring the boundaries between the real and the fictional, and creating new dimensions of time. Those features also play as the characteristic features of the group identity of the universal society of today.

What if the post-literary also meant that which operates in a literary space (almost) devoid of
language as we know it: for instance, a space in which language simply frames the literary or
poetic rather than ‘containing’ it? What if the countertextual also meant the (en)countering of
literary text with non-textual elements, such as mathematical concepts, or with texts that we
would not normally think of as literary, such as computer code? This article addresses these
issues in relation to Nick Montfort’s #!, a 2014 print collection of poems that presents readers with the output of computer programs as well as the programs themselves, which are designed to operate on principles of text generation regulated by specific constraints. More specifically, it focuses on two works in the collection, ‘Round’ and ‘All the Names of God’, which are read in relation to the notions of the ‘computational sublime’ and the ‘event’.

(Source: Author's Abstract)

Whilst there may be aesthetic tropes within digital media, there is no universally accepted authority within contemporary culture nor is there an easy mutual acceptance of what is “right and proper” or indeed legitimate outside the now virtue of being popular and well followed. Indeed the now bodily distanced and disinhibited digital citizen frequently demonstrates a palpable distain for the elite and pretentious (1). Considering this, any community with Literature in its name may have an identity problem; literariness still pertains to an elevated quality of artistic or intellectual merit and is thus counter to popular cultural production. In addition, mainstream culture has successfully commoditized many counter-cultural communities (2). Electronic Literature has arguably not been through such commodification processes, and the question of interest is why not? To that extent this paper seeks to explore possible answers. Investigating the broader shifts towards increased visuality within modern culture (3) the paper will discuss and revisit the discourses on the power structures of the gaze, consider spectatorship’s dominance over readership and interaction and co-creation and the function of the image within contemporary narrative forms inside and outwith Electronic Literature (4). The paper will also consider the politics implied in the move to open access, the fluid distribution of often context-less “images”, how this relates to prior notions of literary publishing, and whether this manifests as an opportunity or a challenge to Electronic Literature’s dissemination. Lastly and toward a conclusion, the paper will propose that if we consider the tradition of literature as one that is driven by the expression of human experience, where in today’s context literary “traditions” are not longer built around specific commonalities of form (i.e. predominately verbal language) but rather subject matter, themes and worldviews then the questions of identity and of “literariness” can evaporate to make space for fuller participation in the ocular freedoms in contemporary culture.

(Source: ELO 2015 Conference Catalog)

In Gerard Genette’s (1993; 1997) narratology, “rheme” is contrasted with “theme.” While themes are symbolic indications of what texts mean, rhemes are super-formal indications of texts themselves. The title of this article is highly thematic because it indicates much of that what is being discussed; a title like “Only an Article” would be highly rhematic due to its lack of indication of the subject matter at the expense of non-reflective form.

Veli-Matti Karhulahti has recently argued that the aesthetics of the videogame phenomenon are better understood through “rhematics” than the rhetoric of “meaning” that has so far dominated the analysis of cultural products, especially within literary studies:

While [videogame play] is essentially meaningless – there is no decipherable message to be understood – it is not senseless: there is a sensation to be understood. What exchanges (or more correctly, comes into being) is data that cannot be made known by signs. This sensible nonsense gives shape to an aporetic rhematic [that] cannot be understood by means of any conventional interpretative discipline, a new discipline is needed; a rhematic discipline. (Karhulahti 2013)

This paper introduces rhematics as an analytic tool that facilitates comprehending the multiplicity of aesthetic ends in electronic literature. It is suggested that the rhematics of electronic literature operate on two levels, the conceptual and the material. As the former has already been mapped out extensively by literary theorists through “poetic” functions (e.g. Burke 1941; Jakobson 1960; Eco 1989), the present focus is on the latter and its “configurative” functions (see Aarseth 1997; Eskelinen 2012). The material manipulation of electronic literary works is thus examined as an intrinsically rewarding mode of interaction that is not guided solely by hermeneutic methods of interpretation but also by cybernetic engagement (see Iser 2003).

The configurative competency of the e-reader, it is argued, must hence be taken as a serious contextual factor in electronic literary analysis. This also calls for an ontological problematization: if reading and literature are identified as noematic or hermeneutic entities, do extranoematic configurative aspects not conflict with the ‘literariness’ (cf. Randall 1988) of electronic literature?

(Source: ELO 2015 Conference Catalog)

The three papers in this panel seek to move beyond primarily formalistic discussions of electronic literature as well as approaches primarily concerned with drawing definitional boundaries for it. Instead, they propose to explore various works of electronic literature in terms of the potential dialogue they may open with concepts that are often locatable outside or beyond the current critical boundaries of electronic literature.

More specifically, Aquilina’s paper will explore how “literary eventhood” may occur in works which, in different ways, fall under the nomenclature associated to electronic literature. Callus’s paper, on the other hand, will focus on the concept of the “literary absolute” to try to discover whether it could bear any consequentiality to current understandings of electronic literature. While both papers will show an awareness of the potential “category mistake” that this may involve, they argue that such attempts are fundamental in discussions of the “ends” of electronic literature. Calleja’s paper will also seek to extend or trespass definitional restrictions by emphasising on the role of imagination in contemporary indie games, which highlights a continuity between print, electronic texts and cybertexts that we too often take for granted.

The approaches being proposed are not colonising discourses. Rather than simply applying terms from literary studies or from game studies to examples of electronic literature, they start from electronic literature (or some modes in which it functions) to speak about concepts that may potentially have a wider scope than it. Our interventions in electronic literature from peripheral starting positions will operate with both the risks and the potential originality that such approaches may bring.

(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)

In my paper I would like to propose reconfiguration of “literariness” through the concept of liberature formulated by Zenon Fajfer and Katarzyna Bazarnik (Bazarnik, 2005), updated to some extent with the theory of affordances (Norman, 1990, 2004). The term which according to Bazarnik (2005) denotes a transgenre where content (text) and its medium form a whole, seems to offer rich theoretical possibilities – especially if “literariness” is to be conceived also as a media-specific, embodied yet emergent and contigent phenomenon (Hayles, 2002). However, the concept of liberature - set from the ouset as both a theoretical tool against a form/content dualism and means to study multimodality of a literary text – still offers an interesting proposition when it comes to instances of e-literature developed for touch screen devices. A particularly interesting example to illustrate such interrogations is The Humument App by Tom Phillips. It is a part of the ongoing project coming from the artist known, among others, from his cooperation with Peter Greenaway on TV Dante. In 1966, inspired by Burrough's cut-up technique, Phillips started working on the print of a late Victorian novel, A Human Document by W.H. Mallock. Graphically enhanced, collaged and reconfigured, the artwork has been published in 1970 by Tetrad Press as The Humument Book: A Treated Victorian Novel with subsequent editions from Thames & Hudson in 1980, 1986, 1998 and 2004, each of which modified the precedent versions. This part of a project has already been interpreted by N. Katherine Hayles (Hayles, 2002). However, in 2010 The Humument has been released as a tablet application, enhanced with a few interactive features: “the oracle” seems to be the most interesting as the case of remediation of oral communication mode. Apart from questions that had already been asked (eg. about word/image interplay, the book as artefact and the narrative as the case of “interiorized subjectivity”) this particular instance of the Phillips' project inspires as well to pose a set of new inquiries. What constitutes “literariness” of touch screen device application? How – if ever - does it differ from its print (or remixed multimodal for that matter) incarnation? Does the notion of “literariness” exist independent from media into which it is inscribed? Could the protagnist of The Humument App – considering the common social media plug-ins included within it - be seen as an instance of networked subjectivity?

K. Bazarnik (2005), What is liberature. [in]: Bartkowiak’s Forum Book Art. Compendium of Contemporary Fine Prints, Artists’ Books, Broadsides, Portfolios and Book Objects. Yearbook no 23. Hamburg: H.S. Bartkowiak, pp. 465-468K.

N. Hayles (2002), Writing Machines, Cambridge and London: MIT Press

D.A. Norman (1990), The Design of Everyday Things, New York: Doubleday(2004), Design as Communication, http://www.jnd.org/dn.mss/design_as_comun.htmlaccessed 19.12.2012

(Source: Author's abstract at ELO 2013 site: http://conference.eliterature.org/critical-writing/humument-app-tom-phi… )

Franco Moretti’s notion of “distant reading” as a complementary concept to “close reading,” which has emerged alongside computer-based analysis and manipulation of texts, finds its mirror image in a sort of “distant” production of literary works—of a specific kind, of course. The paper considers the field in which literature and new media creativity intersect. Is there such a thing as literariness in “new media objects” (Manovich)? Next, by focusing on the websites that generate texts resembling and referring to sonnet form, the article asks a question about the new media sonnet and a more general question about new media poetry. A mere negative answer to the two questions seemingly implied by Vuk Ćosić’s projects does not suffice because it only postpones the unavoidable answer to the questions posed by existing new media artworks and other communication systems. Teo Spiller’s Spam.sonnets can be viewed as an innovative solution to finding a viable balance between the author’s control over the text and the text’s openness to the reader-user’s intervention. In conclusion, two concrete reconfigurations of the experience of (new media) literature—and through it the surrounding world—are considered: the experience of time in Spiller’s News Sonnets and the spatial dimension as implied in his project SMS Sonnets. News Sonnets uses current news obtained via RSS feeds from various sources, which makes the “messages” contained in the lines of the sonnet a potential stimulus for readers’ immediate action. SMS Sonnets expands the territory where the communication takes place beyond the text-reader confrontation and into the community of participants in an interactive (non-artistic) communication system.

(Source: English abstract in Primerjalna književnost 36.1)

Over the last two decades, many recent forms of electronic literature have revealed a strong aptitude for hypertextuality and hypermediality. Meanwhile, we have assisted to the progressive emergence of innovative examples of print fiction that may be defined as «writing machines»,1 because they strive to incorporate the aesthetics and the symbolic forms of the electronic media. These kinds of narrative are often characterised by an "autopoietic" potentiality, since they often tend to include a multiplicity of media sources while preserving the autonomy of their literary function. As Joseph Tabbi observes: «Defining the literary as a self-organizing composition, or poiesis, is not to close off the literary field; instead, by creating new distinctions such a definition can actually facilitate literary interactions with the media environment».2 At the same time, some examples of print and electronic 'writing machines' are also characterized by an «exopoietic function». As the philosopher John Nolt points out (in the disciplinary context of the environmental ethics): «In exopoiesis, an organism functions not for its own benefit, but rather for the benefit of something related to it, to which it is therefore of instrumental value».3 Applying this concept to the literary field, the aim of this article is to analyse the structures and the fruition of four recent novels, in order to understand how the electronic environment promotes a complex relationship between exopoiesis and literariness. William Gibson's novels "Pattern Recognition" (2003) and "Spook Country" (2007) became the core of the projects of some online communities: users begun to build online databases by annotating the various narrative segments, in order to link them to other online searchable resources. These images, videos, and texts are indirectly related to the literary plot, being at the same time independent from it. Similarly, "Flight Paths" (2007) is an electronic «networked novel» that was developed by Kate Pullinger and Chris Joseph alongside a related hypermedial database containing images, videos, newspaper articles and other texts, which may be continuously updated by the readers. Finally, the verse novel "Only Revolutions" (2006) was written by Mark Z. Danielewski with the help of a well established group of readers involved in his online forum, in order to discuss the various aspects of the novel and to suggest possible connections to other material. In all these cases, the reading of the literary work seems to be perceived as not sufficient in itself and it requires the support of a parallel electronic environment, such as a database or a forum. Moreover, the authors purposefully prearranged the structural and poetic nature of their works to promote an exopoietic non-autonomy of the literary text, the fragments of the latter being exploited in order to become part of non-literary fluxes of online information. These works are not only «distributed narratives»,4 which spread themselves across different media platforms and authorial voices, but they are also novels whose reading engenders a problematization of many of the most relevant aspects that usually define the literariness of a text, like its «open» nature and the the logic of «possible worlds» that were discussed by Umberto Eco and other scholars in the fields of semiotics and narratology.5 The exopoietic function of literary works in electronic environments may be a proper field of analysis to understand how it is possible to conceive literature as a process that runs along with other information strategies.1 See N. Katherine Hayles, Writing Machines, Cambridge (MA) - London: The MIT Press, 2002, p. 112. 2 Joseph Tabbi, Cognitive Fictions, Minneapolis - London: University of Minnesota Press, c2002, p. 8. 3 John Nolt, "The Move from Is to Good in Environmental Ethics," in «Philosophy Publications and Other Works» Vol. 31, 2009, pp. 135-154; p. 149. Web. 29-07-2011. . 4 See Jill Walker, “Distributed Narratives. Telling Stories Across Networks,” Presented at AoIR 5.0, Brighton, September 21, 2004 by Dr. Jill Walker, Dept. of Humanistic Informatics, University of Bergen. Web. 12-10-2010. . 5 See: Umberto Eco, Semiotics and the Philosophy of Language, London: Macmillan, 1984, p. 18; The Open Work, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984, pp. 3-24; On Literature, Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2005 pp. 14-15; Cesare Segre, Introduction to the Analysis of the Literary Text, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988.

Computer-generated poetry is now almost sixty years old, stretching from the work of Christopher Strachey, Jackson Mac Low and Theo Lutz in the 1950s to the wealth of interactive poetry generators freely available online today. According to Antonio Roque, this history comprises four distinct (but overlapping) ‘traditions’: the Poetic; the Oulipo; the Programming; and the Research. But despite the inherent ‘literariness’ of the enterprise, one tradition is conspicuous by its absence: the ‘Critical’. It is the object of this paper to rectify this omission, proposing a mode of critical engagement that might allow interactive poetry generators to be naturalised as objects of textual study according to the protocols of literary criticism. It seeks to achieve this by means of a comparative analysis between what might be construed as the first interactive poetry generator – Tristan Tzara’s ‘How to Make a Dadaist Poem’ – and one of the most recent (and most powerful) – Chris Westbury’s JanusNode. It argues that a full critical understanding of Tzara’s text can only proceed from a phenomenological engagement attentive to the 'reader-plays-poet dynamic' that is a feature of any ‘Dadaist poem’. This approach is then applied to present-day interactive poetry generators via an interface-centred close reading of JanusNode that draws on the phenomenology of Gaston Bachelard and the work of concrete poets such as Eugen Gomringer. This analysis serves to assert the literary pedigree of interactive poetry generation and, more importantly, establishes some ways to critically fix a textual object for which flux might be said to be a primary characteristic. Previous to the advent of the web, the failure of literary criticism to engage with poetry generation might be excused, as the critic’s access was limited by problems of distribution and resources and a lack of specialised knowledge. In the contemporary online environment, however, this failure is no longer tenable. This paper strives to encourage deeper critical engagement with interactive poetry generation and the recognition that these programs constitute virtual aesthetic objects in their own right worthy of literary study. Furthermore, it aims to engage Roque's other ‘traditions’ in dialogue, in the hope of further developing and extending the myriad possibilities of poetry generation.