literariness

The influential book that introduced the terms cybertext and ergodic literature was first written as a PhD dissertation. See the entry for the book for details and references.

Questions whether the world presented in interactive fiction is a "literary one." Defines "literariness" as quality of "making strange" that which is linguistically familiar. Randall presents study of: "Mindwheel,""Brimstone,""Breakers,""A Mind Forever Voyaging,""Portal," and "Trinity." Suggests that the literariness of interactive fiction comes out of its concern for "making strange" what is familiar and vice versa.

What makes electronic literature interesting for researchers?Maybe not its artistic and literary value, but rather its heuristic value.Indeed electronic literature not only permits previous media to be reexamined (paper for instance), but it also allows several well-established notions to be questioned (cf. figure above) such as:- narrative in narratology;- text in linguistics and semiotics;- figure in rhetorics;- materiality in aesthetics;- grasp in anthropology;- memory in archivistics;- literariness in literary studies…

Exploiting the heuristic value of electronic literature has two consequences:- an evolution of some notions in certain scientific disciplines, and maybe of the disciplines themselves;- a revealing effect regarding both digital technology and interactive and multimedia writing.

Where does electronic literature derive this capacity of interrogation from? From its sometimes hybrid status (paper vs digital) and its internal tensions (static vs dynamic text). Yet we should consider that this heuristic value is also due to the Digital and its properties: the need to be explicit - regarding formats for example - and the tendancy to objectivize the processes. This need to explicit formats and media is obvious for example in the HTML language : the metatags allow information to be given on the file itself, on the way it is to be interpreted and indexed. The media and its various formats are thus verbalized. The Digital entails a form of explicitation, and thus reflexivity, on its own formats and frames of production. It is this explicitation of format which invites us to revisit previous media, or at least to further interrogate what wrongly seemed inherent to the printed media.

Just as the Digital supposes a need for explicitation, the works of electronic literature objectivize certain properties of the literary. In this sense, they play a revealing role. One can even wonder to what extent digital writing may end up using conceptual tools made explicit by literature theoreticians. Let’s take the examples of the categories used by Gérard Genette to characterize the narrative speed : pause, scene, summary and ellipse. In a digital work, we could consider integrating these concepts into a DTD (Document Type Definition). It is indeed in a DTD that the poetics (from the Greek poiesis, meaning “making”) appears. DTDs specific to digital literary works could thus be elaborated, which would unveil their poetics. We would have here the principles of an objectivization of their stylistic devices.

However, electronic literature remains, from an anthropological point of view, “an experience that goes beyond us”, as Bruno Latour would say (« une expérience qui nous dépasse » ). Besides its heuristic value, electronic literature provides an experience of limits.

(Source: Author's abstract for ELO_AI)

Kate Hayles‘ keynote here at The Future of Electronic Literature (ELO2007)  discusses why literature departments and programs should and in fact need to incorporate electronic literature in their curriculum. Here are my notes from her talk. There are three ways of integrating e-lit in universities: 1. A department of media arts – film people, computer people, literary people. 2. An interdisciplinary program where students from different departments come together. 3. Depts of English or other literatures that introduce electronic literature as a component of their faculty lines, curriculum etc. Such a dept is often hard to convince of the importance of e-lit in the general study of literature.

The development of literary studies since mid-twentieth century has posed a number of challenges to literary scholars: cultural studies, ethnic studies, post-colonial studies, diaspora studies. Each of those has placed pressure on the dept and changed the kind of questions that literary studies must ask. E.g. what does it mean to write literature in English? (Rather than just in Britain or the US)

What kind of assumptions does the introudction of e-lit catalyse in lit. depts? What are the pressure points?

1. What des it mean to write literature in a specific medium? (Have largely assumed the medium is print, with a small bow to manuscript culture)

2. Frequent questions when addressing literary audiences: - why do we call these works “literature”? (e.g. in the ELC) - can a work of literature BE literature if it has no words?

Modest proposal: - Literature requires words that can be read/spoken or works that directly draw on language such a sound poetry. (i.e. to be literature, a work must have….) (thinks about 40% of the works in the ELC might not qualify) - “The literary” consists of literature plus artworks that interrogate that contexts, histories, and productions of literature. (this is a broader definition, we need a broader definition.

Why?

Has to do with the way these works are institutionalised. A literature department cannot leave aside that which is called “the literary”. IT also defines a particular interpretative status with which to view these works. (Alternatives: the sonic, the filmic – these are other focuses through which some of the same works might be seen).

Why contest for this territory? Why not leave it to sound artists, animation etc.? 1. Literary interpreations bring out some of the richnesses of this work that would be lost from other perspectives. 2. This is a vital part of twenty-first century literature, and if we leave it aside it will impoverish our understanding of all literature, including print literature.

An understanding of these literary works will broaden our understanding of ALL literature, including print literature.

EXAMPLES Stephanie Strickland and Cynthia Lawson Jaramillo: Slipping Glimpse Includes words, so clearly literature. However, much more is going on here than simply words and language. Questions what it means to read and what it means to be read.

Donna Leishman: Deviant: The Possession of Christian Shaw (2004) Becomes literary by its narrative focalisation of the viewpoint. At first the focalisation seems to be from outside, but as you engage with it you begin to understand that in fact you are seeing all this from within the eyes of Christian Shaw. The tip-off happens in the first screen when you see a screenshot of Christian Shaw’s journal – no words, but presented as a codex on the screen, connecting it to the traditions of literature. Alludes to computer games, but there are no rewards – yet would be productive to interpret it from the viewpoint of ludology as well, but the literary is clearly important, especially as it challenges the ludological and chooses a narrative logic instead.

Giselle Beiguelman, Code Movie 1 (2004) Hexadecimal code on the screen. The hexadecimal code being shown on the screen might be, but isn’t (?) the same hexadecimal code that is used to generate the movemnets of code on the screen. So there’s an apparent recursive loop between code that runs the work and code being shown on the screen, but there’s a disjunction, too. This piece questions what it means to read. This is a narrative about legibility. What is at stake is the very legibility of the screen itself. Appearence of chomping black teeth going to eat the screen – so there’s conflict. What is at stake is whether legibility will be preserved at all. The code leaves the 2d plane of the screen and seems to leap off into 3d space – this is the climax of the piece, as Kate Hayles reads it. This is how we must read today, take the work off the 2d screen (is this what she says?). Then the denouement – the return to static characters on a flat screen, that could seem as though they’re identical to print. So this is an interrogration of how a digital work differs from print, but the more important issue is that of legibility and what it means as a human reader to be confronted by code that you may not be able to access and even if you can access it you may not be able to understand it.

Maria Mencia, “Birds Singing Other Birds’ Songs. This is the piece that always makes literary audiences ask: “Is this literature?” Mencia is a philologer. She recorded the sounds of actual sounds singing and then transformed those sounds into morphemes. Then she asked human readers to read the morphemes as though they were birds. Then she tweaked the human sounds digitally to make them sound more bird-like. So we have a capsuled history of literacy – from orality to writing, from writing to a more regularised form, from print to a more regularised form of that and back to orality. This narrative –> should be seen as literary.

Camille Utterback and Romy Achituv, Text Rain (1999) Letters rain down on the screen and as the viewer stands in front of the installation, her shape is registerde by the installation and becomes part of what happens on the screen. Sometimes letters make words. The gestural important.

Camille Utterback, Composition (2000) Using characters (alphabetic and typographic) to generate images of the viewers.

Camille Utterback, Drawing from Life (2001) Seeing DNA as code. (Print metaphors – copy reading errors, copywriting errors are metaphors used by geneticists)

Camille Utterback, Untitled (2004)

Someone in an earlier panel today asked what the disadvantages are of calling these things literature. Do we lose something by locking new forms into an old paradigm? Or does there come a point where you don’t have a discipline anymore, when you only have a grabbag of various items? There may be some limit point, but the advantages of seeing these works as literary seems to be greater than disadvantages [I may have smudged this part of her argument].

In Bruce Sterling’s Shaping Things, he makes an argument about spines, which are objects in space and time, e.g. using RFIDs. Literature is not something that happens only in books, or only on screens, but something that has the potential to move out into the environment. When that happens, the scope of the literary will expand to even greater proportions.

We can now see that “What is a game?” is a pretty boring question compared to say “How” is this played?” I’m pretty sure that “What is the literary” is a similarly boring question. Luckily , the field of literary studis provides us with a number of examples of more interesting questions. (Noah Wardrip-Fruin commenting on Camille Utterback’s “Untitled”.)

Calling these things literary allows us to make common cause with our colleagues in departments of literature while giving us tools to see challenges (OK, so I can’t quite remember her concluding line).

Rob Kendall: What about other narrative forms that are not traditionally seen as literary, such as a ballet like Swan Lake?

Kate Hayles: If literary interpretations can help us understand those works in ways that say choreographers or dance theorists can’t, then yes, it would be useful to interpret them as literary.

(Someone): There’s a conservative drive towards defining genres, disciplines – see how this is important in terms of being able to talk with your colleagues – but is this really how we should be thinking? Is this our job?

Kate Hayles: It’s necessary to work within these constraints when working in academia. For instance, when working with grad students, you want to help them to actual get jobs – and how you define these things affect whether scholars of electronic literature can actually get jobs. We don’t want people to be casualties on the wayside because people can only describe themselves in catagories that don’t mean anything on the job market. This is likely to not be a long-term solution – electronic literature and literature is changing so fast that things will be different in ten years time.

Joe Tabbi: Literature departments are opening up already, see cultural studies. “Take a topic, apply a theory and produce an article – just in time.”

Kate Hayles: The objects of cultural studies are predominantly text. Maybe not literary texts in a conventional sense, but predominantly text. Electronic literature challenges the assumption that things should be text – and what is text?

Stuart Moulthrop: As happy as I am with the talk you just gave, I can now also see another talk you didn’t give: the virtue of the literary is a two-way door. We can talk with our colleagues and say look, it’s still literature. But also, the examples you showed also show the things that literature hasn’t been able to deal with over the last century or so, as you have showed in your many books on code. I was delighted that your last example was the Sterling book. Sterling is a polymath. I thin the real diversity of the literary is that it allows us to diversify. While I want to be able to talk with our colleagues, I also want to be able to spread out to hte many other things that can be done with this.

Kate Hayles: Yes, the literary viewpoint is only one seat at the table – there are many other seats at the table. Disciplinary transformation – it’s not painless. We’re in the process of disciplinary transformation right now. In twenty years we’ll look back at talks like this one and laugh and think “how silly”.

Most often when critics try to demonstrate the "literariness" of digital poetry, the theory they rely upon derives from the avant-garde practices of the twentieth century. To expand this dialogue with literary traditions, this paper explores the possibility of a digital lyric. Through a textual analysis of selected digital poems, the lyric genre is reconsidered to meet the needs of digital writing in two ways. First, by drawing on key works from posthuman studies (Hayles; Haraway; Turkle) the lyric subject is re-envisioned beyond the limiting (and often assumed) Romantic-era definitions. Second, by revising the lyric subject with concepts from digital studies, a dialogue opens up with other generic traditions of the lyric: notions of brevity, emotional functions of the utterance, and even musical language. As well, the function of the lyric as a communal, performative gesture becomes an especially suitable poetic convention for the digital realm.

The first experiments in digital literary forms started as early asthe 1960s. From then, up to the mid-90’s, was a period that,according to Chris Funkhouser (2007), can be considered asa ‘laboratory’ phase. The rise of the Internet has resulted in theproliferation of creative proposals. The first involves indexingcreative works in the form of databases, sometimes giving accessto hundreds of works without any hierarchical order. Since 2000,digital literature has been experiencing a new phase, marked bythe creation of anthologies. Over the years, the evaluation andselection criteria have proved to be as problematic as they arenecessary for these projects. The main issue of this paper is toprovide a critical discussion of these criteria.

I will first compare the corpus of two founding initiatives, i.e. collections1 and 2 edited by the Electronic Literature Association(ELO)1 and the ‘improved sheets’ published online by theCanadian nt2 laboratory2, in order to bring out a list of workscommonly considered as ‘worthy’ by these communities. I willthen put the positions of four important players of this field intoperspective: Bertrand Gervais (director of the nt2 lab), ScottRettberg (co-editor of the first ELO collection and leader of theEuropean ELMCIP project devoted to digital literature3), LauraBorràs (co-editor of the second ELO collection and director ofthe Hermeneia research group4) and Brian Kim Stefans (co-editor of the second ELO collection, and author of various workspresented in the ELO collections and nt2 ‘improved sheets’).In spring 2011, I questioned them about their initiatives and theirselection criteria. In the ‘crossed corpus’ of ELO and nt2 works,I will finally identify these selection criteria through a semiopragmaticmethodology.

Source: author's introduction to article

This presentation will challenge the current, too quickly determined relationship between
the ‘literary’ and digital media. The presumed literariness of digital art--these days, anything
from performance art to virtual sculpture work--muddles the already confused and meandering
genre of electronic literature, leading away from acts of reading and remarking on text and its location in new media. Electronic literature began as a study of literary writing produced and
meant to be read on a computer screen, opening up new possibilities for interactive and dynamic
storytelling, utilizing the new medium’s ability for linking lexias. The literariness of this work
is manifest: the work was primarily textual, the centrality of reading paramount. Textuality was
at the heart of the work, thus the term electronic literature was appropriate and uncontested.
Lately, ‘electronic literature’ is an umbrella-term for all things digital. A spectrum of genres
and forms are included, among them video games, interactive fiction, digital art, and (virtual)
performance art. Yet the search for the literary continues in all forms of digital art, regardless of
whether or not the literary should even be looked for.

Digital media, particularly digital art, unquestionably has merit. But this does not mean that
digital art need subsume the literary. Electronic literature is still a nascent field, and if it is to
build a corpus of literary works sufficient to sustain a field, these questions need to be addressed
now rather than later (or never). Instead of celebrating the blurring of borders, I hope to draw
certain distinctions that will help the field see the uniquely literary accomplishment of some key
authors working in the e-lit field.

This paper will explore how literariness need be driven by reading and writing, and how the
literary is being lost by the overly general application of the term ‘electronic literature.’ The
search for the literary in the digital is, for the most part, a way for the Humanities to stake a
claim for its own position in the new media ecology. What is needed is an identification by
critics and archivists, not of an e-lit canon, but a corpus of born digital literary works that both
extend and break from the print tradition - as genuine literary works within that tradition have
always done.

(Source: Author's abstract, 2012 ELO Conference site)

Lack of new and challenging, interactive hypertextual fictions causes a continuously growing frustration among literary scholars like myself. While we are witnessing a growing and exciting field within digital poetry, and especially digital art as such, hypertextual fictions seem to have become part of and/or floating into interactive digital performance and installation artworks. Noah Wardrip-Fruin’s CAVE-work Screen and Camilla Utterback’s Text Rain are among digital artworks based on text and words. According to Roberto Simanowski in “Holopoetry, Biopoetry and Digital Literature” (2007), however, Utterback’s work in particular, must be seen as a work of digital art rather than literature, since its aim is not to be read but to be played with. So how much text, how many literary generic traits must a hypertextual fiction include to be called literature and not digital art? This paper shall try to answer some of these questions, and if no new hypertextual works surface before the conference, I shall recycle the unsurpassed multimodal fiction Das Epos der Maschine by Urs Schreiber from 1998 (!) http://kunst.im.internett.de/epos-der-maschine/ and perhaps take a look at Scandinavian digital poetry sites like www.afsnitp.dk and www.netpoesi.no.