literary analysis

An increasing number of journals and conferences have been publishing articles and critical essays about electronic literature, but still mainly adopting traditional approaches to literary texts, such as close-reading (deeply rooted in the New Criticism trend), or reporting readers’ experiences (in accordance to the Reception Aesthetics). These approaches, however fruitful and well-established in literary analysis as they are, were not originally conceived to study digital texts. Therefore, they systematically fail to grasp specificities of electronic literature, unless the critic goes beyond the limits of the method and adopts other analytical tools as well.

Considering this gap between the digital materiality of electronic literature and the traditional analytical procedures that literary theory has devised for printed texts, this paper is aimed to present an analytical approach to computer systems and their interfaces that can be used for the sake of literary criticism in the field of e-lit: Semiotic Engineering (SemEng). Semiotic engineering is a semiotic theory of human-computer interaction (HCI), which views interactive computer systems as messages from designers to users conveyed by system interfaces. Interactive systems are, thus, seen as texts, which allows us to understand e-lit productions as interactive systems whose messages purposely have aesthetic intentions, or a poetic function, as described in Roman Jakobson’s famous communication model. Furthermore, SemEng is intended not only to capture the message of the system, but also its metamessage, i.e., the message from the designer to the reader explaining how the system message should be unpacked.

In the field of literature, the concept of a metamessage is evidently analogous to Umberto Eco’s notion of the model reader, where a text defines, by its structure, the interpretive limits of its content, which is a key element to the understanding of the interpretability of any piece of literature (including electronic ones). EngSem reconstructs the message and the metamessage conveyed by interactive computer systems by analyzing their interfaces as sign-clad texts. The original sign categories devised by the theory were the Peircean tripartition of metalinguistic, static and dynamic signs, but new studies have found that other categories of sign can be added to the theory, so as to better grasp systems messages and metamessages. All in all, as it is a theory based on Semiotics and Linguistics (especially on Jakobson’s, Eco’s and Peirce’s contributions to those fields), but developed within Computer Science academia, to help software engineers and interface analysts better understand systems communicability (rather than their usability), we believe that SemEng can help bridge some of the gaps between Literature and Computer Science studies in the realm of Electronic Literature.

To prove that hypothesis, this paper carries out an analysis of In Absentia, by J. R. Carpenter, a work published in the Electronic Literature Collection volume 2, under the analytical lenses of Semiotic Engineering. Besides showing the critical insights into this work provided by SemEng, we also discuss ontological and epistemological aspects of the theory, concluding that it can open up new discussions and analytical paths into electronic literature.

Textual analysis places great emphasis on determining the development and direction of authorial intention to illuminate a text’s layers of meaning. How, though, is one to determine the development of authorial intention in a text that appears to remove the traditional human author? This paper explores issues of authorship presented to genetic criticism (critique génétique) by algorithmically-produced texts – that is, texts produced through programmed logic in a computer rather than through direct human agency – such as those of the Twitter bot Pentametron (twitter.com/pentametron). This paper considers the perceived importance of authorship and human agency in the creation of a text. Algorithmic texts challenge contemporary notions of textual creation and development, in turn posing challenges to genetic criticism that are similar to those posed by cut-up texts in other media. This paper argues that Pentametron’s rather nonsensical algorithmic output stresses the reader’s responsibility for meaning-making, and suggests that such algorithmic texts are not so much final texts to be subjected to genetic critique themselves, but are more aptly considered to be forms of avant-texte. These avant-textes serve as inspiration for human-computer symbioses, for re-creations wherein readers make sense out of the seemingly senseless.

Traditional printed texts and hypertexts are not fundamentally different. Actually they have more in common than is commonly assumed, and they thus can be analysed well within the parameters of established categories of literary theory. Against this background it seems striking that a number of theoretical treatises by early hypertext theorists such as Landow, Bolter, or Joyce refer to the revolutionary character of this kind of writing, the amazing technological development that lies behind it, and the almost miraculous convergence of postmodern literary concepts and hypertext. These treatises can be criticised for foregrounding technological innovations to a disproportional extent, while lacking both elaborate theoretical foundation and support from actual close analyses of hypertextual narratives. Especially hypertexts which are published on the internet have not been accounted for in a substantial way. Therefore, the present dissertation aims to provide the necessary theoretical framework for a close literary analysis of hyperfiction on the internet.

Source: Author's Abstract