literary criticism

This book introduces an archaeological approach to the study of media - one that sifts through the evidence to learn how media were written about, used, designed, preserved, and sometimes discarded. Edited by Erkki Huhtamo and Jussi Parikka, with contributions from internationally prominent scholars from Europe, North America, and Japan, the essays help us understand how the media that predate today’s interactive, digital forms were in their time contested, adopted and embedded in the everyday. Providing a broad overview of the many historical and theoretical facets of Media Archaeology as an emerging field, the book encourages discussion by presenting a full range of different voices. By revisiting ‘old’ or even ‘dead’ media, it provides a richer horizon for understanding ‘new’ media in their complex and often contradictory roles in contemporary society and culture.

Electronic literature (e-lit) constitutes one of the most innovative and exciting literary forms occurring today; it is the unique child of this new technological age. Scandinavian e-lit is no exception, yet it has frequently been overlooked by literary academics in both the United States and Scandinavia. This dissertation investigates how Scandinavian e-lit engages with printed Scandinavian literature, and how critical analysis of Scandinavian literature can benefit from an understanding of e-lit. In this dissertation I argue that, far from relegation to the outer margins of Scandinavian literary research and studies, Scandinavian e-lit, and scholarship on such works, ought to occupy a central position in the field, alongside print-based counterparts. Such a shift in focus would create a new vantage point from which Scandinavianists could analyze canonical and contemporary works of print-based Scandinavian literature.

Chapter one addresses the effect of the corporeal body on the electronic text and the reading experience, while the second chapter examines Scandinavian works of e-lit to investigate how these resemble and/or distinguish themselves from codex-based literature. Chapter three provides a detailed, close reading of Primärdirektivet/The Prime Directive by Swedish poet-artist Johannes Heldén, as an example of analytical approaches to works with multi-modal capacities. Finally, chapter four discusses the institutional support, and new analytical tools Scandinavian literary scholars are developing to effectively research, evaluate, and teach this form of literature. In short, this dissertation explores what Scandinavian e-lit is, what its relationship to conventional literature is, how it functions, and how we can understand it.

My hope is that future Scandinavian literary scholarship, and academic study will not only incorporate works of Scandinavian e-lit into these activities, but that their inclusion will become routine. Integrating the study of e-lit into established literary practice not only offers opportunities to understand literary movements, themes, styles and relationships among works of Scandinavian literature (as its print-based counterpart does), but it also affords the opportunity to reconsider the nature and potential of literature itself. As such, it is a bright field of potential, as well as an innovative, fascinating form of contemporary literary art.

Seiça describes modification as an art practice meant to subvert and divert from what we—as readers, spectators, and also consumers—expect from technological apparati and platforms. He extends the study of mods to “lit mods”—including art, games, and literature.

In particular, Seiça notes that the learning curve for modding has changed: where in the past, it may have taken a certain amount of user knowledge, modification may now be automated (for instance, through Instagram filters). More importantly, he asks what lit mods show us about literary practice and literary criticism. Where fast-moving content—fast-moving e-literature and e-poetry included—may defy interpretation, so analysis is strengthened by breaking down their mechanisms.

(Source: publisher)

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.

Natural language generation (NLG) – the process wherein computers translate data into readable human languages – has become increasingly present in our modern digital climate. In the last decade, numerous companies specialising in the mass-production of computer-generated news articles have emerged; National Novel Generation Month (NaNoGenMo) has become a popular annual event; #botALLY is used to identify those in support of automated agents producing tweets. Yet NLG has not been subject to any systematic study within the humanities.

This paper offers a glimpse into the social and literary implications of computer-generated texts and NLG. More particularly, and in line with the ELO 2018 Conference’s 'Mind the Gap!' theme, this paper examines how NLG output challenges traditional understandings of authorship and what it means to be a reader. Any act of reading engages interpretive faculties; modern readers tend to assume that a text is an effort to communicate a particular pre-determined message. With this assumption, readers assign authorial intention, and hence develop a perceived contract between the author and the reader. This paper refers to this author-reader contract as ‘the hermeneutic contract’.

NLG output in its current state brings the hermeneutic contract into question. The hermeneutic contract’s communication principle rests on two assumptions: that readers believe that authors want them to be interested in their texts, and that authors want readers to understand their texts. Yet the author of a computer-generated text is often an obscured figure, an uncertain entanglement of human and computer. How does this obscuration of authorship change how text is received?

This paper will begin with an introduction to, and brief history of, NLG geared towards those with no previous knowledge of the subject. The remainder of the paper will review the results of a series of studies conducted by the researcher to discern readers’ emotional responses to NLG and their approaches to attributing authorship to computer-generated texts. Studies have indicated that a sense of agency is assigned to an NLG system, and that a continuum from authorship to generation is perhaps the most suitable schema for considering computer-generated texts. Who is responsible for the text? Are computer-generated texts worthy of serious literary analysis? What do computer-generated texts reveal about human creativity and lived experience?

The paper will conclude with an argument for why consideration of the social and literary implications of NLG and computer-generated texts is vital as we venture deeper into the digital age. Computer-generated texts may not just challenge traditional understandings of authorship: they may engender new understandings of authorship altogether as readers explore the conceptual gap between human and computer language production.

The digital age has had a profound impact on literary culture, with new technologies opening up opportunities for new forms of literary art from hyperfiction to multi-media poetry and narrative-driven games. Bringing together leading scholars and artists from across the world, The Bloomsbury Handbook of Electronic Literature is the first authoritative reference handbook to the field.Crossing disciplinary boundaries, this book explores the foundational theories of the field, contemporary artistic practices, debates and controversies surrounding such key concepts as canonicity, world systems, narrative and the digital humanities, and historical developments and new media contexts of contemporary electronic literature. Including guides to major publications in the field, The Bloomsbury Handbook of Electronic Literature is an essential resource for scholars of contemporary culture in the digital era.

(Source: Publisher's description)

In “Nothing Lasts,” Stephen Schryer considers Tom LeClair’s Passing On and The Liquidators as paired novels, one immersing the reader in the maelstrom of the social and economic systems that shape contemporary life, the other shielding the reader from those systems. Unlike the massive novels from the seventies that fascinated LeClair the critic, Schryer finds the novelist a “literary miniaturist,” seeking “concise synecdoches for the larger systems” his books evoke.

In this review of O’Nan’s West of Sunset, Messenger explores 20th Century American literary history as a kind of contemporary metafictional myth. Using Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald as characters composing the life of a literary icon against the emergence of “Hollywood,” O’Nan’s work is considered a bittersweet meditation on the death of an author and the hope that his work lives on.

Source: Author’s Abstract