literary history

In the conclusion of *Literary History of Canada: Canadian Literature in English* (1965), Northrop Frye asserts that there “is no Canadian writer of whom we can say what we can say of the world’s major writers, that their readers can grow up inside their work without ever being aware of a circumference” (821). This paper will partly push against this tendency in Canadian literary criticism and will consider a select instance of Canadian electronic literature. In Frye’s terms, “Canadian sensibility” is “profoundly disturbed” not only by “our famous problem of identity,” which can be, in part, summarized by the question of “[w]ho am I?,” but by the question of “[w]here is here?” (826). I claim that *here* in the question of “where is here?” has become digital; i.e., “we” (as in Canadian writers and critics) are now online and not in the prairies or the lakes or the cityscapes and we live lives in which our identities (along with the potentiality of a national identity) have been outsourced to an indefinite electronic space. Identity is experienced through the mirrors of technological avatars and doubles in a mise en abyme of electronic spacelessness. I call it “spacelessness” because the ontology of this “space”—the space of the digital—is indiscrete and indefinite; it remains, to put it in the terms of Alan Liu (when applying Derrida’s notion of the transcendental signified to “data pours” [“59]), “transcendent” (62). Extrapolating from Liu, the space of electronic literature should be conceived as being “transcendent” as opposed to “immanent”—to use a Deleuzoguattarian term—but this notion of transcendence is unique in that a materiality of space is nonetheless configured through the complicated interplay of technological and subjective doubling, which renders materiality in very new terms and in a very new place. To put this argument differently, I would say that the emergence of Canadian electronic literature is still concerned with the question of “where is here,” but now the orientation of here is situated in a very different notion of “environment.” This new notion of environment is no longer a directly “Canadian” environment—an environment of mountains, trees, fields, prairies, lakes, and rivers that is inhabited by moose, geese, humans, and various other non-humans—but rather an environment that features an extreme plurality and a profound lack of both subjectivity and space. The electronic environment that is presented by Canadian electronic literature is not a void-space of subjective inexistence, but a material space of sociocultural heterogeneity; in other words, it is a space that is constituted as a vague, expansive, and indefinite commons. This argument will be primarily grounded in an in-depth analysis of Darren Wershler’s *NICHOLODEON* and *NICHOLODEONLINE* (but many other examples will be considered as well). *NICHOLODEONLINE* is akin to an archaeological locale that requires nonlinear apprehension: the text does not progress in a linear fashion (as it does in the print version for example), but rather proceeds through the nonlinear processes of clicking through the various pathways of what could be called its “ganglion” (a term that is very important for bpNichol).

Electronic Literature considers new forms and genres of writing that exploit the capabilities of computers and networks – literature that would not be possible without the contemporary digital context.In this book, Rettberg places the most significant genres of electronic literature in historical, technological, and cultural contexts. These include hypertext fiction, combinatory poetics, interactive fiction (and other game-based digital literary work), kinetic and interactive poetry, and networked writing based on our collective experience of the Internet. He argues that electronic literature demands to be read both through the lens of experimental literary practices dating back to the early twentieth century and through the specificities of the technology and software used to produce the work. Considering electronic literature as a subject in totality, this book provides a vital introduction to a dynamic field that both reacts to avant-garde literary and art traditions and generates new forms of narrative and poetic work particular to the twenty-first century. It is essential reading for students and researchers in disciplines including literary studies, media and communications, art, film, and creative writing.

(Source: Polity catalog copy)

Electronic Literature is the winner of the 2019 N. Katherine Hayles Award for Criticism of Electronic Literature.

Amy J. Elias reviews Madhu Dubey’s second book Signs and Cities: Black Literary Postmodernism and gauges the argument that we can locate within literary history a distinctive African American strain of postmodernism.

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

My paper tries to make three simple points, each one of which is connected to a specific end of electronic literature: theoretical, practical, and historical. The point of departure is of course electronic literature as we know it and perhaps like it to be: seriously undertheorized, critically experimental, ignored by media and literary departments, and practiced in relatively small and isolated communities that are firmly situated outside the usual constraints of literary market economy. This is about to change given the multitude of devices and gadgets suitable for consuming electronic literature controlled (i.e. produced, published, distributed and owned) by big media corporations. In short, we’ll soon have something new and unprecedented: popular electronic literature and probably all that usually (or historically) comes with it: both healthy and counterproductive tensions between e-literatures high and low, experimental and generic, innovative and mainstream etc. Therefore, we might need several alternative ends.

First, as electronic literature re-activates ergodic, procedural, combinatory and other centuries and even millennia long literary traditions while still struggling with the tangled triple heritage of 20th century modernism, avant-garde, and postmodernism, it offers unique perspectives on literary history and plenty of chances to radically rewrite it (as a necessary and unavoidable continuation or sequel to all of the above). In short, electronic literature should confront and challenge literary history and include itself in it as an act of self-defense before it is too late, and tablet textuality takes over and both re-invents and re-historicizes the wheel. Electronic literature’s failure to do this could constitute its very own end and confirm what many may already suspect, i.e. that in the greater scheme of things electronic literature was destined to be collateral damage. The first part of the paper will give examples of how to strategically situate electronic literature into literary history.

Second, we will reach an end with no actual ending (or beginning) in sight. Electronic literature could easily be conceptualized as one giant and heterogeneous research program that has enormous potential to undermine, test and falsify several currently hegemonic notions and concepts of literary theory (and not only of literary history) and set reasonable limits to their analytical and explanatory power. Here the goal is to use electronic literature to offer countless easily verifiable counterexamples to any overreaching paradigm that presents itself as a general theory of literature, but is based on print literature and nothing but print literature. The second part of the paper will give examples of how this may help us formulate new research questions.

Third, if rewriting literary history and expanding literary theory with the help of electronic literature are not good or worthy enough, then there is always the classic possibility of rewriting the classics. The third and final part of my paper speculates on how to embody, enhance and modify the texts and personal poetics of Joyce, Musil or Kafka with a wide variety of born digital literary devices.

(Source: ELO 2015 Conference Catalog)

“I suppose that my fiction will be word-processed by association, though I myself will not become a green-screener,” John Barth told the Paris Review in 1985. But just a few years later he did, not only switching to a word processor but exploring the machine as a subject in subsequent fiction. This lecture, drawn from my forthcoming book Track Changes: A Literary History of Word Processing, interweaves a narrative of word processing’s introduction to the literary world–we will see that Barth’s story, both his abrupt turn-around and his fear of guilt by association is typical–with a consideration of practical problems in doing research at the intersection of literary and technological history, especially the changing nature of the archive as primary source material becomes itself “born-digital.” Along the way we will take a look at Stephen King’s Wang, John Updike’s trash, and the 200-pound writing machine that produced the first word processed novel in English.

(Source: ELD 2015)

This artist paper examines in detail and poetic dimensions both the content and construction of the Unknown Territories project. This project incorporates two literary histories constructed along paths dissecting imagined landscapes of the western Canyonlands. The first paths follow an exploration narrative and in the second, imagined 100 years later, users take on a landscape facing development and destruction. The presentation is based on forthcoming papers in the books Switching Codes (Chicago, 2010) and Picture This (Minnesota, 2011).