literary theory

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.

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.

Everything that happens, happens now. The essays, narratives, and essay-narratives gathered under the thread title, Fictions Present, reaffirm the 'presentist' bias in electronic publishing and in ebr particularly: our non-periodical, continuous publication is designed to keep the archive current and to present critical writing not as an afterthought, but as an integral element in the creation of literary fictions.

(Source: ebr, thread editors' statement)

In this paper, I regard generative literature as a model-object from the perspective of Mahr and Erdbeer’s application of model theory in order to give insight into the functioning of generative literature as well as further specify the new research focus of literary model theory (Erdbeer 2014). Through the modelling practice of literature generators, own preconceptions of what literature is (supposed to be), are projected. In its algorithmic writing, generative literature mimics intention-typical literature while at the same time destabilizing its very foundations. Through multiple short case study analyses, I outline (1) how generative literature self-reflexive in the sense that it is a model of literature, (2) how literary models change due to practices in generative literature and (3) how temporality is modelled in generative literature.

(Source: Abstract ICDMT 2016)

This doctoral thesis is dedicated to a form of storytelling which was added to the literary horizon
almost three decades ago. Digital fiction began by defining itself against the printed book. The
transgression of linearity, a feature which is often related to print or, more precisely, to the novel, and the attempts to reduce authorial presence in the text, were soon turned into defining
characteristics of this literary form. These works were first described as fragmented objects
comprised of “text chunks” interconnected by hyperlinks, which offered the reader freedom of
choice and a participative role in the construction of the text. This text was read by selecting several links and by assembling its lexias. However, the expansion of the World Wide Web and the emergence of new software and new devices, suggested new reading and writing experiences. Technology offered new ways to tell a story, and with it, additional paradigms. Hyperlinks were replaced with new navigation tools and lexias gave way to new kinds of textual organization. The computer became a multimedia environment where several forms of representation could thrive and prosper. As digital fiction became multimodal, words began to share the screen with image, video, music or icons. Sound was also included as part of digital fiction.
In electronic literature, the emergence of new software is often followed by the creation of new
types of texts. Virtual reality or augmented reality are presently being used to produce new textual responses. These demand an analysis of the relation between interactivity and immersion. While interactivity is often described as a set of physical activities that can interfere with attention, immersion is frequently seen as an uncritical and passive response to the text. Interactivity was used to offer freedom of choice to the reader and to give the
reader the opportunity of co-authoring the text. Immersion was, by contrast, considered as the
result of a reading experience constrained by authorial intention. In so doing, interactivity was
mostly viewed as an antidote of reader’s immersion in the text. However, in this thesis, I will focus on a cooperation rather than a conflict between both. By describing electronic literature as part of a long self-generating process known as literature, I will demonstrate that immersion and interactivity cannot survive separately. In fact, they represent intrinsic characteristics which can be identified in any kind of literary text. In order to better understand the relation between immersion and interactivity, the alleged transparency of the medium and its apparent immateriality will be discussed in this thesis. The hybridity and interactivity of digital fiction will be considered as aesthetic features that must be covered by literary analysis. This thesis aims to address the relationship between immersion and interactivity by taking into account the text’s multimodality and transiency, as well as the ergodic and cognitive work done by the reader.

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)

In my earlier research, I have drafted a theory of literary communication using programmable and networked media based on Actor-Network Theory (e.g., “Reassembling the Literary: Toward a Theoretical Framework for Literary Communication in Computer-Based Media”, in Beyond the Screen: Transformations of Literary Structures, Interfaces and Genres, eds. Jörgen Schäfer and Peter Gendolla, pp. 25-70). In this optic, the conceptions of “actor-networks”, or more precisely, the conceptions of distributed agencies and of chains of translations between human and non-human actors provide us with a framework that helps to relate human dispositions and corporeal activities, variable activity roles of human actors in the literary system (as “author”, “editor”, “reader”, etc.), changing media technologies and various literary procedures. The semantic field of “nets” and “networks” acquires a special significance because it stresses the uncertainty about sources of action.

It goes without saying that “electronic literature is situated as an intermedial field of practice between literature, computation, visual and performance art”, as the conference organizers argue appropriately. This does neither mean that literature as a specific medium of expression has come to an end nor that digital media are not suited for literary communication. However, what is still needed is a theory of literature as well as analytical methods that are able to conceive of and to observe “open” and unfinished processes between humans and non-humans that only lead to ephemeral materializations on displays instead of works as “closed” materialized objects. Using approaches from STS, Semiotics and Media Studies as well as from Literary Studies, the proposed paper aims at replacing notions of the “work” with an awareness of the local and temporal emergence of specific material-discursive reconfigurations “for another first next time”. Karen Barad’s elaboration of “posthumanist performativity” suggests that writing and reading practices should be regarded as entangled by a web of “non-human” material-discursive practices (cf. “Posthumanist Performativity: Toward an Understanding of How Matter Comes to Matter” in Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 28.3 (2003), pp. 801-831).

In literary projects such as Stephanie Strickland et al.’s slippingglimpse, John Cayley and Daniel Howe’s The Readers Project, Michael Mateas’s and Andrew Stern’s Façade or Caitlin Fisher’s Andromeda, to name a few, a congealing of physical, semiological, technological etc. agencies can be analyzed in action. Here, subjectivity does not only refer to the experiences of the human recipients, but also to that of the machines, which recursively observe their own operations (cf. Francisco J. Ricardo, The Engagement Aesthetic: Experiencing New Media Art Through Critique). Therefore I propose not to define “the literary” as a special domain but as a “very peculiar movement of re-association and reassembling” (Bruno Latour, Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory, p. 7). I will try to identify particular poetic effects of the brief moment of a network’s “becoming-literary”. From there on, the decisive questions of literary studies need to be brought up again and partially revised:

How do the relationships between “text” (contains letters), “work” (contains texts), “material medium” transform in electronic literature?
How, when, and through what does a specific aesthetic experience develop for the (human) recipient in these associations or entanglements?
How does the translation between the agencies of human actors acting in the “real word” and those of literary characters or actions in the fictional space of a story or an interactive drama like Façade or a Cave installation like Screen or those of an avatar in a computer game take place?

(Source: ELO 2015 Conference Catalog)

Is electronic literature in a cul de sac? For the main audience only digitized literature exist. E-books, e-readers, self-publishing, tablets, digital libraries, publishing houses in the Web, etc. Electronic literature needs certain conditions to revive: 1. The literary corpus should increase. 2. The text should be the focus, the story should not be hidden with special effects that can be of no interest at all. 3. There must be professional criticism on digital works.

If there is such a thing as a new computer-assisted literary criticism, its expression lies in a model that is as broad-based as that presented in John Smith’s seminal article, “Computer Criticism,” and is as encompassing of the discipline of literary studies as it is tied to the evolving nature of the electronic literary text that lies at the heart of its intersection with computing. It is the desire to establish the parameters of such a model for the interaction between literary studies and humanities computing – for a model of the new computer-assisted literary criticism – that gave rise to the papers in this collection and to the several conference panel-presentations and discussions that, in their print form, these papers represent.

Source: Author's Abstract

Twenty-six years after its original publication in French, I examine and propose to revisit a traditional literary theory bound to the book-as-object for the realm of literature in programmable media: paratext theory as envisioned by French narratologist Gérard Genette (translated into English by Jane E. Levin, 1997). To Genette, paratext is that which accompanies a text. He differentiates and distinguishes paratexts according to location of appearance and the sender of paratextual information. Two concepts are relavant: peri- and epitext. Genette speaks and identifies peritexts as those elements of the book dictated by a publisher devoted to the cover, typesetting, format etc. and epitexts which exist outside a book in the form of notes and interviews. Both elements merge into what Genette calls paratext theory, all of which carry out a functionality. Among others, Genette envisions paratexts to fulfill a “literary function“ which serve for guiding a readers reading; a claim under critical exploration in this presentation. Investigating the theme of this conference, I question how paratext theory may help to locate the literary in electronic literature. How do the paratextual elements, or, more specific in the here presented context: how do peritexts that surround and point to a texts existence in fact point to a work’s literary content? Given the very informational original nature and functionality of paratexts, it should be expected to locate a work’s text in these liminal devices that accompany works of electronic literature. Methodologically, I take into consideration, compare, and search for locating the literary in different peritexts to one and the same work. Among others, the Electronic Literature Directory (ELD) that presents readers with encyclopedic articles on creative works is of particular interest to this study. The paper examines selected article contributions from the ELD, as well as work descriptions in the Electronic Literature Collection and asks how these locate the literary of a work. Text in an peritext is located if substantial engagement with a texts literary content is identified. This is true if a description relates to the themes and a work‘s motifs, if it presents a work’s characters, time, space, and setting of the imaginative writing. Optionally, the literary may also be located in a presentation of how a work’s material strategy and behavior relates to the content of a work. The paper intends to make the e-lit community attentive to locate text in paratexts to creative works. This is relevant if a works technical obsolesence is considered. Despite of archival work, if a paratext is all that is available should a work no longer be accessible, one should wish for a paratext that formally is as extensible as possible and as comprehensible as possible when it comes to a work’s literary content that is no longer readable. Such a proposal conceives paratexts as cultural heritage. It relates to Philppe Bootz’s and Alexandra Saemmer’s writing on the theory put forward in the discussion of the “lability of the device“ and builds on Saemmer who in an article states “I [thus] consider the paratext as an ultimate defence against the lability of our digital creations, as well as a part of my work“ (90).

Source: Author's Abstract