This is the definition of “weblog” I’ve written for the Routledge Encyclopedia of Narrative Theory, which is forthcoming in 2005. It’s limited in size and scope: I had to keep to a maximum of 500 words, including the references, and I wrote it for an encyclopedia of narrative. The asterixes indicate cross references to other entries in the encyclopedia.
(Source: Author)
The past several decades have seen an explosion of interest in narrative, with this multifaceted object of inquiry becoming a central concern in a wide range of disciplinary fields and research contexts. As accounts of what happened to particular people in particular circumstances and with specific consequences, stories have come to be viewed as a basic human strategy for coming to terms with time, process, and change.However, the very predominance of narrative as a focus of interest across multiple disciplines makes it imperative for scholars, teachers, and students to have access to a comprehensive reference resource.
Source: amazon.com
Over the last thirty years, we have spoken about electronic literature in terms of its newness. Scholars have emphasized new ways of reading, challenges to closure, and entirely new models for composition. From the earliest books in the 1980s through recent scholarship in this maturing field, critics have sought out the unique features of the electronic medium. Ludologists, in particular, have challenged attempts to reduce electronic literature to a variation on older print forms.
I want to offer a different perspective on the challenges posed by electronic literature by revisiting the relation between older and newer media. When a new medium emerges, it challenges the existing order and vocation of older media. Sometimes older media respond directly, such as the impressionist shift away from realism after the advent of photography. But often the influences of a new medium are more subtle and indirect, and instead bring out a potential that is implicit but latent in an earlier medium. Alan Spiegel’s Fiction and the Camera Eye and Nancy Armstrong’s Fiction in the Age of Photography are examples of scholarship revealing that newer media subtly revealed new potentials within an older medium.
In this talk I will make a case that electronic literature can be read to subtly change of the core narrative concepts that we have developed through in literature, theater, and film. Obviously, a full discussion of this change is impossible in twenty minutes, but I will take as a proof-of-concept a re-reading of the concept of narrative setting. Specifically, I will discuss electronic works by J.R. Carpenter and Jason Nelson against the formulation of narrative space and time provided by Bakhtin’s classic essay on the chronotope. Although Bakhtin’s discussion of space and time can easily and productively be applied to these electronic works, I also read this relation backwards as a critique of some of the assumptions implicit in Bakhtin’s essay – especially Bakhtin’s tendency to see a continuity between narrative space and the phenomenological world in which authors and readers live.
The upshot of this discussion is a claim that life “after” electronic literature isn’t only going to be a matter of new and emerging forms for writing, but also a transformation and deepening of some of our most basic narrative concepts.
(source: ELO 2015 Conference Catalog)
Today, we not only see video games and online role-playing games interpreted, in print-based scholarly journals, by way of classical literary and narrative theory (to the dismay of the radical ludologist), but we also see the inverse: classical novels interpreted by way of role-playing games staged in computerized, simulated environments (as in Jerome McGann's IVANHOE Game). The use of classical theory for the study of contemporary video games and video games for the study of classical literature, however, does not necessarily mean that we now inhabit a mixed up muddled up shook up literary-critical world. In fact, these examples might mark opposite sides of a continuum of critical practice, and underscore the logic of analyzing a text in a given medium with the tools of a different – and complementary – medium.
The notion recalls McGann's own assertion that problems in textual scholarship inevitably arise when we "deploy a book form to study another book form," thereby creating an undesirable "symmetry between the tool and its subject" (2001, 56). If the assertion holds true across media, it would appear that we have arrived at a rather tidy formulation: scholars should utilize the tools of a dynamic medium in order to study a text in a fixed one and, conversely, they should make recourse to a more stable medium in order to study dynamic works of (digital) literature. The formulation is, of course, too tidy, and breaks down as soon as we consider texts that would fall anywhere in the middle of this continuum. What sort of critical tools and critical perspectives would best suit works of digital literature that rely on a fusion of discursive and material complexity / movement?
Most theorists and critics invested in language-driven digital literature at least tend to agree on a pronounced need for more "close readings." At the same time, it is still not entirely clear what is meant by "close reading" and how (or even if) the very notion of close reading applies to digital literature. This paper suggests that digital literature prompts a revisitation, re-articulation, and reanimation of the concept of close reading, one that attends to the material context of its process and product. It will first consider the historical and genealogical development of close reading alongside the material and technological developments of 20th century literary production – the very context that was consciously elided by its earliest practitioners as they sought to insulate literature from the vulgarities of industrial and technological culture. Then it will perform a series of short close readings of a recent work of digital literature, TOC: a new media novel by Steve Tomasula (et. al.) (2009). The first will disregard medium and materiality, the second will "read" only the medium and its materiality, and a third will read both elements in concert. The experiment aims to demonstrate how understanding textual materiality as something distinct from a work of digital literature is at once impossible and absolutely necessary.
(Source: Author's abstract for ELO_AI)
Just as the explosive growth of digital media has led to ever-expanding narrative possibilities and practices, so these new electronic modes of storytelling have, in their own turn, demanded a rapid and radical rethinking of narrative theory. This timely volume takes up the challenge, deeply and broadly considering the relationship between digital technology and narrative theory in the face of the changing landscape of computer-mediated communication.
New Narratives reflects the diversity of its subject by bringing together some of the foremost practitioners and theorists of digital narratives. It extends the range of digital subgenres examined by narrative theorists to include forms that have become increasingly prominent, new examples of experimental hypertext, and contemporary video games. The collection also explicitly draws connections between the development of narrative theory, technological innovation, and the use of narratives in particular social and cultural contexts.
Finally, New Narratives focuses on how the tools provided by new technologies may be harnessed to provide new ways of both producing and theorizing narrative. Truly interdisciplinary, the book offers broad coverage of contemporary narrative theory, including frameworks that draw from classical and postclassical narratology, linguistics, and media studies.
(Source: University of Nebraska Press catalog page)
We acknowledge that the range of texts interrogated by the authors in this volume will soon appear not so very ‘new’ at all. Instead, they might best be regarded as a selective snapshot of narrative practices--practices already significantly different from the first hypertext fictions that were the focus of the first wave of digital narratology.
The Interactive Fiction (IF) genre describes text-based narrative experiences in which a person interacts with a computer simulation by typing text phrases (usually commands in the imperative mood) and reading software-generated text responses (usually statements in the second person present tense). Re-examining historical and contemporary IF illuminates the larger fields of electronic literature and game studies. Intertwined aesthetic and technical developments in IF from 1977 to the present are analyzed in terms of language (person, tense, and mood), narrative theory (Iser's gaps, the fabula / sjuzet distinction), game studies / ludology (player apprehension of rules, evaluation of strategic advancement), and filmic representation (subjective POV, time-loops). Two general methodological concepts for digital humanities analyses are developed in relation to IF: implied code, which facilitates studying the interactor's mental model of an interactive work; and frustration aesthetics, which facilitates analysis of the constraints that structure interactive experiences. IF works interpreted in extended "close interactions" include Plotkin's Shade (1999), Barlow's Aisle (2000), Pontious's Rematch (2000), Foster and Ravipinto's Slouching Towards Bedlam (2003), and others. Experiences of these works are mediated by implications, frustrations, and the limiting figures of their protagonists.
(Source: From the author´s website)
Traces the transformation of storytelling in the digital age. Since its inception, narratology has developed primarily as an investigation of literary narrative fiction. Linguists, folklorists, psychologists, and sociologists have expanded the inquiry toward oral storytelling, but narratology remains primarily concerned with language-supported stories. In Avatars of Story, Marie-Laure Ryan moves beyond literary works to examine other media, especially electronic narrative forms. By grappling with semiotic media other than language and technology other than print, she reveals how story, a form of meaning that transcends cultures and media, achieves diversity by presenting itself under multiple avatars.
Ryan begins by considering, among other texts, a 1989 Cubs-Giants baseball broadcast, the reality television show Survivor, and the film The Truman Show. In all these texts, she sees a narrative that organizes meaning without benefit of hindsight, anticipating the real-time dimension of computer games. She then expands her inquiry to new media. In a discussion covering text-based interactive fiction such as Spider and Web and Galatea, hypertexts such as Califia and Patchwork Girl, multimedia works such as Juvenate, Web-based short narratives, and Façade, a multimedia, AI-supported project in interactive drama, she focuses on how narrative meaning is affected by the authoring software, such as the Infocom parser, the Storyspace hypertext-producing system, and the programs Flash and Director. She also examines arguments that have been brought up against considering computer games such as The Sims and EverQuest as a form of narrative, and responds by outlining an approach to computer games that reconciles their imaginative and strategic dimension. In doing so, Ryan distinguishes a wide spectrum of narrative modes, such as utilitarian, illustrative, indeterminate, metaphorical, participatory, emergent, and simulative.
Ultimately, Ryan stresses the difficulty of reconciling narrativity with interactivity and anticipates the time when media will provide new ways to experience stories.
(Source: Publisher's description)
If it still makes sense to try to overcome the resistance of digital media to narrativity, it is because these media suffer from a malaise that perhaps only the time-tested appeal of storytelling can relieve.
While the main focus of this book is the contribution of digital technology to narrative, it does not approach this issue in isolation but rather places it in the larger context of the relations between media, narrative, and modes.
Throughout the second part of this book I will stress the difficulty of reconciling narrativity with interactivity, a feature that I regard as the most distinctive property of digital environments.
Hayles’s book is designed to help electronic literature move into the classroom. Her systematic survey of the field addresses its major genres, the challenges it poses to traditional literary theory, and the complex and compelling issues at stake. She develops a theoretical framework for understanding how electronic literature both draws on the print tradition and requires new reading and interpretive strategies. Grounding her approach in the evolutionary dynamic between humans and technology, Hayles argues that neither the body nor the machine should be given absolute theoretical priority. Rather, she focuses on the interconnections between embodied writers and users and the intelligent machines that perform electronic texts.Through close readings of important works, Hayles demonstrates that a new mode of narration is emerging that differs significantly from previous models. Key to her argument is the observation that almost all contemporary literature has its genesis as electronic files, so that print becomes a specific mode for electronic text rather than an entirely different medium. Hayles illustrates the implications of this condition with three contemporary novels that bear the mark of the digital.
(Source: Publisher's catalog description)
To see electronic literature only through the lens of print is, in a significant sense, not to see it at all.
The immediacy of code to the text's performance is fundamental to understanding electronic literature, especially to appreciating its specificity as a literary and technical production.
[T]he computational media intrinsic to electronic textuality have necessitated new kinds of critical practice, a shift from literacy to what Gregory L. Ulmer calls "electracy."
Electronic Literature extends the traditional functions of print literature in creating recursive feedback loops between explicit articulation, conscious thought, and embodied sensorimotor knowledge.