network fiction

While many critics have compared the current digital age in communications media with the print revolution that began in the 15th century, these discussions have focused primarily on the differences, as opposed to the similarities between the two moments in history (Bolter, Landow, Hayles). As an author and critic involved in exploring new approaches to digital fiction, I, too, am keenly aware of the distinct differences between the age of print and the current digital age. Nevertheless, I have also been struck by many similar concerns in the specific types of literary experimentation taking place in response to new authoring and publishing technologies today with those undertaken in the past in response to print technology. In this paper, I consider specific instances of experimentation that arose in response to print technology in works of fiction published in the eighteenth century (Richardson, Pope, Sterne) with literary experimentation in response to digital technologies (Moulthrop, Montfort/Strickland, Rodgers).

(Source: Author's abstract ELO 2013, http://conference.eliterature.org/critical-writing/beyond-binaries-cont…)

Repetition and Recombination: Reading Network Fiction is the first full-length study devoted to network fiction. Network fictions are narrative texts in digitallynetworked environments that make use of hypertext technology in order to create emergent and recombinatory narratives (unlike interactive, or "arborescent," fictions that employ mutually exclusive plotlines). They represent a coalescence of works that predate and postdate the World Wide Web but share an aesthetic drive that exploits the networking potential of digital composition and foregrounds a distinctive quality of narrative recurrence and return. The thesis consists of (1) a critical and theoretical component that returns to printbased narratology in light of digital literature; (2) analyses of network fictions from the first-wave of digital literature published as stand-alone software applications; and (3) analyses of second-wave network fictions published on the World Wide Web. The analyses each focus on the interplay of the material, formal, and semantic elements of network narrative, an jnterplay that is framed by the dynamics of repetition. Furthermore, the thesis illustrates how concepts of orientation, immersion, constraint, and mobility, which have long informed the experience of reading narrative fiction, take on new meaning in digital environments. The primary contribution of the thesis is to an aesthetic and narratological understanding of this nascent form of digital literature. However, cybertext theory, systems theory, postfeminist theory, and post-structuralist and deconstructionist theory (when dissociated from early hypertext theory that claimed to literalize, embody, or fulfill it) all inform its critical understanding. The movement in the arts away from representation and toward simulation, away from the dynamics of reading and interpretation and toward the dynamics of interaction and play has led to exaggerated or alarmist claims for the endangerment of the literary arts. At the same time, some have simply doubted that the conceptual and discursive intricacy of print fiction can migrate to the screen, where performativity and immediacy are privileged. Against these claims, the thesis attests to the verbal complexity and conceptual depth of a body of writing created for the surface of the screen.

(Source: Author's abstract)

David Ciccoricco establishes the category of "network fiction" as distinguishable from other forms of hypertext and cybertext: network fictions are narrative texts in digitally networked environments that make use of hypertext technology in order to create emergent and recombinant narratives. Though they both pre-date and post-date the World Wide Web, they share with it an aesthetic drive that exploits the networking potential of digital composition and foregrounds notions of narrative recurrence and return. Ciccoricco analyzes innovative developments in network fiction from first-generation writers Michael Joyce (Twilight, a symphony, 1997) and Stuart Moulthrop (Victory Garden, 1991) through Judd Morrissey’s The Jew's Daughter (2000), an acclaimed example of digital literature in its latter instantiations on the Web. Each investigation demonstrates not only what the digital environment might mean for narrative theory but also the ability of network fictions to sustain a mode of reading that might, arguably, be called "literary." The movement in the arts away from representation and toward simulation, away from the dynamics of reading and interpretation and toward the dynamics of interaction and play, has indeed led to exaggerated or alarmist claims of the endangerment of the literary arts. At the same time, some have simply doubted that the conceptual and discursive intricacy of print fiction can migrate to new media. Against these claims, Reading Network Fiction attests to the verbal complexity and conceptual depth of a body of writing created for the surface of the screen.(Source: Publisher's description)