print literature

Judy Malloy is a pioneer in the field of electronic literature. As she writes in this interview, she wrote the first hyperfiction in 1986 called “Uncle Rogers” a series of works of hypernarratives for Eastgate Systems, the first hypertext publishing house founded in 1982 in Watertown, Massachusetts (USA). The interview is a resume of her work as an author and visiting lecturer at Princeton University that still goes on as her latest publication in 2016 can prove.

This is the first interview of a series called Electronic Literature Review Promotion. These interviews are published one month before the event takes place.

It is too easy to fall into prognostications of electronic literature as the end of literature or as a new beginning. (...) Such views imply too much teleology, and see electronic literature purely as the unfolding of the possibilities of the apparatus. The rhetorical logic at work is literalization, i.e. taking literary works as the sum of their technical features. (Rui Torres & Sandy Baldwyn, eds. 2014. PO.EX: Essays from Portugal on Cyberliterature and Intermedia. Morgantown, WV: Center for Literary Computing: xv-xvi).

Our panel title, adapted from Manuel António Pina’s poetry book (1), serves to interrogate our notions of literary art today, when we consider its current production and distribution through various media (printed codex, programmable media, digital platforms, Internet, social networks). The ironical paradox contained in the phrase “it is just a little bit late” seems to suggest the idea that not much has changed despite the so-called “big changes” (in the case of Pina, it is relevant to know that his work was published in 1974, the year of the Portuguese revolution). Taking his ironical premise into the field of literature, it is legitimate to ask ourselves how literary art has changed across these media incarnations, how meaningful is “the electronic” for a definition of literature, what changes are actually significant, and how they impact on notions of author, work, reader and literary experience. The papers in this panel offer three perspectives on the end(s) of electronic literature and may be described as attempts to de-literalize its technical apparatus.

(1) Manuel António Pina (1943-2012). The title of his poetry book is “Ainda não é o fim nem o princípio do mundo calma é apenas um pouco tarde” [“It’s not yet the beginning or the end of the world remain calm it’s just a little bit late”]. This book was originally published in 1974.

(Source: ELO 2015 Conference Catalog)

This paper takes a topographical approach to re-reading print books in digital literary spaces through a discussion of a web-based work of digital literature “…and by islands I mean paragraphs” (Carpenter 2013). In this work, a reader is cast adrift in a sea of white space extending far beyond the bounds of the browser window, to the north, south, east and west. This sea is dotted with computer-generated paragraphs. These fluid texts call upon variable strings containing words and phrases collected from a vast literary corpus of books about islands. Individually, each of these textual islands represents a topic – from the Greek topos, meaning place. Collectively they constitute a topographical map of a sustained practice of reading and re-reading and writing and re-writing on the topic of islands. This paper will argue that, called as statement-events into digital processes, fragments of print texts are reconstituted as events occurring in a digital present which is also a break from the present. A new regime of signification emerges, in which authorship is distributed and text is ‘eventilized’ (Hayles). This regime is situated at the interface between an incoherent aesthetics, one which tends to unravel neat masses, including well-known works of print literature; and an incoherent politics, one which tends to dissolve existing institutional bonds, including bonds of authorship and of place. Alexander Galloway terms this regime of signification the ‘dirty regime of truth’.

(Souce: ELD 2015)

In this interview, Carlo Cinato, author of the hypertext novel L’uomo senza cappello e la donna con le scarpe grigie (The man without a hat and the woman with grey shoes) and curator of the blog Parolata, explains how he started getting interested in electronic literature and how he conceived his novel. Through the study of hypertextual and non sequencial books in printed form he discovered a new way of writing which was adaptable to the technical possibilities of the web and the ebooks. According to Cinato there are analogies between literary works of the print tradition and the digital tradition, but in particular the latter are characterised by the possibility of making a leap inside the text. The hypertextual structure alters the role of the reader, the materiality of the text, the way of reading and the way to write for an author. Moreover Cinato sees the writing of the novel as an experiment. It was an occasion to write by using one of the seven hypertext links he has pinpointed. In the end he explains in which way the hypertextual structure changes the way of reading and how it can be installed also in ebooks.

(Source: Interviewer's abstract)

Print literature has a deep, theoretically-engaged history of scholarly editing practice which provides a powerful framework within which to understand different versions or editions of texts and the natures and sources of their differences. While scholarship on electronic literature has brought in forensic, bibliographic, and platform-related concepts in the last decade or so, only recently have original computational works been considered in this way. Much of the discourse around “digital editions” has focused on the creation of electronic versions of print works.

Computational works often look very different than the texts scholarly editors are used to considering. Even basic questions of nomenclature, although addressed in certain ways, are difficult to settle: How should we name, and therefore understand, the basic textual relationships for computational work? The traditional literary term, “edition,” does not always model the relationship between a creative computational work and its descendants, which may have resulted from something that, particularly in the case of games, is unlike “editing” in the textual sense. The broader term “version” seems too general to fully express the nature of the connections between different instances of a work. Taking into account Matthew Kirschenbaum's terms for applying textual studies to digital works -- including layers, releases, and objects -- we consider other terms that have been used, including “remake” and “reboot,” paying specific attention to their histories.

We examine these terms in the context of two different computational works and their follow-up versions. This includes the original "Karateka," the 1984 Apple II videogame by Jordan Mechner. and three groups of related work: numerous early ports to home computers, a 2012 “HD Remake,” and the 2013 "Karateka Classic" for mobile phones. We also consider the three editions/versions of "First Screening," which was first implemented by an individual developer (Canadian poet bpNichol) on the Apple II in 1984. "First Screening" was subsequently published in a HyperCard edition in 1993 and, in 2007, in a website with extensive apparatus, documentation, and different versions, including a new one in JavaScript.

We evaluate these two textual histories and how different types of porting, re-implementation, and re-publication brought about new types of computational artifacts. While those engaged exclusively in literary studies would not consider "Karateka," and those looking at games exclusively would not consider "First Screening," we choose to reunite these two 1984 Apple II programs, both of which have been carried into new versions with great care. We consider how scholars can study different versions of the same computational work side-by-side, and what the applicability or lack thereof of standard bibliographic terms means for the way computational works are re-issued. We argue that viewing the detailed textual histories of computational works helps to support a variety of critical perspectives on the social, technological, and economic forces involved in the production and re-production of electronic literature.

(Source: Author's Abstract)

Viewed next to print literature, e-lit appears as a poor copy, a replica(nt) lacking both the genius agency of modernism and the abject subjectivity of postmodernism. In this talk, I will use the concepts of re-territorialization (Deleuze and Guattari) and “the open” (Giorgio Agamben) to show how, like Hoffman’s automaton, the “born digital” is powerful precisely because it fails to deceive. Neither preserving nor directly opposing the conventions of print-lit, e-lit functions as a reflecting apparatus that unmasks language and meaning-making as machines through the revelation of its own machine-works. Using multifarious examples from the work of Alan Bigelow, Mez Breeze, Emily Short, Jason Nelson, and others, I will show how these re-inscribe obstruction, glitch, error, randomness and obsolescence as potentiality. In doing so, they repurpose the productive and reproductive functions of writing not for some finite end or product, but for play.

(Source: author's abstract)