Book (collection)

From the ELL Website:

Written and produced by the Electronic Literature Lab Team––Dene Grigar, PhD; Nicholas Schiller, MLIS; Vanessa Rhodes, B.A.; Mariah Gwin, Veronica Whitney, B.A.; and Katie Bowen––Rebooting Electronic Literature: Documenting Born Digital Pre-Web Media provides scholars with access to fragile, seminal works published on floppy disks and CD-ROMs between 1986-1996, including:

• Sarah Smith’s science fiction hypertext novel King of Space (1991)
• David Kolb’s hypertext essay “Socrates in the Labyrinth” (1994)
• J. Yellowlees Douglas’ hypertext narrative “I Have Said Nothing” (1994) 
• Thomas M. Disch’s text adventure AMNESIA (1986)
• Rob Kendall’s hypertext animated poem A Life Set for Two (1996)
• Judy Malloy’s generative hypertext narrative its name was Penelope (Version 3.0, 1993)
• Mary-Kim Arnold’s hypertext narrative poem “Lust” (1994)

The book features 85,000 words of artist biographies, descriptions of media, and critical essays; 350 photos of artists, works, and their original packaging; and 55 videos of artist readings and interviews and Live Stream Traversals.

Critical essays include:

• “Contextualizing Sarah Smith’s King of Space“
• “Untangling the Threads of the Labyrinth in David Kolb’s ‘Socrates in the Labyrinth'”
• “Saying Something about J. Yellowlees Douglas’ ‘I Have Said Nothing'”
• “Remembering the 1980s with Thomas M. Disch’s AMNESIA“
• “Love and Loss in Robert Kendall’s A Life Set for Two”
• “On Memory, the Muse, and Judy Malloy’s its name was Penelope“
• “Repetition in Mary-Kim Arnold’s ‘Lust'” 

It also offers scholarly resources and versioning and publication information about each work.

Holes is a digital poem by Graham Allen that presents a new approach to autobiographical writing. It is a ten syllable one line per day poem which offers something less and something more than a window on the author’s life. Composition of Holes began on December 23rd, 2006. To mark the 10-year anniversary of the piece, a limited edition print volume of the text’s first decade has been released.

At the start of the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey, two tribes of apes get into a fight over a watering hole, and one group drives off the other. The apes who have been driven away are depressed, and just sit around moping when one of them gets the idea to use a thigh bone of some large animal as a club. First he tries it out on a few dried ribs that are lying about,1 then he uses it to bring down one of the tapirs that had, up until this moment, lived peacefully among the apes in an idyllic, Garden-of-Eden symbiosis. Suddenly, we are back at the watering hole, more of a mud puddle really, and the ape that invented the club is at the head of his troupe, all of whom are armed with their own bone clubs. The larger, stronger apes are still there, furious at the reappearance of the weaker group. They attack, using all the usual monkey strategies for waging war: shrieks, baring of teeth, pounding of chests and quick feints, during which the individual who’d invented the bone club stands upright—more like a man than an ape—and when the leader of the other pack rushes at him on all fours, he uses his club to bash in this ape’s brains, and we can’t help but be struck by how the tool has made the man. No matter what Benjamin Franklin says about Man being the tool-making animal, it’s the tool—the club—that made this ape stand upright: it’s impossible to swing a club when walking on all fours; from a hunched-over, ape-like position, you can’t get the leverage needed to swing a tool to chop wood, hit a golf ball, win wars, and so on.Source: Abstract by the Author

The digital age has had a profound impact on literary culture, with new technologies opening up opportunities for new forms of literary art from hyperfiction to multi-media poetry and narrative-driven games. Bringing together leading scholars and artists from across the world, The Bloomsbury Handbook of Electronic Literature is the first authoritative reference handbook to the field.Crossing disciplinary boundaries, this book explores the foundational theories of the field, contemporary artistic practices, debates and controversies surrounding such key concepts as canonicity, world systems, narrative and the digital humanities, and historical developments and new media contexts of contemporary electronic literature. Including guides to major publications in the field, The Bloomsbury Handbook of Electronic Literature is an essential resource for scholars of contemporary culture in the digital era.

(Source: Publisher's description)