Chris Messenger achieves a rare convergence of elite and popular cultural criticism by doing for The Godfather (and its spinoffs) what previous critics have done for Uncle Tom’s Cabin.
Salvatore Proietti straddles science and fiction to offer an interpretation of a McElroy Cyborg.
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)
In Stewart's presentation he will set out his theoretical understanding of computer-mediated textuality (an understanding that is derived from the dialogic philosophy of language described by Mikhail Bakhtin and others).
In particular, he will report on how his research has identified a number of different rhetorical practices used by contemporary author-participants of computer-mediated textual art that focus on making readers actively aware of their participation in the work. He has classified these forms of rhetoric in the following ways:- 1. Active Participation of the Reader-Participant through Selection; 2. Active Participation of the Reader-Participant through Contribution; and3. Participation of the Reader-Participant by their Presence;
Stewart will illustrate these three types of rhetoric, by drawing examples in the recent work of Simon Biggs, Talan Memmott, and Alan Sondheim, as well as from his own work 'gas' (developed at Textlab 2003).
He will conclude by noting that a dialogic understanding of computer-mediated textuality flags up the significant cultural value of these works.
To summarise, Stewart will first argue that these works are valuable because they encourage their reader-participant's to become aware of their contribution to the work being read. He will then argue that this participative aesthetic has wider cultural value because it encourages the reader-participant to become more aware of their participation in every aspect of their world.
(Source: Author's abstract, Incubation3 conference site, trAce archive)