close-reading

My paper explores the genre of visual novels, a form of digital interactive fiction popularized in Japan. As very little academic work has been undertaken on visual novels thus far, I explore several different methods for analyzing them, and consider what other scholars may find useful and interesting about them in the future. One of the few detailed English-language essays on visual novels is Patrick W. Galbraith’s “Bishōjo Games: ‘Techno-Intimacy’ and the Virtually Human in Japan.” While Galbraith does make some insightful points about visual novels’ representations of romance and sexuality, he also misrepresents the medium as primarily a form of romance simulation for lonely heterosexual men. I challenge Galbraith’s assumptions through my first method of analysis: using a java program to distant-read the data aggregated by the website The Visual Novel Database. The results of my study demonstrate not only that visual novels encompass a variety of genres, but also that trends in recent releases point toward an increase in stories featuring female protagonists. Scholars interested in positive representation of women in digital interactive fiction may therefore find visual novels relevant to their work. I also consider the debate between narratology and ludology regarding analysis of video games, and explore how both approaches could be useful in the study of visual novels. I first close-read some scenes from the short visual novel Once on a Windswept Night, applying the narratological theories of interactive fiction scholars Daniel Punday, Veli-Matti Karhulahti, and Espen Aarseth. I argue that through unique strategies such as taking a minimalist approach to orienting spaces, using metanarrative to situate itself within a long history of interactive literature, and taking advantage of the medium’s conventions to subvert readers’ expectations, Once on a Windswept Night demonstrates the potential for visual novels to be narratologically complex and interesting. Finally, while the core component of visual novels is similar to hypertext stories and choose-your-own-adventure books, many also include elements of other video game genres. Visual novels which engage in this blurring of genres, such as Aviary Attorney, lend themselves to analysis from ludological perspectives as well. I compare Aviary Attorney’s gameplay elements to those that Noah Wardrip-Fruin analyzes in the role-playing game Knights of the Old Republic, considering how they can make the narrative more immersive, yet also open the door to flaws and inconsistencies in the story. I argue that games like Aviary Attorney, which integrate simulation elements into detailed and branching stories, could pave the way for new and exciting forms of game fiction in the future. I hope that my paper can provide a good introduction to some of the merits and values of visual novels as a subject of academic study. Exploring visual novels may expand the viewpoints of scholars of interactive fiction and video games, and in bringing more recognition to the medium, these scholars have the potential to help provide visual novel developers with the opportunities to try even more new and experimental methods of expressing their stories.

(Source: Author's description from ELO 2018 site: https://sites.grenadine.uqam.ca/sites/nt2/en/elo2018/schedule/1224/Ludo…)

This article examines an aesthetic experience associated with the digital, which is characterized by the ability of the reader to interact, participate, and manipulate literary works created in this format. First, a map of Chilean digital literature will be presented and then two aspects will be analyzed which allow a description of an aesthetic of the digital: hypertextuality and cultural hacking. As a result of this analysis, and considering that digital literature is that which is created to be read on the screen of an electronic device, two poems will be investigated: A veces cubierto por las aguas by Carlos Cociña and Clickable poem@s by Luis Correa-Díaz.These texts allow us to think about the status of literature and poetry in the digital era, linked with an aesthetic experience which emphasizes intervention and the wish to participate.

Posthumanism, according to Cary Wolfe, "names a historical moment in which the decentering of the human by its imbrication in technical, medical, informatic, and economic networks is increasingly impossible to ignore" (xv-xvi). This conference paper brings the framework of posthumanist philosophy to bear on the field of electronic literature, at a critical moment in time wherein our conception of the human, and of literature, are fundamentally questioned through digital technology. I argue that humanist philosophy is explicitly tied to the rise of print literature, via Elizabeth Eisenstein (1979), while posthumanism is linked with digital media (Wolfe 2010) and, by extension, electronic literature. Furthermore, posthumanism interrogates assumptions of autonomy and subjectivity inherited from humanism, and via cybernetics articulates an image of the human as another information-processing machine. Electronic literature's reliance and amalgamation of natural and artificial languages (most noticeable in “codework”) reflects the posthumanist critique of the supposed binaries between human and machine. To this end, my presentation provides close-readings of electronic literature in order to determine whether authors of electronic literature work with either a humanist or posthumanist understanding of human subjectivity and literature (which is often itself a framing device for subjectivity).

To adequately address this issue of writing and language in relation to Being, I turn to codework. This term originated with Alan Sondheim, and refers to work which feature a mixture of language and code, in what Katherine Hayles has deemed a ‘creole’ language. I will be providing a detailed reading Mez Breeze’s, _the data][h!][bleeding texts_ (2001), which even from the title suggests the incursion of programming language onto natural language. In order to explore the humanist or posthumanist lens offered by works of electronic literature, I turn to the work of Jason Nelson, Stephanie Strickland, and Steve Tomasula. The former is discussed as one of the most unique and prolific writers in e-lit, and the latter two are discussed for their unique position as working in both print and digital media.

Of course, I will also address the issue of codework as literary object. As John Cayley remarks in an essay on electronicbookreview, “the code is not the text (unless it is the text).” It is clear that codework is a term for literature which addresses code in some way, and Cayley suggests that most codework simply illustrates a potentially subversive act of transparency. Again, I explore codework under a posthumanist lens to interrogate how media technologies frame and construct our understanding of the human.

(Source: Author's Abstract)

A reading of These Waves of Girls.

Since the demise of the 'Golden Age' of literary hypertext (Coover 1999) and the theoretical debates surrounding online and offline electronic literature that followed in its wake, the study of digital fiction in particular has undergone a significant paradigm shift. Recent research has moved from a 'first-wave' of pure theoretical debate to a 'second-wave' of close stylistic and semiotic analysis. While the theoretical intricacies of second-wave digital fiction theory have been well debated (e.g. Ciccoricco 2007, Ensslin 2007, Ensslin and Bell 2007, Bell 2010 forthcoming), the discipline and practice of close-reading digital fiction require a more systematic engagement and understanding than offered by previous scholarship. With this in mind, the Digital Fiction International Network ('DFIN', funded by The Leverhulme Trust since January 2009) has been exploring new avenues of defining and implementing approaches to close-reading, with the tripartite trajectory of developing a range of tools and associated terminology for digital fiction analysis; of providing a body of analyses based on the close-reading of texts, which are substantiated by robust theoretical and terminological conclusions; and of fostering a collaborative network of academics working on inter-related projects.

In following this agenda, this paper offers a comparative approach to second person narration in two exemplary digital fictions: geniwate and Deena Larsen’s satirical flash fiction, The Princess Murderer (2003), and Jon Ingold's interactive fiction mystery, All Roads (2006 [2001]). We aim to explore the extent to which print-oriented narratological approaches to the textual 'You' (e.g. Herman 1994) apply to the texts under investigation and suggest theoretical tenets arising from their distinct (inter-)medial and ludic qualities (cf. Ryan 1999). Of particular interest will be the ways in which the reader and his/her role in the cybernetic feedback loop are constructed textually and interactionally.

(Source: Authors' abstract for ELO_AI)

This paper aims at analyzing the historical evolution of poetry experiments in Italian and Portuguese languages. Poetry has always been interested in experimenting with new ways of writing; however the computer and internet media make the experiments with the language a basic question. The first part of this paper will refer to a historical approach tracing the most important breakpoints in the poetry development in Italian and Portuguese languages during the last century. We will focus above all on Italian Futurism and visual poetry and we will connect Italian visual poetry tradition to Brazilian concrete poetry to identify the main characteristics and to define the links between these movements and the contemporaneous epoetry environment. In the second part some Italian Portuguese e-poetries will be presented and analyzed. A close-reading of some famous works will be proposed trying to identify the strategic elements which constitute the poetics of digital text - the infographic images, the poeticity of the elements, theirs [il]legibility, the pluri-signification of the relation image. The third part will allow us to observe if there are some distinctiveness in Italian and Portuguese works due to historical reasons and traditions.

(Source: Author's abstract for ELO_AI).

Literary gaming (Ensslin 2014) is situated at the interface between literary computer games and ludic digital literature. The conjunction of literary close-reading and gaming is inherently paradoxical because literature and computer games are two entirely different receptive, productive, aesthetic, phenomenological, social and discursive phenomena. Reading, according to Hayles (2007), requires deep attention, which allows subjects to focus on an artefact such as a print novel or digital fiction for an extended period of time without, however, losing a sense of the actual world surrounding them. Gameplay, on the other hand, typically involves hyperattention, which literally glues players to the screen, thereby creating "artificial" basic needs, such as the urge to finish a level or quest before being able to focus on any other activity. (Literary) art games tend to "détourn" commercial game aesthetics (Dragona 2010, Vaneigem 1967) to evoke a critical meta-stance in players towards the ludic and textual expectations created by mainstream game culture. This meta-stance may relate to the ways in which players willingly succumb to teleological trajectories such as functional killing and saving damsels-in-distress (Ensslin and Bell 2012). By the same token, literary game designers and digital writers explore creatively the question of whether hyper and deep attention are indeed compatible, thereby producing a variety of artefacts that inhabit various loci on the spectrum between ludic digital literature and literary computer game (Ensslin 2012). Focusing on the ludic, fictional, medial and linguistic metazones (Jaworski et al. 2004), this chapter offers a close "playing" of Jason Nelson's poetic platform game, Evidence of Everything Exploding (2009). Nelson's work sits near the middle of the ludic-literary spectrum. It literally 'toys' with the explosive potential inherent in the fusion of reading and playing, specifically in the highly polysemic and metalinguistic realm of poetry. Methodologically, an extended notion of functional ludo-narrativism (Ryan 2006: 203) will be employed to the analysis, with a view to examining how elements of game design, gameplay, textuality and poetic style concur to evoke distinctive receptive and interactive experiences. (Source: Author's abstract, 2012 ELO Conference site)