distribution

The question of what are the aesthetic- politics of electronic literature in Latin America, constitutes the point of departure of this research. In this paper I aim to discuss about this issue regarding the electronic novel “Tierra de extracción” from Doménico Chiappe and Andreas Meier. Using macromedia director, this polyphonic novel was presented to the public for the first time in 2000 and it is available on internet since 2007. It was included in the 2010 second volume of electronic literature presented by the Electronic Literature Organization, in the category of multilingual or non-English narratives. The analysis considers two dimensions, the modes of production of electronic texts and its forms of reception. The first dimension — production— is related to the decisions of the authors about aesthetics, levels of interaction/participation of the readers and technologies used to produce the texts. The second dimension — reception — refers to two “sub-dimensions”. The first one is the creation of alternative ways of distribution/circulation of the texts (mainly internet). The second is related to changes on reading behavior and the development of creative communities (or collective-interpretative intelligences), which are directly related to a conception of the relation with technology contained in posthumanist theories. Terry Eagleton poses that modern literature has a contradictory function. On one side, literature cannot be detached from the ideological forms belonging to the modern society of classes. Thus, literature reflects the context where it is produced and, to some extent, it reproduces that context. On the other side, literature creates spaces that allow us to think in alternatives and transgressions to the dominant contexts we are living in. The ways electronic texts in Latin America are developed reflect Terry Eagleton’s proposals. In summary, from the analysis of Chiappe and Meier’s electronic novel we propose a definition of a mode of literary production characterized by the uses of the new digital technologies that derived into practices of distribution and reception, related to forms of appropriation of these technologies, which are creating cultural meanings and social relationships in the context of informational capitalism.

The e-book has been launched several times during the last decades and the book’s demise has often been predicted. Furthermore networked and electronic literature has already established a long history. However, currently we witness several interesting artistic and literary experiments exploring the current changes in literary culture – including the media changes brought about by the current popular break-through of the e-book and the changes in book trading such as represented by e.g. Amazon’s Kindle and Apple’s iBooks – changes that have been described with the concept of controlled consumption (Striphas, 2011, Andersen & Pold, 2012). In our paper we want to focus on how artistic, e-literary experiments explore this new literary culture through formal experiments with expanded books and/or artistic experiments with the post-print literary economy. Examples of the first are Konrad Korabiewski and Litten’s multimedia art book Affected as Only a Human Can Be (Danish version, 2010, English version forthcoming) and our own collaborative installation Coincidentally the Screen has turned to Ink (presented at the Remediating the Social conference, Edinburgh 2012). Examples of the second are Ubermorgen’s The Project Formerly Known as Kindle Forkbomb which will be released in January 2013 and is an intervention into the Amazon Kindle book production and distribution platform with a new form of literature generated from YouTube comments. The paper will discuss how such projects explore how literature currently becomes part of a post-capitalistic production process through controlled consumption platforms. If the printing press was the first conveyor belt and thus an integral part of developing industrial capitalism (such as famously argued by Elizabeth Eisenstein and Walter J. Ong), then this paper will aim to sketch out how contemporary literary technologies is integral to develop and reflect critically on post- or semio-capitalism, and furthermore we will discuss how literature functions in a post-industrial software culture such as the one presented by Apple, Amazon and Google.

301. Reconfiguring Publishing

Friday, 6 January, 1:45-3:00 p.m., Grand A Sheraton

An Electronic Roundtable Exhibiting the Future(s) of Publishing

Presiding: Carolyn Guertin, Univ. of Texas, Arlington; William Thompson, Western Illinois Univ.

This session intends not to bury publishing but to raise awareness of its transformations and continuities as it reconfigures itself. New platforms are causing publishers to return to their roots as booksellers while booksellers are once again becoming publishers. Open-access models of publishing are creating new models for content creation and distribution as small print-focused presses are experiencing a renaissance. Come see!

(Source: MLA 2012 Program Abstracts) 

Two Electronic Literature Organization Board Members participated. Caroyn Guertin was one of two presiders, and Rita Rayley presented the Electronic Literature Collection, Volume Two, which she co-edited.

A preliminary presentation of Publishing E-Lit in Europe,  a report detailing efforts to systematically survey and analyze the publication of electronic literature within Europe. Due to the immensity of their investigation and the limitations on what two researchers could achieve in three months' time, the authors emphasized that their report was a work in progress: at this point, they had been able to collect primary data about the publications, portals, collections, contests and other forums that supported the creation and distribution of electronic literature in Europe. The revised version of the report would feature more content analysis - of the type of material published and trends that distinguished various e-lit communities writing within specific linguistic and cultural traditions.