A plenary presentation for the biennial conference of the Electronic Literature Organization focused on the circumstances of the founding of the organization and on the work of novelist Robert Coover on the occasion of his retirement from teaching, delivered in a scripted and parodic style appropriate to the subject. Co-presented with Rob Wittig.
A noted literary scholar, Mark McGurl, has dubbed the postwar period in American literary history “The Program Era.” This phrase alludes to the fact that after World-War II most American literary production occurred in and around creative writing programs. Today, electronic literature continues the trend of literature’s institutionalization within higher education systems. E-lit literalizes the concept of “program” fiction inasmuch as its authors must also be adept at coding and programming. Taking the systematic coupling of literary art and higher-educational institutions as a necessary given, what can we—i.e. the authors, artists, critics, coders, scholars, students, writers and readers thinking at the interface of these social systems—do to create environments in which e-lit can flourish?
One answer is to make these environments networked and open-access, and in so doing promote a model of sharing knowledge, the academic gift economy, that bypasses conservative paternalism and neoliberal corporatization, which undermine higher education and literary culture by emphasizing training elites and making profits. To actualize the potential of open-access publishing for e-lit, however, requires a genuine exchange of knowledge: new media writers need to follow academic debates, and literary scholars and critics need to keep up with aesthetic and technoscientific developments.
In my talk, I will discuss a few ways that the Electronic Book Review’s (ebr) system of peer-to-peer review provides a networked publishing environment for conducting and archiving these critical exchanges. Over time, and provided writers participate in this gift economy, such collaborative exchanges will help to define e-lit and, more broadly, the contemporary literary field in what could be The Programming Era. In presenting ebr’s peer-to-peer review system, I intend to explain how it should work in theory and to solicit advice from the audience on ways it might be improved.
(Source: author's abstract)
The Electronic Literature Organization was founded as a literary nonprofit organization in 1999 after the Technology Platforms for 21st Century Literature conference at Brown University. Today, the ELO is one of the most active organizations in the field, central to the practice of literature in the United States and its establishment as an academic discipline. This presentation will briefly outline the history of the organization, the ways that its mission, profile, and focus of has evolved and changed over its first decade, and offer some tentative insights into the ways that an institutionally structured community can facilitate network-mediated art practice.
Digital media is increasingly finding its way into the discussions of the humanities classroom. But while we have a number of grand theoretical texts about digital literature we as yet have little in the way of resources for discussing the down-to-earth practices of research, teaching, and curriculum necessary for this work to mature. The book Reading Moving Letters, edited by Roberto Simanowski, Jörgen Schäfer and Peter Gendolla, addresses this need and provides examinations by nine scholars and teachers from different national academic backgrounds. While the first section of the book provides definitions of digital literature as a discipline of scholarly treatment in the humanities, the second section asks how and why we should teach digital literature and conduct close readings in academia and discusses institutional considerations necessary to take into account when implementing digital literature into curricula. The following text is the introduction to section two.