media specific analysis

In this project review, I discuss the companion website criticalcodestudies.com in relation to Mark C. Marino’s book Critical Code Studies (2020). Over the past decades, companion websites have become a small but persistently growing genre in academia, with products ranging from paratextual records to publications in their own right. The Critical Code Studies companion website makes excellent use of content and design to make media-specific arguments that interrogate the research subject, foregrounding a method that oscillates between close reading and contextual reading as well as promotes personal and communal reading practices. The combination of book and companion website successfully makes intellectual interventions into the case studies but also into our conception of source code in general. I review how the companion website reflects, amplifies, and contradicts the arguments made in the book.

(Author abstract)

Leonardo Flores tells about his beginnings in the field of electronic literature and his current project on electronic poetry. He then makes an in-depth description of the paradigmatic change from printed literature to electronic literature with special attention on the expectations of readers who are new to new media works and the tradition, so to speak, of experimentalism in literature. With the same accuracy he ponders about the status of science of electronic literature and ends the interview with some considerations about the important issue of preservation.

While many critics have compared the current digital age in communications media with the print revolution that began in the 15th century, these discussions have focused primarily on the differences, as opposed to the similarities between the two moments in history (Bolter, Landow, Hayles). As an author and critic involved in exploring new approaches to digital fiction, I, too, am keenly aware of the distinct differences between the age of print and the current digital age. Nevertheless, I have also been struck by many similar concerns in the specific types of literary experimentation taking place in response to new authoring and publishing technologies today with those undertaken in the past in response to print technology. In this paper, I consider specific instances of experimentation that arose in response to print technology in works of fiction published in the eighteenth century (Richardson, Pope, Sterne) with literary experimentation in response to digital technologies (Moulthrop, Montfort/Strickland, Rodgers).

(Source: Author's abstract ELO 2013, http://conference.eliterature.org/critical-writing/beyond-binaries-cont…)

In this interview Dene Grigar tells about her approach to electronic literature in the early 1990s and about her work as curator for the exhibit "Electronic Literature and Its Emerging Forms" in 2015. She goes on describing some distinguishing features of electronic literature and explaining her 'conceptual shift' on regard to the way of working with computers. Finally she suggests some methods of analysis for the understanding of electronic literature for both academic scholars and mainstream audience.

N. Katherine Hayles's keynote address for the 2002 State of the Arts Symposium at UCLA. Hayles identifies two generations of electronic literature: mainly text-based works produces in Storyspace and Hypercard until about 1995-1997, and second-generation works, mainly authored in Director, Flash, Shockwave and XML in years after that. She identifies second-generation works as "fully multimedia" and notes a move "deeper into the machine." She then reads a number of second-generation works in the context of their computational specificity.

Publication note: Also published online in Culture Machine Vol. 5 (2003)