In an increasingly monolingual, globalized world, the second volume of theElectronic Literature Collection may just offer a map of the territory. The question the reviewer, John Zuern, poses is how do we navigate this terrain going forward?
(Source: ebr.)
Whereas the first volume had a necessarily retrospective emphasis, however, tasked as it was with defining a field and showing where electronic literature has come from, Volume 2 seems more intent on showing us where electronic literature is now - and perhaps even hinting at where it, along with its institutional and critical support systems, ought to be going.
Internationalization is clearly on the editorial agenda; the collection reinforces the drive to represent electronic literature as a world-wide phenomenon...
[W]e should think more about electronic literature's engagements (and complicities) with monolingualism and with the operations of global capitalism not only out of a high-minded sense of ideological duty, but because the insights we derive will help us argue for the field's contribution, indeed its indispensability, to a polyvocal discourse (nurtured in part, but not exclusively, in universities) that is responsive to innovations in communication technology and, even more important, responsible for cultivating a critical, interpretive orientation toward those emerging modalities of always-located, always-embodied human-human, human-machine, and human-world-system interaction.