Offshore of Writing: E-literature and the Island

The broad aim of this paper is to contribute to a discussion on some aspects of the relationship between e-literature, spatiality and site-specificity. The context for this particular investigation is a major initiative for the establishment and development of an Academy of New Media and Digital Arts (see below) on the Italian island of Procida, one of the three islands that sit in the Bay of Naples. Within this initiative, e-literature as both practice and community plays a central role.

One question which inevitable arises from the Procida project concerns the discrepancy between the geographical situatedness of the Academy on the one hand, and the dispersed nature of networked e-lit communities and of e-literature as a practice on the other. How will the relationship between site and network play out?

The paper itself is designed to emphasise the spatiality of e-texts, in contrast to the more temporally structured nature of page-based narrative. It comprises a pattern of “insular” sections that are linked to each other, although this pattern is one among many possible patterns. In other words the “textual islands” are both isolated and inter-located at the same time.

(Source: Authors' abstract)