Relocating the Literary: In Networks, Knowledge Bases, Global Systems, Material and Mental Environments

In two essays, “Toward a Semantic Literary Web” (2006, ONLINE at http://eliterature.org/pad/slw.html) and “Electronic Literature as World Literature” (2010, Poetics Today), I set out a project for identifying literary qualities and marking literature’s present transformations within new media. The idea in these essays was to discern aesthetic and communicative qualities that I felt could be carried over to the present (e.g., Goethe’s and Marx’s unrealized call for the formation of a world literature “transcending national limits”), and those that could easily go missing (e.g., the materially bounded object whose aesthetic can be recognized and repeated by a generation of authors in conversation with one another).

Trying to hold onto both of these desirable literary qualities, I turn my attention in the present talk to the one place where such conversations are now being staged – not in scholarly journals or social media (online or in print) but rather, in databases. Specifically, I consider the open source, open access literary database. I settle on database construction as a necessary scholarly and technical complement to the creation of works, not for wholly archival purposes, but as a condition or destination for present creativity. The electronic database, by granting authors (and their critics) direct access to present discourse networks, opens possibilities that appear unique to literary writing in new media.

One point of reference in my talk will be the Electronic Literature Organization’s  Electronic Literature Directory (ELD version 2.0). The ELMCIP Knowledge Base, developed by Scott Rettberg in Norway, Simon Biggs in Scotland, and colleagues throughout Scandinavia, The U.S., and Europe, offers another, complementary point of entry. Brief descriptions of other literary archives, developed or in development in Montreal, Providence, Siegen, Sydney, and elsewhere, will indicate how interoperability can work at the level of databases, and how literary collaboration might at last begin to work across disciplines and institutions. I argue that the current, wide-ranging database construction (already a trans-disciplinary collaboration among scholars and programmers), is the necessary precondition to the emergence of the electronic ‘world literature’ that I described some years previously.

(Source: Author's abstract for HASTAC 2013)