Salon 5: June 12, 2020: E-Lit In the Wild

Rather than taking a lit-crit approach to a single piece of e-literature, we used this session to collect and discuss “e-lit in the wild”: works that we have found that often don’t have ties to the academic or artistic circles we traditionally look to for electronic literature. We created a Google Doc list of works we have come across that make interesting artistic and narrative uses of digital spaces, including customer reviews of products, interactive web comics, online bulletin boards, Reddit users, indie games and more.

We began with Lyle discussing the items on the list so far, and why, to her, they qualified as “e-lit”. The discussion quickly branched into topics such as: defining e-lit, finding e-lit, the evanescence of art, the use of “1st/2nd/3rd generation e-lit” as classification, and what the digital medium means for linguistic arts. We found common ground in the notion that some work cannot be separated from its medium of origin without loss of coherence, and that various media shape their texts in a myriad of meaningful ways.