A Short History of Electronic Literature and Communities in the Nordic Countries

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Abstract (in English): 

While literary hypertexts and the research field were still in an early stage, Nordic researchers laid their eyes on the literary potential of hypertext technologies. Some Nordic researchers (e.g. Aarseth 1994; Koskimaa 1994; Liestøl 1994), I would claim (perhaps in a moment of patriotism), contributed significantly to a research field still in its infancy. Still, after almost twenty years, it is hard to discover a specifically Nordic community for electronic literature. Those scholars conducting research on electronic literature in the Nordic countries are usually associates of international communities like the Electronic Literature Organization, Digital Fiction International Network and Electronic Literature as a Model of Creativity and Innovation in Practice. Similar communities in the Nordic countries are not that easy to spot, but we might say that they exist, although as rather small-scale projects and communities. This does however not imply that they are insignificant. On the contrary, as this article will show, the communities have been important for distributing and archiving electronic literature in the Nordic countries, for making works available to a broad audience, and for improving the conditions for writing electronic literature in a Nordic language.

(Source: Author's abstract)

Critical writing referenced:

Title Author Year
Nonlinearity and Literary Theory Espen Aarseth 1994
Cybertext: Perspectives on Ergodic Literature Espen Aarseth 1997
Born Digital: Writing Poetry in the Age of New Media Maria Engberg 2007
Hyperworks: On Digital Literature and Computer Games Anna Gunder 2004
Electronic Literature: New Horizons for the Literary N. Katherine Hayles 2010
Canonizing Hypertext: Explorations and Constructions Astrid Ensslin 2007
Cybertext Theory: What an English Professor Should Know Before Trying Markku Eskelinen 2001
Cybertext Poetics: The Critical Landscape of New Media Literary Theory Markku Eskelinen 2012
Towards a Poetics of Virtual Worlds. Multiuser Textuality and the Emergence of Story Lisbeth Klastrup 2004
Digital Literature: From Text to Hypertext and Beyond Raine Koskimaa 2000
Wittgenstein, Genette, and the Reader's Narrative in Hypertext Gunnar Liestøl 1994
Textopia: Experiments with Locative Literature Anders Sundnes Løvlie 2010
New narrative pleasures? A cognitive-phenomenological study of the experience of reading digital narrative fictions Anne Mangen 2006
Electronic Poetry: Understanding Poetry in the Digital Environment Giovanna Di Rosario 2011
Piecing Together and Tearing Apart: Finding the Story in afternoon Jill Walker Rettberg 1999
Fiction and Interaction: How Clicking a Mouse Can Make You Part of a Fictional World Jill Walker Rettberg 2003
Tekstspill i hypertekst. Koherensopplevelse og sjangergjenkjennelse i lesing av multimodale hyperfiksjoner Hans Kristian Rustad 2008
The Lyrical Quality of Links Susana Pajares Tosca 1999
A Pragmatics of Links Susana Pajares Tosca 2000

Publishers referenced:

Title Location
Cybertext Yearbook
University of Jyväskylä
Seminaarinkatu 30
40100 Jyväskylä
Finland
FI

Databases/Archives referenced:

Title Organization responsible
ELINOR: Electronic Literature in the Nordic Region University of Bergen, Department of Humanistic Informatics

Research Collection that references this Critical Writing:

Multimedia: 

15662502

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Record posted by: 
Eric Dean Rasmussen