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Early Electronic Literature in the Romantic Tradition
In searching for literary models for digital writing, current scholarship will often suggest James Joyce, yet pioneering writers working directly indigital forms looked repeatedly instead to British Romantic authors. This dissertation examines the early history of electronic literature, showing the significance of a Romantic tradition with which a selection of digital authors self-consciously identified themselves and their goals. Electronic literature is an emerging genre of literary works which are designed to be read on a computer, and by focusing on the pre-Web 2.0 era, my project looks specifically to the largely text-based sub-genres of interactive fiction and hypertext fiction, non-linear works which respectively enable progression through text inputs from users or clicking hyperlinks. Though many major scholars of digital humanities are Romanticists by training, the critical history of electronic literature focuses heavily on the genre’s modernist and postmodernist contexts.
Jill Walker Rettberg - 15.09.2020 - 15:15
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Digital Literary Arts - Scandinavian E-Texts: Criticism, Theory, and Practice
Electronic literature (e-lit) constitutes one of the most innovative and exciting literary forms occurring today; it is the unique child of this new technological age. Scandinavian e-lit is no exception, yet it has frequently been overlooked by literary academics in both the United States and Scandinavia. This dissertation investigates how Scandinavian e-lit engages with printed Scandinavian literature, and how critical analysis of Scandinavian literature can benefit from an understanding of e-lit. In this dissertation I argue that, far from relegation to the outer margins of Scandinavian literary research and studies, Scandinavian e-lit, and scholarship on such works, ought to occupy a central position in the field, alongside print-based counterparts. Such a shift in focus would create a new vantage point from which Scandinavianists could analyze canonical and contemporary works of print-based Scandinavian literature.
Anika Carlotta Stoll - 16.09.2020 - 10:50
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Experimental Poetics of the Asian Diaspora: Readings in Meatspace and Cyberspace
Since the 1980s, experimental poets of Asian descent writing in English around the world have created works informed by both their experiences of being in the Asian diaspora and their subjectivities in the age of advancing computing technologies. Studies of these works have been scarce and few have put them all together in order to make an argument about how to read them in connection with each other. The aim of this dissertation is to make a case for what I call the diasporic reading framework, and to argue that this way of reading fills in crucial gaps in our understandings of experimental Asian poetry.
Jill Walker Rettberg - 16.09.2020 - 10:58
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"Literature," Progress, and Monsters: What is Electronic Literature?
Jacques Derrida famously asserts, “The future can only be anticipated in the form of an absolute danger. It is that which breaks absolutely with constituted normality” (Of Grammatology 5). When writing of the ‘future’ here, Derrida points to a way of thinking “beyond the closure of knowledge,” which is to say an absolute danger inasmuch as it betrays all that is by welcoming an unknown and as yet unthought is not. N. Katherine Hayles proclaims electronic literature the future of literature on the strength of its capacity to keep pace with a ‘new’ digital normality, to anchor a new structural center for 21st century literature and safeguard against an otherwise imposing and dangerous future for study in the humanities—a very different ‘danger’ than one to which Derrida alludes.
Cecilie Klingenberg - 16.09.2020 - 11:07
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The story, the touchscreen and the child: how narrative apps tell stories
Digital children’s literature is a relatively recently established field of research that has been seeking for its theoretical base and defining its position and scope. Its major attention so far has been on the narrative app, a new form of children’s literature displayed on a touchscreen computational device.
The narrative app came into being around 2010, and immediately attracted the attention of the academics. So far, various studies have been conducted to explore its educational potential, but very few have investigated the app for what it is in its own right. To bridge the gap, this study has explored the nature of the narrative app and the essential principles of its narrative strategies.
Iben Andreas Christensen - 16.09.2020 - 11:22
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The broken poem: Ephemerality, glitch and de-performance in digital (and non-digital) poetry
The Broken Poem: Ephemerality, Glitch, and De-Performance in Digital (and Non-Digital) Poetry explores a few ways in which digital poetry, poetry that is written in programmable media and is intended to be read on computers or other digital devices, is acting to tactically resist various forms of oppression through what I am calling “breakage.” Breakage is, in this sense, an error or disruption in a perceived continuity. For example, I look at digital poems that take advantage of the fact that, because of software or hardware upgrades, they have a limited functional life. The poets’ embrace of their poems’ ephemerality actively resists market forces, cultural or professional demands on the poet to participate in processes of canonization, and the like. I also explore the idea of “glitching poetic language,” in which existing texts are digitally manipulated, digitally “broken” through a process in which the poet provokes errors. This is a remix strategy with aleatoric results that shifts the reader’s focus from the referential elements of the text, or the fragments of text, to an error, a break.
Åse Marie Våge Beheim - 16.09.2020 - 11:23
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Changeful Tales: Design-Driven Approaches Toward More Expressive Storygames
Stories in released games are still based largely on static and predetermined structures, despite decades of academic work to make them more dynamic. Making game narratives more playable is an important step in the evolution of games and playable media as culturally relevant art forms. In the same way interactive systems help students learn about complicated subjects like physics in a more intuitive and immediate way than static texts, more dynamic interactive stories open up new ways of understanding people and situations. Such dreams remain mostly unrealized in released and playable games.
Mads Bratten Myking - 16.09.2020 - 11:37
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/anode a/node an/ode: Poems and an Essay on Teaching Digital Creative Writing
This dissertation is part critical essay and part poetry collection. The critical essay, “Flipping the Script: On the Pedagogical Relevance of Teaching Digital Creative Writing,” examines the benefits of digital creative writing, i.e. text-based, literary work that requires digital technology at every stage of existence, by organizing those benefits into five categories, or nodes: poiesis, literacy, identification, authority, and cognition. Then, it argues that digital creative writing, like print creative writing, reinforces and extends the goal of liberal education, i.e. to promote creative, critical, and conscientious citizens. As students read, or interact with, and construct their own digital literary objects, they simultaneously learn to read, interact with, and construct their various selves and knowledge. As for the poems in the collection, they act, in Pound’s words, as “radiant node[s] . . .
Sebastian Soleng Borge - 16.09.2020 - 11:48
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Generating Narrative in an Interactive Fiction Game
This thesis explores a niche field of Computer Science called Interactive Fiction, a field that utilizes the conventions of a regular story to offer multiple variations on how the story plays out. Our goal is to explore the possibility of developing a game that can generate a story file during game play that not only reads like a short story but reflects the events that transpire during a given game play. During development, we have determined that keeping track of various "states", we can simulate a narrative based on actions that transpire in the game.
We developed the game using a language called Inform 7. Inform 7 is a language developed for Interactive Fiction. It contains classes with functionality similar to real-life objects from a narrative stand-point and provides a system of rules that can be edited to simulate real-life actions and events. The language also bases its syntax on English and is thus easy to read and understand.
Martin Li - 16.09.2020 - 14:14
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Curating Simulated Storyworlds
There is a peculiar method in the area of procedural narrative called emergent narrative: instead of automatically inventing stories or deploying authored narrative content, a system simulates a storyworld out of which narrative may emerge from the happenstance of character activity in that world. It is the approach taken by some of the most successful works in the history of computational media (The Sims, Dwarf Fortress), but curiously also some of its most famous failures (Sheldon Klein's automatic novel writer, Tale-Spin). How has this been the case? To understand the successes, we might ask this essential question: what is the pleasure of emergent narrative? I contend that the form works more like nonfiction than fiction—emergent stories actually happen—and this produces a peculiar aesthetics that undergirds the appeal of its successful works. What then is the pain of emergent narrative? There is a ubiquitous tendency to misconstrue the raw transpiring of a simulation (or a trace of that unfolding) as being a narrative artifact, but such material will almost always lack story structure.
Martin Li - 16.09.2020 - 14:43
