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1. The Absence and Potential of Electronic Literature

   There is no understanding of electronic literature. No theory exists to analyze literary texts and signs on the computer and the network. How does the digital inscription become literary? Don’t get me wrong: there are admirable descriptive formalisms and historical genealogies of electronic literature. All these function as criticism should, but offer nothing of electronic literature as such. Existing criticism begins from the presumption that “there is” electronic literature and proceeds to describe the various works in existence (for example, in Electronic Literature Hayles explicitly refuses to theorize the subject of her book). The results are productive for maintaining the existing distribution of texts and readings in a field of literary and non-literary texts. My paper is part of a project refusing the given-ness of these forms and histories. The theory of “electronic literature” is a failure, and I insist on the achievement of this failure. The larger project is a technical and philosophical argument for the absence and potential of electronic literature. For purposes of this paper, I draw my examples from the ELC Volume 2.

   Alvaro Seica - 04.10.2013 - 12:08