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1. Why Digital Literature Has Always Been “Beyond the Screen”

   Andrew Michael Roberts demonstrates that digital literature has always been beyond the screen. In many of the practices and framing ideas of electronic literature, he identifies recurrences of key conceptions of modernism and postmodernism such as literalization, enactment, difference, movement, etc. Nonetheless, as he argues, literature is embracing new forms of expression influenced by the evolving mediatechnological possibilities and the increased involvement of the recipient’s whole body.

   (Source: Beyond the Screen, introduction by Jörgen Schäfer and Peter Gendolla)

   Scott Rettberg - 23.05.2011 - 13:02

2. Growing Intimate With Monsters: Shelley Jackson’s Patchwork Girl and the Gothic Nature of Hypertext

   Described by Robert Coover as “perhaps the true paradigmatic work” of the “golden age” of hypertext literature, Shelley Jackson’s Patchwork Girl (1995) provides not only a rewriting of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818), but an opportunity to consider the ways in which the gothic as a genre serves to problematize the somatic dimension of our writing technologies. In its capacity to touch the reader directly, at the level of the nerves, tissues, and fibres of the body, Patchwork Girl recalls the debates concerning the affective force of the gothic novel, and, in particular, the threat it was thought to pose for women readers. The gothic, in this sense, emerges as the deep and unsettling recognition that the technological is the formative ground of subjectivity, the very condition of our becoming. What Jackson calls “the banished body,” the monstrous materiality of subjectivity, haunts not only the eighteenth-century faith in the powers of rational powers of intellection, but our own post-human dreams of transcendence.

   Jill Walker Rettberg - 06.07.2013 - 09:27

3. Approaching the Real: Materiality in Digital Literature

   Digital literature foregrounds its own medium, and it foregrounds the graphic, material aspects of language. Experiments with the new medium and with the form of language are generally presented and interpreted within a framework of the historical avant-garde or the neo-avantgarde. This paper aims to take a new perspective on the emerging digital materiality of language.
   The analysis of the work of work that use digitalized handwriting or graffiti-like drawing (for example in Jason Nelson, the digital artist of hybrid works between games, literature and video) leads to the conclusion that the effect of this materiality is an ambivalent relation to affect, reality and the body.
   In other words: an ‘absent presence’ is foregrounded. The paradoxical and spectral merging of presence and absence makes these forms of digital literature an expression of a specifically late postmodernist stance towards representation of the ‘real’. Complicity with the media-culture goes hand in hand with an ironic approach of the mediatedness of the world and the body.

   Jill Walker Rettberg - 25.09.2013 - 13:07