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1. On Nationalizing a Transnational Literature: A Case Study on Examining J. R. Carpenter’s Work Within a Canadian Context

   In our contemporary, increasingly transnational world, national literatures may seem increasingly arbitrary—even more so in the context of electronic literature, whose barriers of circulation tend to be marked by transnational, rather than national, groupings based on, for example, language or access to certain technologies. In contrast to the frequently (hyper-)nationalized literatures of mainstream literary study, electronic literature is often framed as an international or transnational literature. There are very good reasons for this: for example, the medium of electronic literature naturally lends itself to transnational dissemination and readership through the global reach of the internet. However, this transnational approach, which frequently exhibits an unacknowledged bias towards works produced in the US, also frequently ignores the ways in which an understanding of national contexts may enrich the understanding of a work.

   Vian Rasheed - 12.11.2019 - 01:36

2. Electronic Literature, or Whatever It’s Called Now: the Archive and the Field

   The umbrella term ‘electronic literature’ arches broadly over a multitude of digital art forms, so long as they satisfy the criteria ‘electronic’, and ‘literature’. However, it is this paper’s primary contention that the extent of the term’s coverage is delimited by whatever has already been archived. Understandings of what constitute ‘literature’ and the ‘literary’ are manifold and include concepts of the letterary (also as in ‘belles lettres’), the poetic, the lyrical – but also, the canonical, and the institutional. This paper will argue that that which can now be pointed to by literary and digital humanities scholars, and called ‘electronic literature’, is in large part only recognisable because archivisation has been used in its regard as an instrument for institutionalisation and canon-creation. This body of work is also only findable because archivisation has preserved it, faced as it is with the constant threats of platform erosion, and obsolescence sooner rather than later. Archivisation is therefore both a problem of media, and a problem of selection.

   Vian Rasheed - 12.11.2019 - 03:35

3. Revisting Califia: “Here the Path triverages”

   This paper is not a reappraisal of Califia, as it needs no reappraisal in terms of its value to electronic literature, but a re-reading of what could be termed its hidden critical apparatus. While not wrongly referred to as “hypertext narrative,” this general category obscures a number of crucial structural and theoretical distinctions that suggest Califia rests on, and can offer, a different and powerful critical idiom of its own that has only recently found more theoretical expression as technology has advanced. Roughly contemporary (Luesebrink began Califia in 1995, when Patchwork Girl was published, and published it in 2000) and both on Eastgate, Califia remains in a relatively peripheral position in comparison, and not because Patchwork Girl appeared first. As many articles written about Patchwork will attest, PWG is and was more immediately accessible to the academic community via its attachment to several theoretical narratives around intertextuality, strategies of resistance, and a straightforward use of hypertext as structure and theme (“patching” and linking, e.g.

   Vian Rasheed - 14.11.2019 - 01:21

4. Two New Perspectives on Electronic Literature: Hybrid Writing Forms and Lexical Automata

   To date, all formal, technical, and typological analyses of electronic literature (and poetry) that I am aware of have approached the domain from both obvious angles: theory-led and from-the-text. The former has yielded traditional literary analyses such as (Aarseth 1997) and (Hayles 2007) while the latter more recently has yielded analyses such as (Di Rosario 2011) and (O’Sullivan 2016). Taking our cue from informatics we could if we so wished analyse works of electronic literature using the theoretical foundation of computer science: finite automata. What is being suggested here is not the theoretical analysis of the electronic arts through the lens of Turing Machines or alternately the lambda calculus/type theory. Rather, what is being suggested is replacing the symbol with the lexeme thus alighting on the idea of lexical automata. Semiotically speaking, finite automata operate on sets of unrestricted symbols whereas surely it must be agreed that literary works are lexically constrained therefore electronic literary works must be in the final analysis characterised by lexical automata.

   Vian Rasheed - 18.11.2019 - 01:46

5. Creative Writing on the Wall: Literary Practices on Facebook

   Leonardo Flores has identified the latest trend in electronic literature, which he calls its ‘third generation’, as one that happens on social media, using and/or abusing, hijacking the affordances of popular platforms such as Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, Snapchat, and so on. Much has been written about various aspects and genres of twitterature; I have myself presented ‘video writing’ on YouTube at the 2017 ELO, and examined digital authors’ attitudes towards Facebook as a space for communication elsewhere. I now propose to look at a different use of Facebook as a literary space in which creative writing practices emerge that would not exist without this platform. Focusing again on French and Francophone authors, often (yet) unpublished in print, this paper will explore a range of modes of, and approaches to, writing on the Facebook wall, including the form, poetics, rhythms of publication, and motivations, both by individual authors and in the case of a collective project, drawing on the work of a handful of authors.

   Vian Rasheed - 18.11.2019 - 16:01