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1. Philosophical Labyrinths in Cybertexts

   Not only since Postmodernism have spatial dichotomies such as absence and presence, inside and outside played a major role in defining the human condition and the physical positioning of the subject within the world. With the emergence of phenomena like HTML and the World Wide Web authors and artists have found new tools to explore and express new ideas of the human condition in the late 20th and early 21st centuries. Hypertexts or, with Espen J. Aarseth, “cybertexts”, offer new ‘roads’ which need not be taken, hiding places or Dantesque places of beauty. The one is only a step away from the other; in which space the user finds himself depends on the ‘literary machine’ with its narrative strategies. Often compared to labyrinths, these virtual spaces recall an almost archetypal quality of the conditio humana: The choice of exploring life, and of finding enlightenment and defeating the mythical minotaur; yet with one significant difference, as it appears one cannot escape from the labyrinth. Heidegger’s “Dasein” as much as Derrida’s “différance” are key to understanding what this means. At the example of three texts, Michael Joyce’s afternoon, a story, Mark Z.

   Jill Walker Rettberg - 18.06.2012 - 10:53

2. Mapping out Spaces for E-Lit Criticism

   This paper explores the process of discovering works of elit by focusing on the role of the online literary journal. The heyday of Web 1.0, the late 1990s, gave birth to the first generation of electronic literature. To support this emergent art form, this period also delivered a multitude of online literary journals that showcased hypertexts, kinetic poetry, animations, and interactive fiction as well as scholarly articles, interviews with authors, book reviews, and critical discourse. But as the Web became a more graphic-friendly navigation space and debates about cybertext vs. hypertext took centerstage in critical forums, celebration of electronic literature in web-zines and journals seemed to dry up. In the first few years of the twenty-first century, most of the literary journals that had flourished in the late '90s had ceased operations. What are the spaces for electronic literature and its discovery in the 21st century? How do these spaces or lack of them map and remap the field of electronic literature and its criticism?

   Scott Rettberg - 09.01.2013 - 11:56

3. Literacy between book, page and screen – on Between Page and Screen by Amaranth Borsuk and Brad Bouse

   The aim of the speech will be to show that e-literature realizations not only could be a renovation of avant-garde or even earlier tradition, but also in many cases provoke the same kind of questions which were made by theoreticians of (e.g.) formalism or structuralism in relation to avant-garde or modern text. Looking at electronic texts we re-ask about a literacy of those works and have to renovate our conception of literary communication, re-thinking not only the category of the text (as Aarseth did), but also the character of signs and code used in this kind of communication.
   

   Jill Walker Rettberg - 23.08.2013 - 10:26

4. Shapeshifting texts: following the traces of narrative in digital fiction

   We have been referring to electronic literature as a corpus of texts with dynamic and
   multimodal features. A digital text can change during reading and assume the form of a
   collage work, a film or a game. Additionally, the text as a whole (Eskelinen, 2012),
   because of its own transient nature, might never be presented to the reader. The text
   can be played at such a pace as to be partly or completely ungraspable. Due to the range
   of forms assumed by the text, it might also be unable to return to an early state. This
   means that the reader might not be allowed to reread or replay the text in order to achieve
   a final or coherent version of it. This also means that there might be no original state to
   return to.
   Shapeshifting is the ability of a being to take the form of an object or of another being.
   This has been a common theme in folklore and mythology and it continues to be explored
   in games or in fantasy and science fiction films, as well as in literature. Since digital
   fiction is created through a computer and this tool can show emergent behavior, texts can
   

   Daniela Côrtes Maduro - 05.02.2015 - 14:48