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1. Is Life Like a Book or a Smart Phone? Why Form in Fiction Matters

   Rob Wittig's 17 minute video lecture, recorded for a TEDx event at the University of Minnesota / Duluth, lays out some ideas about connections between the design of printed books and a particular idea of life in contemporary culture, in contrast to a model of life based on postmodern ideas of identity. He also references the context of literary history in considering the forms of literature that might be suited to a culture of multitasking and smart phones, at one point comparing Don Quixote to a contemporary gadget-obsessed digital native. The talk and accompanying slideshow provide a useful introduction to some important questions about the relationship between contemporary technologies and literary form.

   Scott Rettberg - 08.03.2011 - 21:37

2. Reclaiming the 'Golden Age': The Second Person in Digital Fiction

   Since the demise of the 'Golden Age' of literary hypertext (Coover 1999) and the theoretical debates surrounding online and offline electronic literature that followed in its wake, the study of digital fiction in particular has undergone a significant paradigm shift. Recent research has moved from a 'first-wave' of pure theoretical debate to a 'second-wave' of close stylistic and semiotic analysis. While the theoretical intricacies of second-wave digital fiction theory have been well debated (e.g. Ciccoricco 2007, Ensslin 2007, Ensslin and Bell 2007, Bell 2010 forthcoming), the discipline and practice of close-reading digital fiction require a more systematic engagement and understanding than offered by previous scholarship.

   Audun Andreassen - 20.03.2013 - 10:12

3. Electronic Literature as a Means to Overcome the Supremacy of the Author Function

   In his seminal essay “What Is an Author?” Michel Foucault maintains that we can only accept literary discourses if they carry an author’s name. Every text of poetry or fiction is obliged to state its author, and if, by accident or design, the text is presented anonymously, we can only accept this as a puzzle to be solved, or, one could add, as an exceptional experiment about authorship that is verifying the rule. This was in 1969. In the meantime, a profound change of all forms of social interaction has been taking place. Amongst them are works of electronic literature that use the computer in an aesthetic way to create combinatory, interactive, intermedial and performative art. One could argue, of course, that electronic literature as new media art often only is a proof of a concept addressed to the few tech-savvy select. However, these purportedly avant-garde pieces break the ground for developments that might happen barely noticed, and by this serve an important political, ideological, aesthetic and commercial purpose. Amongst these developments is a change of the seemingly irrevocable rule of the author in literary discourses.

   Hannah Ackermans - 16.11.2015 - 10:07