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The Real Treasure of Califia in M. D. Coverley’s Novel "Califia"
M. D. Coverley’s Califia is an interactive, hypertext novel that experiments with multi-vocal storytelling. The first of two major novels by the artist, it was produced in 2000 on the Toolbook 2.0 platform and published by Eastgate Systems, Inc. for the Windows operating system on CD-ROM. It tells the story of three people whose lives, intertwined by various family connections and location, search for the fabled Treasure of Califia. A major theme driving the narrative is The American Dream, or rather the stuff such dreams the three main characters––Augusta Summerville, Kaye Beveridge, and Cal (Calvino) Lugo–think it should be made of rather than what it really ends up to be.
Dene Grigar - 30.08.2020 - 23:21
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The Persistence of Genius: The Case for Stuart Moulthrop's "Victory Garden"
In his essay, “The American Hypertext Novel, and Whatever Became of It?,” Scott Rettberg discusses the impact of hypertext fiction before the mainstreaming of the World Wide Web, arguing that the "link and node hypertext" approach represented by early stand alone software like Storyspace was “eclipsed . . . by a range of other digital narrative forms” (Rettberg, “The American Hypertext Novel”). His essay goes on to reference important examples of hypertext fiction––Michael Joyce’s afternoon, a story (featured in Chapter 1 of this book) as well as Shelley Jackson’s Patchwork Girl and Stuart Moulthrop’s Victory Garden. Of these, both Joyce’s and Jackson’s novels are still accessible to the reading public; Moulthrop’s is not. As a digital preservationist of interactive media whose mission it is to maintain public access to our literary and cultural heritage, the question this essay asks is, “Has the lack of accessibility to Moulthrop’s novel affected research about it?”
Dene Grigar - 30.08.2020 - 23:30
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Megan Heyward's "of day, of night": A Story of Wanderings
In of day, of night Megan Heyward’s voice fuses disparate scenes into a coherent story about a woman's wanderings, a search to regain her sense of self. For what are our dreams if not a series of journey through our past, present, and potential?
Dene Grigar - 30.08.2020 - 23:38
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Mark Bernstein's "Those Trojan Girls": Classical Storyspace Channels a Classic Story
Bernstein's revisioning of Storyspace in its 3rd version functions as a bridge between the previous hypertexts that Eastgate Systems, Inc. published and experimental interactive works readers encounter today on storytelling platforms like Twine or as apps on their phones. The result is that Those Trojan Girls remains constant in his approach to publishing “serious hypertext” embraced in the 1990s while at the same time contemporizes its aesthetic and functionality for readers today.
Dene Grigar - 30.08.2020 - 23:45
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A Toast to the Flash Generation
"A Toast to the Flash Generation" took place on New Year’s Eve Day to celebrate the genius of the Flash Generation. Over 20 artists of Flash narratives, poetry, and essays will read and performed their works throughout the day via Zoom.
Dene Grigar - 01.01.2021 - 22:33
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The Politics of Web Materiality: Making Electronic Literature in the Capitalocene
We are on the brink of planetary catastrophe. Environmental, political, health and humanitarian crises have infused the zeitgeist of the Anthropocene with a sense of urgency (Crutzen and Stoermer 2000). Human activity has been placed in opposition (or as an add-on) to Nature, participating in a dialectical discourse that, like the binaries of sexism, racism, or even Eurocentrism, points directly to the violence, inequality and oppression of the modern world (Moore 2016). As these relate to climate and political change, the Anthropocene argument presents the exploitation and accumulation of capital as conterminous to human nature and progress.
Accumulation, however, is not only productive, but necrotic (McBrien 2016), in the sense that it unfolds a slow violence sustained by reduction or, perhaps, extinction: the reduction of cultures, languages and peoples; as well as the extinction of the Earth through depletion of resources. If accumulation is natural to us, then so are reduction and extinction.
Cecilie Klingenberg - 24.02.2021 - 14:40
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Writing as collective assemblages in the age of (post)digital capitalism, or de-colonizing e-literature in the minor key.
In my proposition, I would like to explore the notion of the minor (Deleuze and Guattari, 1986), employed here as a theoretical tool allowing for a critical inquiry into multifarious e-literary post-internet practices, popularly referred to as Third-Generation E-Literature (Flores, 2019), and accompanied by third-wave e-literature scholarship (Ensslin et al., 2020). However, I am going to build on this notion following its recent repurposing by Anne Sauvagnargues (as the minor style) (Sauvagnargues, 2016) and Erin Manning (as the minor gesture) (Manning, 2016). Kathi Inman Berens aptly remarks (Berens, 2020) that de-colonization of e-literature requires multiplicity of perspectives, as it entails not only cultural hegemonies operating along geographical, ethnic and racial axes and following the set of distinctions shaped by modernist aesthetics, but it also needs to address widespread domination of Big Tech companies shaping the popular internet platforms, programming solutions and users' practices.
Cecilie Klingenberg - 24.02.2021 - 15:57
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‘Doing e-lit’ in print: Plus-Human Codes and the (re)Turn to the Bookbound
“He may be a superdecoder or a superspy but he’s sort of neutral, though not quite like a machine, more like he’d, sort of, come and, reversed all our, traditional, oppositions, and questioned, all our, certainties”, or so Zab falteringly describes the Martian boulder-cum-supercomputer that has crash-landed in a disused Cornish mine.
Christine Brooke-Rose’s 1986 novel, Xorandor, is remarkable as much for its eponymous radioactive-waste-guzzling, double-crossing rock, as for being partially narrated in the programming language, Poccom 3. Invented by siblings, Jip and Zab, first as a kind of idioglossia and then as a lingua franca for communicating with Xorandor, Poccom 3 is rather like the indeterminate rock: its presence in the text requires a supreme effort of decoding to begin with, becomes increasingly naturalized with exposure, but consistently questions all our certainties about the language of literature.
Cecilie Klingenberg - 26.02.2021 - 14:11
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The Paradox of Electronic Literature in the Classroom: The Challenges for New Literacy Practices within the Platformized School
Reviewing the history of computing, the educational potential of new ways of knowledge representation and new literary affordances have sparked many influential ideas and reform efforts, spanning from “frantic systems” (Nelson, 1970) to constructionist discovery learning (Papert, 1993) to the reconfiguration of literary education (Landow, 2006, ch. 7). Yet, the current usages of electronic literature in education arguably fall behind those early anticipations. Therefore, this paper explores the wider educational and social entanglements that withhold electronic literature from entering classrooms in the context of current technology transformations. Considering the recent pandemicrelated global upsurge of the digitalization of educational systems, the mere lack of supply of digital devices and equipment will cease to be the main obstacle for the adoption of electronic literature in K12 classrooms. Nonetheless, the question shifts to what imaginaries and discourses shape (and limit) the use of new digital literary affordances. Reviewing current trends, three issues are identified.
Lene Tøftestuen - 24.05.2021 - 17:07
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An Institutional Approach to Building a Platform of Digital Literary Works: The Case(s) of Dutch and Flemish Digital Literature
The recently formed Dutch Digital Literature Consortium – a partnership of researchers from Tilburg University, Radboud University Nijmegen, the Royal Library of the Netherlands and local libraries – aims to develop and launch an online catalogue of digital literature, created in the Netherlands and Flanders, and turn this collection into a publicly accessible digital catalogue. The project draws inspiration from comparable databases, such as the Electronic Literature Collection 1-3, NT2, Hermaneia, and Literatura Electrónica Hispánica. Whereas these databases bring together digital literary projects from a variety of traditions – often with a particular focus –, the project at hand focuses exclusively on works from a specific geographical location (much like collections such as the Brazilian Electronic Literature Collection).
Lene Tøftestuen - 24.05.2021 - 18:49
