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Aesthetics of Surface, Ephemeral and Re-Enchantment in Digital Literature: How Authors and Readers Deal with the Lability of the Electronic Device
Whenever the program of a work, created by an artist, is run by a computer, the digital device necessarily plays a role in its updating process: because of the operating systems, the software and the ever changing speed of computers, the digital device may sometimes affect the author’s artistic project, or even make it unreadable on screen. Thus, readers do not know what they should consider as part of the artist’s intentionality, and what they should ascribe to the unexpected changes made by the reading device of their personal computer. Critics who are in keeping with a hermeneutic approach may ascribe certain processes, actually caused by the machine, to the artist’s creativity. What is more, authors lose control over the evolution of their work and the many updates it undergoes. Thus, the “digital” artist is given four options when dealing with the lability of the electronic device, which will be described in this article by close readings of The Dreamlife of letters by Brian Kim Stefans, Revenances by Gregory Chatonsky and La Série des U by Philippe Bootz.
Alexandra Saemmer - 03.07.2011 - 16:03
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Digital Literature—A Question of Style
For some time, critics tried to circumscribe the “novelty” of digital literature in rather generalist terms, either taking into account its relation to literary avant-gardes or focalizing on its technical features; these theoretical approaches were often blind to contents. Now that digital literature seems more and more aesthetically convincing, the time has come to define its stylistic features with more precision. In order to circumscribe the poetics of interaction, some authors tested the validity of the classical figures of style. It is, however, probably dangerous to use classical rhetorical terms intended to characterize textual phenomena, whereas the signs of digital text almost constantly refer to different semiotic systems (including the visual one). In the following pages of this article, I will sometimes continue to borrow from conventional taxonomies to describe the stylistic devices of digital literature, and I will try in other cases to invent a new terminology in order to avoid foolhardy analogies.
Alexandra Saemmer - 03.07.2011 - 16:37
