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1. Cybertext: Perspectives on Ergodic Literature

   Cybertext explores the aesthetics and the textual dynamics of digital literature and its many diverse genres such as hypertext fiction, computer games, computer generated poetry and prose, and collaborative Internet texts such as MUDs. However, instead of insisting on the uniqueness and newness of "electronic writing" or "interactive fiction" (phrases which mean very little) the author situates these new literary forms within the larger and much older field of "ergodic" literature, from the ancient Chinese I Ching to the literary experiments of the OuLiPo. These are open, dynamic texts where the reader must perform specific actions to generate a literary sequence, which may vary for every reading. Aarseth constructs a theoretical model that describes how these literary forms are different from each other, and demonstrates how the widely assumed divide between paper texts and electronic texts breaks down under careful analysis.

   Patricia Tomaszek - 21.09.2010 - 10:59

2. Digital Arts and Literature – Is it Just a Game?

   “Games are not serious; digital art and literature are playful; therefore they are not serious”. Formulations such as these are sometimes used when discussing the playfulness of digital art and literature. The origin of this argument is based on the traditional opposition between “serious” and “playful”. Because of their interactive nature, digital art and literature have often been considered as particularly close to play - and to “mass culture”. Depending on the approaches, this proximity is interpreted as an opportunity, or as a risk, as I will show in this article.

   On the one hand, art and play are so closely related that it has become commonplace to assert: “art is play”, “play is art”. On the other hand, it seems equally impossible to deny the existence of playfulness in art and literature. Indeed, is it not one of their fundamental privileges to allow free, unselfish play with the materials, codes and conventions, while science, craft industry, and industrial design are "condemned" to produce and capitalise?

   Patricia Tomaszek - 12.01.2011 - 16:44

3. Artificial Poetry: On Aesthetic Perception in Computer-Aided Literature

   Artificial Poetry: On Aesthetic Perception in Computer-Aided Literature

   Eric Dean Rasmussen - 31.01.2011 - 15:39

4. Locating the Literary in New Media

   Locating the Literary in New Media

   Eric Dean Rasmussen - 27.06.2011 - 09:14

5. Reading Digital Literature: A Subject Between Media and Methods

   Simanowksi's overview essay describes the agenda of part one, "Reading Digital Liteature" of the Reading Moving Letters collection: to gather semiotic readings of digital literature that provide future readers of these varied aesthetic forms with sophisticated theoretical and methodological tools for intepretation. While doing so, it provides short glosses of key concerns addressed in the essays from this section. One overarching concern is how to strike the correct critical balance when reading literary works in which natural language is often subsumed by other semiotic flows: how can the critical reader address medial specificity without sacrificing an interest in a work's linguistic properties, which, traditionally, have been at the forefront of literary study? Like much of Simanowksi's critical writing on digital literature, the essay aims to enable scholars and critics to produce meaningful, analytic interpretations of works of digital literature, rather than simply empirical descriptions of their functional interactions.

    

   Eric Dean Rasmussen - 05.12.2011 - 10:30

6. Electronic literature or digital art? And where are all the challenging hypertextual novels?

   Lack of new and challenging, interactive hypertextual fictions causes a continuously growing frustration among literary scholars like myself. While we are witnessing a growing and exciting field within digital poetry, and especially digital art as such, hypertextual fictions seem to have become part of and/or floating into interactive digital performance and installation artworks. Noah Wardrip-Fruin’s CAVE-work Screen and Camilla Utterback’s Text Rain are among digital artworks based on text and words. According to Roberto Simanowski in “Holopoetry, Biopoetry and Digital Literature” (2007), however, Utterback’s work in particular, must be seen as a work of digital art rather than literature, since its aim is not to be read but to be played with. So how much text, how many literary generic traits must a hypertextual fiction include to be called literature and not digital art?

   Jill Walker Rettberg - 18.06.2012 - 11:10

7. The Presumed Literariness of Digital

   This presentation will challenge the current, too quickly determined relationship between
   the ‘literary’ and digital media. The presumed literariness of digital art--these days, anything
   from performance art to virtual sculpture work--muddles the already confused and meandering
   genre of electronic literature, leading away from acts of reading and remarking on text and its location in new media. Electronic literature began as a study of literary writing produced and
   meant to be read on a computer screen, opening up new possibilities for interactive and dynamic
   storytelling, utilizing the new medium’s ability for linking lexias. The literariness of this work
   is manifest: the work was primarily textual, the centrality of reading paramount. Textuality was
   at the heart of the work, thus the term electronic literature was appropriate and uncontested.
   Lately, ‘electronic literature’ is an umbrella-term for all things digital. A spectrum of genres
   and forms are included, among them video games, interactive fiction, digital art, and (virtual)
   

   Eric Dean Rasmussen - 19.06.2012 - 14:41

8. The (Problematic) Issue to Evaluate Literariness: Digital Literature Between Legitimation and Canonization

   The first experiments in digital literary forms started as early as
   the 1960s. From then, up to the mid-90’s, was a period that,
   according to Chris Funkhouser (2007), can be considered as
   a ‘laboratory’ phase. The rise of the Internet has resulted in the
   proliferation of creative proposals. The first involves indexing
   creative works in the form of databases, sometimes giving access
   to hundreds of works without any hierarchical order. Since 2000,
   digital literature has been experiencing a new phase, marked by
   the creation of anthologies. Over the years, the evaluation and
   selection criteria have proved to be as problematic as they are
   necessary for these projects. The main issue of this paper is to
   provide a critical discussion of these criteria.

   Eric Dean Rasmussen - 22.06.2012 - 16:40

9. Post-Chapter Dialogue, Gendolla and Ricardo

   Post-Chapter Dialogue, Gendolla and Ricardo

   Eric Dean Rasmussen - 27.06.2012 - 14:44

10. Digital Poetry Beyond Avant-Garde Readings: Proposing a Digital Lyric

    Most often when critics try to demonstrate the "literariness" of digital poetry, the theory they rely upon derives from the avant-garde practices of the twentieth century. To expand this dialogue with literary traditions, this paper explores the possibility of a digital lyric. Through a textual analysis of selected digital poems, the lyric genre is reconsidered to meet the needs of digital writing in two ways. First, by drawing on key works from posthuman studies (Hayles; Haraway; Turkle) the lyric subject is re-envisioned beyond the limiting (and often assumed) Romantic-era definitions. Second, by revising the lyric subject with concepts from digital studies, a dialogue opens up with other generic traditions of the lyric: notions of brevity, emotional functions of the utterance, and even musical language. As well, the function of the lyric as a communal, performative gesture becomes an especially suitable poetic convention for the digital realm.

    Scott Rettberg - 08.01.2013 - 17:10

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