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I, Chatbot: The Gender and Race Performativity of Conversational Agents
Amidst the various forms of electronic literature stands a class of interactive programs that simulates human conversation. A chatbot, or chatterbot, is a program with which users can “speak,” typically by exchanging text through an instant-messaging style interface. Chatbots have been therapists, Web site hosts, language instructors, and even performers in interactive narratives. Over the past ten years, they have proliferated across the Internet, despite being based on a technology that predates the Web by thirty years. In my readings, these chatbots are synedochic of the process by which networked identities form on the Internet within the power dynamics of hegemonic masculinity. Chatbots, in this light, model the collaborative performance humans enact on electronically-mediated networks.
Scott Rettberg - 14.12.2012 - 01:12
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Theorizing Digital Narrative: Beginnings, Endings, and Authorship
[Published under author's previous name, Jennifer Smith] Since its development, critics of electronic literature have touted all that is "new" about the field, commenting on how these works make revolutionary use of non-linear structure, hyperlinks, and user interaction. Scholars of digital narrative have most often focused their critiques within the paradigms of either the text-centric structuralist model of narrativity or post-structuralist models that implicate the text as fundamentally fluid and dependent upon its reader for meaning. But neither of these approaches can account completely for the unique modes in which digital narratives prompt readerly progression, yet still exist as independent creative artifacts marked by purposive design. I argue that, in both practice and theory, we must approach digital-born narratives as belonging to a third, hybrid paradigm. In contrast to standard critical approaches, I interrogate the presumed "newness" of digital narratives to reveal many aspects of these works that hearken to print predecessors and thus confirm classical narratological theories of structure and authorship.
Jennifer Roudabush - 13.01.2013 - 23:40
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Cybertext Narratology
"Cybertext Narratology" combines Espen Aarseth's textonomy and typology of cybertexts to three advanced models of narrativity: narratology (Gerard Genette, Seymour Chatman, Gerald Prince), postmodernist fiction (Brian McHale), and the combinatorial and procedural writing(s) of OuLiPo (Marcel Benabou, Jacques Roubaud).
The basic and most important distinctions, categories and concepts derived from these approaches are systematically examined, expanded and rewritten in order to map out and include narrative possibilities and practices inherent to and emerged with literary cybertexts and digital textuality in general. The matters of tense, mood and voice are closely studied as well as those of trans- textuality, audibility, reliability and narrative situation.
Scott Rettberg - 19.01.2013 - 13:19
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Omission impossible: the ergodics of time
1. Precautions
This paper concentrates on temporal aspects of ergodic narratives. In that respect it runs counter to the still strong spatial emphasis in hypertext theory. Sadly, this emphasis often goes hand in hand with complete ignorance of narratology and with favoring the narrative models and ideals of 19th century mainstream fiction as is the case for instance with Janet H Murray´s recent book Hamlet on the Holodeck, the past of narrative in cyberspace. In order to avoid such unimaginative mistakes certain precautions had to be made.
Scott Rettberg - 19.01.2013 - 17:39
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'I know what it was. You know what it was': Second Person Narration in Hypertext Fiction
This article offers an analysis of two Storyspace hypertexts, Stuart Moulthrop's Victory Garden and Richard Holeton's Figurski at Findhorn on Acid. The article has a specific focus on how the text implements second-person narration and other forms of the textual "you" (Herman, Story Logic) in juxtaposition with other narrative perspectives. We aim to explore the extent to which print-based narratological theories of the textual "you" apply to the texts under investigation and suggest theoretical tenets and taxonomic modifications arising from the way in which the reader is involved in textual construction. More specifically we will show first how second-person narration can be used in digital fiction to endow the reader with certain properties so that she is maneuvered into the position of "you." We will then show how second-person narration can be used to presuppose knowledge about the reader so as to predict her relationship to "you." In both cases we will show that some instances of second-person narration in digital fiction require additional theoretical categories for their analysis.
Alice Bell - 29.01.2013 - 16:03
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'Click = Kill'. Textual You in Ludic Digital Fiction'
This article offers a close-reading of geniwate's and Deena Larsen’s satirical, ludic Flash fiction The Princess Murderer (2003), with a specific focus on how the text implements second person narration and other forms of the textual you (Herman 1994, 2002) in juxtaposition with other narrational stances.
Alice Bell - 29.01.2013 - 16:06
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Hypertextual Fiction on the Internet: A Structural and Narratological Analysis
Traditional printed texts and hypertexts are not fundamentally different. Actually they have more in common than is commonly assumed, and they thus can be analysed well within the parameters of established categories of literary theory. Against this background it seems striking that a number of theoretical treatises by early hypertext theorists such as Landow, Bolter, or Joyce refer to the revolutionary character of this kind of writing, the amazing technological development that lies behind it, and the almost miraculous convergence of postmodern literary concepts and hypertext. These treatises can be criticised for foregrounding technological innovations to a disproportional extent, while lacking both elaborate theoretical foundation and support from actual close analyses of hypertextual narratives. Especially hypertexts which are published on the internet have not been accounted for in a substantial way. Therefore, the present dissertation aims to provide the necessary theoretical framework for a close literary analysis of hyperfiction on the internet.
Source: Author's Abstract
Patricia Tomaszek - 21.02.2013 - 14:18
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The Heuristic Value of Electronic Literature
What makes electronic literature interesting for researchers?
Maybe not its artistic and literary value, but rather its heuristic value.
Indeed electronic literature not only permits previous media to be reexamined (paper for instance), but it also allows several well-established notions to be questioned (cf. figure above) such as:
- narrative in narratology;
- text in linguistics and semiotics;
- figure in rhetorics;
- materiality in aesthetics;
- grasp in anthropology;
- memory in archivistics;
- literariness in literary studies…Exploiting the heuristic value of electronic literature has two consequences:
- an evolution of some notions in certain scientific disciplines, and maybe of the disciplines themselves;
- a revealing effect regarding both digital technology and interactive and multimedia writing.Audun Andreassen - 14.03.2013 - 15:51
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The materialities of close reading: 1942, 2009
Today, we not only see video games and online role-playing games interpreted, in print-based scholarly journals, by way of classical literary and narrative theory (to the dismay of the radical ludologist), but we also see the inverse: classical novels interpreted by way of role-playing games staged in computerized, simulated environments (as in Jerome McGann's IVANHOE Game). The use of classical theory for the study of contemporary video games and video games for the study of classical literature, however, does not necessarily mean that we now inhabit a mixed up muddled up shook up literary-critical world. In fact, these examples might mark opposite sides of a continuum of critical practice, and underscore the logic of analyzing a text in a given medium with the tools of a different – and complementary – medium.
Audun Andreassen - 20.03.2013 - 09:54
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Analysis of Fitting the Pattern
The objective of this communication is the application of ideas and tools encountered in the field of study of narratology and its consideration as a narrative genre so that the chosen work, Fitting the Pattern, may be analysed and differences seen that may arise when approached from a different frame of the print. It is hoped to show with this approach, how in order to be studied, digital narrative works require new concepts and how more investigation is needed into how the reader receives the work. For example, after analyzing the work of Christine Wilks it was seen to be necessary to deepen the skills required by the reader in order to enter into the work, to establish functional guidelines for the reader, so as to remain within the orientation of the text, etc. It is not just a question concerning only in how the work is received, but also how space and the other approaches to the work need concepts and approaches which are more adequate for the reality presented by the digital narrative. As has been shown in the analysis of Fitting the Pattern, it has not been possible to capture all that is contained in the text using the type of analysis used up to now.
Audun Andreassen - 10.04.2013 - 11:42
