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  1. Electronic Literature as World Literature; or, The Universality of Writing under Constraint

    Electronic literature is not just a “thing” or a “medium” or even a body of “works” in various “genres.” It is not poetry, fiction, hypertext, gaming, codework, or some new admixture of all these practices. E-literature is, arguably, an emerging cultural form, as much a collective creation of terms, keywords, genres, structures, and institutions as it is the production of new literary objects. The ideas of cybervisionaries Paul Otlet, Vannevar Bush, and Ted Nelson, foundational to the electronic storage, recovery, and processing of texts, go beyond practical insights and can be seen to participate in a long-standing ambition to construct a world literature in the sense put forward by David Damrosch (2003: 5): “not an infinite ungraspable canon of works but rather a mode of circulation and of reading...

    Eric Dean Rasmussen - 06.01.2011 - 12:57

  2. The New Media Reader

    The new media field has been developing for more than 50 years. This reader collects the texts, videos, and computer programs—many of them now almost impossible to find—that chronicle the history and form the foundation of this still-emerging field. General introductions by Janet H. Murray (author of Hamlet on the Holodeck) and Lev Manovich (author of The Language of New Media), along with short introductions to each of the selections, place the works in their historical context and explain their significance.

    The texts are from computer scientists, artists, architects, literary writers, interface designers, cultural critics, and individuals working across disciplines. They were originally published between World War II (when digital computing, cybernetic feedback, and early notions of hypertext and the Internet first appeared) and the emergence of the World Wide Web (when these concepts entered the mainstream of public life).

    Patricia Tomaszek - 11.01.2011 - 14:22

  3. German Net Literature: In the Exile of Invisibility

    German net literature had an early and very public start through competitions organized in 1996-8 by the major newspaper Die Zeit and IBM, but was declared dead or stillborn immediately afterwards. Consequently, net literature became a subject of controversy between artists, theorists, and literary critics from which not only a strong community evolved but also a literary system. In this system, competitions served as public, peer-reviewed mediators for net literature and became an important feature of “post-processing.” Since the end of the 90s however, German net literature became slowly invisible. The lack of public awareness of net literature is common to many countries. Post-processing is a key for public visibility and according to Siegfried J. Schmidt et al. an important component in a literary system. In search of reasons for the state of invisibility of German net literature, I analyze mechanisms of post-processing in our community, which I regard as a literary system. This descriptive synopsis is the first paper in an upcoming series that opens up questions towards the role of peer-review, public reception, and artists' community-building.

    Patricia Tomaszek - 12.01.2011 - 17:15

  4. The ELMCIP Knowledge Base and the Formation of an International Field of Literary Scholarship and Practice

    The paper provides an introduction to the HERA (Humanities in the European Research Area) collaborative research project ELMCIP: Developing a network-based creative community: Electronic Literature as a model of creativity and innovation in practice, and in particular details the Knowledge Base component of the project. The Knowledge Base is a new platform for developing and sharing bibliographic records about works, critical writing, events, publishers, organizations, and authors in the field of electronic literature, with a particular emphasis on the European context. The paper further introduces the collaborative activity of CELL: an international Consortium for Electronic Literature organized by the Electronic Literature Organization.

    Scott Rettberg - 12.01.2011 - 20:04

  5. Editorial Process and the Idea of Genre in Electronic Literature in the Electronic Literature Collection, Volume 1

    The article focuses on two subjects: the process of editing the Electronic Literature Collection, Volume 1 (2006), and the idea of genre in electronic literature. The author was one of four editors of the first volume of the Collection, along with N. Katherine Hayles, Nick Montfort, and Stephanie Strickland. The Collection, which will be published on a regular basis, is intended to distribute contemporary electronic literature to a wider audience, and to provide a contextual and bibliographic apparatus to make electronic literature more accessible to audiences and educators. In the past decades, the forms of literary artifacts described as electronic literature have diversified to the extent that it is difficult to continue describe them using traditional terms of literary genre. The essay addresses some of the problems involved in classifying digital artifacts by genre, and suggests some avenues of addressing these epistemological challenges. The essay calls for a contextual understanding of works of electronic literature, based both on their nature as procedural artifacts and on their position within a historical continuum of avant-garde practices.

    Scott Rettberg - 13.01.2011 - 15:49

  6. Patterns of Hypertext

    The apparent unruliness of contemporary hypertexts arises, in part, from our lack of a vocabulary to describe hypertext structures. From observation of a variety of actual hypertexts, we identify a variety of common structural patterns that may prove useful for description, analysis, and perhaps for design of complex hypertexts. These patterns include: Cycle Counterpoint Mirrorworld Tangle Sieve Montage Split/Join Missing Link Feint

    Jill Walker Rettberg - 14.01.2011 - 11:59

  7. The End of Books

    Coover's "The End of Books" essay in the New York Times significantly introduced hypertext fiction to a wider literary audience. The essay describes that ways that hypertext poses challenges for writers and readers accustomed to coventional narrative forms, including assumptions about linearity, closure, and the division of agency between the writer and reader.

    Jill Walker Rettberg - 14.01.2011 - 12:33

  8. Piecing Together and Tearing Apart: Finding the Story in afternoon

    This paper is a reading of a classic of hypertext narrative: Michael Joyce’s afternoon, a story. Several writers have discussed afternoon previously. However I have chosen to explore afternoon from a different angle by using theories of narratology, especially Genette. In this reading, I explore ways in which the text confuses the reader but also the many stabilising elements that aid the reader to piece together a story.

    NB: Published under author's unmarried name, Jill Walker.

    Jill Walker Rettberg - 14.01.2011 - 12:40

  9. Semantisation, Exploration, Self-reflection and Absorption: Our Modes of Reading Hypertext Fiction

    "How do we read hypertext fiction? The question has been widely explored (Moulthrop 1991; Kaplan and Moulthrop 1991; Snyder 1997; Miall and Dobson 2001; Ryan 2001; Gardner 2003; Gunder 2004; Landow 2006; Mangen 2006; Page 2006) and there seems to be a consensus regarding the reader’s experience of hypertext fiction. Many critics actually claim that reading hypertext fiction generates frustration and insecurity. These and other studies describe how their readers react on and respond to hypertext fiction, but, as I see it, they partly fail in that they put to much weight on the reader’s responds and hardly no weight on the fact that hypertext fiction just like print fiction encourage or prefigure different responses and different modes of reading. The consequence is that these studies suffers from limitations witch lessens their valuable contribution to our knowledge about reading hypertext fiction. One reason for this might be that hypertext theory lack established concepts for describing response structures that encourage different modes of reading.

    Eric Dean Rasmussen - 27.01.2011 - 15:13

  10. The Aesthetics of Materiality in Electronic Literature

    According to the French author and theoretician Jean-Pierre Balpe, “all digital art works are first conceived outside the framework of a pragmatic relation to materiality. Any manifestation of digital art is but a simulated moment of an absent matter.”

    However, I wish to show that there is at least as much materiality in the digital media as in other media. Of course, as a formal description, digital and material can be distinguished. Digital media correspond to formalization, insofar as formalization is understood as the modelling of a given reality through the use of a formal code. But because digital media refers to the effectiveness of digital calculation, it can be considered as “material”, at least on two levels:

    Eric Dean Rasmussen - 27.01.2011 - 15:39

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