Publications
Electronic Literature: New Horizons for the Literary
Back in the Seventies, when the word “culture” was not yet being paired routinely with “studies” or “wars,” Roland Barthes made a practical observation concerning the mediating role of institutions. The literary canon, Barthes noted, is “what gets taught.” Not what gets promoted, referenced, demo-ed, written up, or linked to. Professor N. Katherine Hayles needed only to raise the topic of canonicity, in her 2001 address to the ELO at UCLA, to determine a direction for the Organization. Just a decade or two into the era of personal computers, many pioneering works were no longer supported by available platforms. Without the ability physically to read these works, Hayles argued, scholars could not create the canon that is needed to build a field.
I’ve experienced few moments when the shock of recognition was so palpable at a literary conference. Some of the authors present, as I recall, were bothered by the very idea that there should be a new canon for new media. Wasn’t canonicity one of the hierarchies the medium was promising to eliminate? Others, recognized innovators with a stake in such debates, might have been feeling the anxiety of obsolescence. The recognition that inclusion in print anthologies might be the best chance for work produced in multiple media to be read even by the current generation of university students, was a clear signal that authors themselves needed to start paying attention to the staying power of their own medium.
Barthes’ cheeky reduction of this most complex and contested of cultural formations is no less useful for electronic literature than it has been for the literary heritage in print. In fact, classroom activism after post-structuralism might have gained in relevance because today the medium itself needs to be taught. Even as content is studied, routes of production and transmission are being created and need somehow to be preserved. There is no guarantee that electronic literature will be any better integrated in today’s networked society, than works in print have been up to now: both legacies need to be activated (not just put “out there,” without supporting institutions). The modest mechanisms of course description, syllabus construction, genre identification, and the composition of author bios, offer the most efficient means for scholars to go about this foundational task. While scholars and authors of e-lit do well to seek out and even develop custom tools, the field development does not need to wait on technology: it can be done with resources currently at our disposal through universities and augmented through connections with established scholarly networks, libraries, and literary databases, nationally and internationally.
Each of the publications presented here on the ELO site, by board members and friends of the Organization, addresses aspects of the institutionalization of literature in electronic environments. The two ‘byte’ productions, by Montfort, Wardrip-Fruin, Liu , Durand, Proffitt, Quin, and Réty, bring home the problem of obsolescence and offer a set of best practices for those who would like their work to last, at least materially, in the electronic environment where the work was produced. My 2007 essay, Toward A Literary Semantic Web, outlines a project for rebuilding the ELO Directory of Electronic Literature in line with archival projects in our sister arts of music and graphic design, and consonant with a Web 2.0 vision. Hayles’ Electronic Literature: What Is It? covering works that appeared in Volume 1 of the Electronic Literature Collection, demonstrates one critical approach to the study of works of el-lit. Where past practices of ‘close reading’ have emphasized the specifically literary qualities of verbal productions in print, and where subsequent approaches have emphasized the location of racial, gendered, professional, and class identities, Hayles offers an awareness of “media specificity” as a primary concern for the current generation of literary criticism.
Historically, no literary “approach” has been offered without controversy, and no modern institution has proven more effective than the classroom, for debating the merits of any one scholarly, critical, or aesthetic agenda. Such debates, once they get started, very quickly produce texts and authors to be championed by one side, denounced by other sides, and verified by the most demanding Peoples’ Court in the World Republic of Letters – namely, undergraduate and graduate students, and a cohort of school kids who are unlikely to read anything whose cognitive and medial complexity is less than a computer game. The current presentation by Professor Hayles, an ELO sponsored, online companion to her book, Electronic Literature: New Horizons for the Literary, provides authors, scholars, and school teachers with some of the resources we will need, to get those debates started.
Joseph Tabbi
President, ELO (2007-2009)
Electronic Literature: What Is It?
Electronic Literature: What Is It? surveys the development and current state of electronic literature, from the popularity of hypertext fiction in the 1980’s to the present, focusing primarily on hypertext fiction, network fiction, interactive fiction, locative narratives, installation pieces, “codework,” generative art and the Flash poem. It also discusses the central critical issues raised by electronic literature, pointing out that there is significant overlap with the print tradition. At the same time, the essay argues that the practices, texts, procedures, and processual nature of electronic literature require new critical models and new ways of playing and interpreting the works. A final section discusses the Preservation, Archiving and Dissemination (PAD) initiative of the Electronic Literature Organization, including the Electronic Literature Collection Volume I and the two white papers that are companion pieces to this essay, “Acid Free Bits” and “Born Again Bits.” Intended audiences include scholars, administrators, librarians, and funding administrators, respectively, who are new to electronic literature and for whom it is hoped this essay will serve as a useful introduction. Because this essay is the first systematic attempt to survey and summarize the fast-changing field of electronic literature, artists, designers, writers, critics, and other stakeholders may find it useful as an overview, with emphasis on recent creative and critical works. This essay is by N. Katherine Hayles.
Toward a Semantic Literary Web
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 new terms and keywords as it is the production of new literary objects. Both the “works” and their terms of description need to be tracked and referenced. Hence, a Directory of Electronic Literature needs to be, in the first place, a site where readers and (necessarily) authors are given the ability to identify, name, tag, describe, and legitimate works of literature written and circulating within electronic media. This essay grew out of practical debates among the ELO’s Working Group on the Directory, established in the Spring of 2005 and active through the Winter of 2006. The essay offers a set of practical recommendations for development, links to potentially affiliated sites, and an overall vision of how literary form is created in a networked culture. The essay is intended to set a direction for the next phase of Directory development (Fall 2007), central to the ELO’s mission of making a place for literary work (and works) in electronic environments. Finally, and as yet tentatively, the essay offers speculations on how this curatorial activity can be coordinated with similar initiatives in the arts and with stakeholders in the current development of a Semantic Web. This essay is by Joseph Tabbi.
The Electronic Literature Collection
The Electronic Literature Collection is a periodical publication of current and older electronic literature in a form suitable for individual, public library, and classroom use. The publication is available both online and as a packaged, cross-platform CD-ROM, in a case appropriate for library processing, marking, and distribution. The contents of the Collection are offered under a Creative Commons license so that libraries and educational institutions will be allowed to duplicate and install works and individuals can share the Collection with others.
Technical Support/FAQ for Electronic Literature Collection
Born-Again Bits
This report is available online. Born-Again Bits: A Framework for Migrating Electronic Literature is an outcome of the PAD (Preservation, Archiving, and Dissemination) project. The report, by Alan Liu, David Durand, Nick Montfort, Merrilee Proffitt, Liam R. E. Quin, Jean-Hugues Réty, and Noah Wardrip-Fruin, was published in July 2005.
Acid-Free Bits
This pamphlet is available in print and online. Acid-Free Bits: Recommendations for Long-Lasting Electronic Literature is an outcome of the PAD (Preservation, Archiving, and Dissemination) project. It is by Nick Montfort and Noah Wardrip-Fruin, and was published in June 2004.
State of the Arts
Keynote addresses, papers, and electronic literature from the State of the Arts Symposium are collected in this book and CD. State of the Arts: The Proceedings of the 2002 Electronic Literature Organization Symposium was edited by Scott Rettberg and published in March 2003.
All ELO publications are available free of charge to anyone who requests them, as long as supplies last. To request any of these publications, send a written request to: Electronic Literature Organization / Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities (MITH) / B0131 McKeldin Library / University of Maryland/ College Park, MD 20742
