One + One = Zero – Vanishing Text in Electronic Literature
Marjorie C. LuesebrinkIn “One + One = Zero,” Marjorie C. Luesebrink discusses “fleeting” messages and their implications for electronic literature. Beginning with a discussion of the popular social media app, Snapchat, Luesebrink considers a series of works of electronic literature that employ tropes of vanishing and inaccessibility to represent forgetfulness, limited perception, and the challenges posed by dynamic environments for contemporary readers. After tracing a path through two decades of digital practice, Luesebrink points to a future in which the vanishing text will continue to be a relevant site for literary innovation.
Reading the Wind
David (Jhave) JohnstonIn his video-poem "Reading the Wind," Dave (Jhave) Johnston identifies the current environment for electronic literature, and in doing so, claims the impossibility of knowing its future.
Histories of the Future
Patrick LeMieux
For Patrick LeMieux, the future of electronic literature is not before us, and instead entails an investigation of the past--of the unknowable territories we collaborate with through e-lit.
The Ode to Translation or the Outcry Over the Untranslatable
Natalia Fedorova
Natalia Fedorova claims sees the future of electronic literature in translation: just as translation from her native Russian to English can teach us about both of those languages, translations between "natural languages" and "languages of code" can clarify what makes electronic language literary.
dELO: Affordances and Constraints
Samantha GormanCommenting on the high price of long term literary collaboration (and the brevity of most funding in the Humanities), Samantha Gorman asks if it's necessary for arts practitioners today to create commercial start-ups. Can scholars and Digital Language Arts entrepreneurs find a way to bring literary work into "hybrid communities" and "outreach"?
Who’s Left Holding the (Electrical) Bag? A Look to See What We’ve Missed
Ben BishopRecalling ebr's early exploration into "green" and "grey" ecologies, invisible etchings on silicon and massive environmental consequences, Ben Bishop calls our attention to questions of "power" at the heart of our newly digitized critical and creative practices: "Not clout or capability, but electrical power generated by spinning turbines."
A Tag, Not a Folder
Ian Hatcher
The "electronicness" in literary writing, Ian Hatcher suggests, is more of a cognitive disposition, an atmosphere or condition that is present regardless of the print/screen/pen(cil)/paper medium one inhabits.
Literature in a State of Emergency
Davin HeckmanGiorgio Agamben has identified the “State of Exception” as the emergent principle of governance for the 21st Century. Parallel to this crisis in politics, there is the increasing currency of the term emergence in literary criticism, media theory, and cultural studies to describe the general state of change. In this paper, Heckman considers electronic literature in the "state of emergency," as both a laboratory for formal innovation and a site of critique. Specifically, this paper takes into account the relationship between literacy, law, literature and criticism through a reading of Sandy Baldwin’s New Word Order, a work that reimagines poetry in the context of the first-person shooter game.
Against Desire: Excess, Disgust and the Sign in Electronic Literature
Brian Kim Stefans
Brian Kim Stefans proposes the need for a resistance to the "free play" associated with electronic writing, and discusses how this resistance will elevate electronic literature for both the author and the reader. He argues that poetic discharge is comparable with excess and bodily disgust, citing Sianne Ngai, and Steve McCaffery's "North of Intention." Stefans argues that avant-garde excess must be based on a balanced reflection on authorial presences. He draws his argument from his work on The Scriptor Project, which was inspired by his desire to bring "digital textuality back to the drama of the hand making marks on the page - literally dramatizing the act of writing by hand, the plays of body and mind that are erased in standard typography."
Against an Aesthetics of Disappearance (review of Timothy Melley’s The Covert Sphere)
Fabienne CollignonAccording to Fabienne Collignon, Timothy Melley’s refusal to submit “clear vectors of resistance” to "so-called democratic states" in The Covert Sphere is far from a shortcoming of the work, and instead marks its distinct quality. The absence of clear political solution, Collignon contends, informs The Covert Sphere’s achievement as a call for a change of mind in a population who, wittingly or not, have "participated in, and continue to collaborate with, a system of pretended innocence and victimization."