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Marie-Laure Ryan has perhaps done more to extend narrative theory in light of digital media than any other critic to date. In one sense, this is all the more reason to scrutinize the works that constitute her prolific contribution to a field growing in both size and sophistication. Scrutiny is exactly what the reviewers of Ryan’s Narrative as Virtual Reality provide and the reviewers do identify points of imprecision in the organization and presentation of the categories upon which the study is built. The review, however, manifests a degree of imprecision itself, which motivates my own response. The review is […]
Everything that happens, happens now. Projects in development bring forward past publications, in ‘gatherings’ that ebr‘s editors create each time a new ‘thread’ is introduced. At the moment (Fall 2006) we anticipate the appearance of a print volume, Fiction’s Present, edited by Jeffrey Dileo and longtime ebr contributor, R. M. Berry. And with that ‘longtime,’ we recall what is by now a substantial set of ebr essays by Berry and numerous other writers of fiction. These essays, collected now under the thread title, Fictions Present, reaffirm the ‘presentist’ bias in electronic publishing and in ebr particularly, since our non-periodical, continuous […]
Before 1973, if you had said something like “games are a storytelling medium,” just about anyone would have looked at you as if you were mad – and anyone knowledgeable about games would have assumed you knew nothing about them. Before 1973, the world had essentially four game styles: classic board games, classic card games, mass-market commercial board games, and the board wargame. None of these had any noticeable connection to story: There is no story in chess, bridge, Monopoly, or Afrika Korps. But in the early 1970s, two things happened: Will Crowther’s computer game adventure Colossal Cave,The date of […]
Or else perhaps he may invent A better than the poet meant, As learned commentators view In Homer more than Homer knew. –Jonathan Swift, On Poetry: A Rhapsody One must be an inventor to read well. –Ralph Waldo Emerson, The American Scholar In a word, Gregory Ulmer has recommended heuretics. As the paradigm that we have come to know as “literacy” shifts to something else, which Ulmer calls “electracy,” heuretics is a readiness strategy. It is more than that, certainly. But from the start, I want to emphasize that heuretics is a way to prepare for writing in – both […]
1. These brief notes are offered in place of something longer and more fully considered, for which there will probably never be time. These days, reflection is a luxury in most working lives, and it comes particularly dear for those who work in cybertext, which can claim neither the high-cultural entitlements of literature nor the market appeal of video games, but subsists on the margins of those worlds, among others. Most who move in this edgy space are amateurs, obsessives, and/or academics, people driven by, if not to, distraction. We are always “of two minds,” as Michael Joyce (1975) put […]
Richard Powers and Tom LeClair have distinguished themselves as leaders in each of their respective fields. Powers has long been acknowledged as one of America’s best writers, receiving the 2006 National Book Award for his most recent work The Echo Maker. LeClair is held in high esteem as a critic who has championed difficult postmodern writers such as Don DeLillo and William Gaddis along with being an influential voice in establishing Powers’ reputation. He has also written four novels with his most recent work The Liquidators published in the summer of 2006. Powers and LeClair have a long history together, […]
Pax is, to say the least, a confusing text. But more than being about confusion, Pax is also a confused text, literary for sure, but not quite literature, negotiating some rather hazy boundaries between “literature and ludology” (Moulthrop 149). This is not meant as a criticism but rather an observation meant to focus on a central feature of the work, indeed its principle aesthetic qualities seem to derive from its confusing nature. Thus in order to engage Pax one should first recognize that any attempt to mount a critique of it or Moulthrop’s exegesis will necessarily be informed by this […]
Within the privileged zone that bears the demand to produce a book in the first place, nothing, one might say, brings one closer to what Jameson called the “commodity structure of academic intellectual life” than the task of filling out one’s publisher’s marketing questionnaire. Please describe, one is more or less importuned, in any of several standardized variations, what makes your book unique. Not what one’s book shares, as it inevitably does share, with all the work it builds on, and with which it is in present or proleptic dialogue, among its rival products – but rather what most clearly, […]
Sandy Baldwin investigates the manner in which a computer “ping trace” can be classified as a form of digital poetics, and discusses the underlying symbolic practices of both poesis and poetics that encompass coding and computation. An earlier version of this essay was given at the 2008 Electronic Literature Conference in Vancouver, WA. Thanks to all who listened and commented. “Only the imagination is real.” William Carlos Williams Hello Baghdad. Hosts are open, packets receiving. I’m in Iraq in milliseconds. But the DoD turns me back, their firewall refusing to echo, ending my request. I tell you the net is […]
Alice Bell (Sheffield Hallam), Astrid Ensslin (Bangor), Dave Ciccoricco (Otago), Hans Rustad (Hedmark), Jess Laccetti (Grant MacEwan) and Jessica Pressman (Yale) Introduction The sky was the color of a screen, churning code into a maelstrom. It blew through the Wheel of Sheffield, and we blinked amid the post-utopian flicker of hypertext theory and the fast shadows of the Late Age of Print. A viral meme circulated above us, growing, morphing, forming a cloud of tags: digital media—literary practice—literary study—reading—art—materiality. Below us were roots turning fields of promiscuous linkages into systems. Revolutions take time, some (read: Gutenberg) much more than others […]