articles

2026

01-Oct-2026
AI: A Matter of Significance

By connecting the rise of artificial intelligence to the evolution of writing technologies and cybernetic thinking, Davin Heckman's essay calls into question the norms of contemporary writing practices. In doing so, Heckman asks us not to mourn previous conceptions of literacy, but to consider ourselves on the cusp of new literary potentialities.

01-Oct-2026
Movie Laughed in Sprocket-Language, or: a Night at the Chatbot

In this article, Stuart Moulthrop approaches the poetics of large language models through his lived teaching experience. Featuring a conversation with SeminarBot b05 and the work of Moulthrop's students, present and past, this piece highlights the divide 'poetic technology' has introduced into society and calls for attention to be paid to the edges of both sides of the argument.

01-Oct-2026
Rhetoric and Poetics of AI

Constructed partially of quotations from Big Tech CEOs, academics, and journalists---while interlaying performance with AI cognition---Manuel Portela and Ana Marques da Silva's creative essay imitates a conversation between Rhetoric and Poetics. Through their interaction, the use of such techniques by marketers, doomsayers, and AI itself is laid bare.

30-Jun-2026
Beyond the Page: Exploring Identity and Reality in the world of Steve Tomasula's Ascension

Steve Tomasula's Ascension refuses to let the novel sit still, weaving a plethora of multimodal practices into a form that insists reading is a physical, perceptual act. Saidi argues that identity and reality in the novel are never found but perpetually assembled by a reader who cannot remain passive.

30-Jun-2026
Literary Form under Conditions of Media Ephemerality

A poem that encrypts itself after one reading, a videogame-poem that exists only in the contingency of play, an augmented-reality sequence that vanished with its platform: Foscolo argues that disappearance is not a problem digital literature faces but a formal principle it has learned to inhabit.

30-Jun-2026
The Prompt as Practice

The word "prompt" carries three histories at once: the teacher's assignment, the command line's blinking caret, and the natural-language input to a large language model. This essay reads all three together to argue that prompting is not purely programming but something that sits uneasily in the contact zone between code and natural linguistic expression.

30-Jun-2026
Verificational Reading: Code Beyond Interpretation

When you read code, you can interpret it, or you can trace it, and these are not the same thing. Arakawa proposes verificational reading as a distinct epistemic practice, one whose validity rests not on critical persuasion but on what the code actually does when it runs.

24-Apr-2026
A Posthumanist Genealogy 'Of Being Numerous' in Steve Tomasula's Ascension: A Novel

Providing insight into posthuman narrative strategies, Laura Shackleford analyses Steve Tomasula's novel Ascension (2022) for relational points of interest. Who or what is ascending who or what, and to what end?

24-Apr-2026
Death of the Humanist Author: Steve Tomasula’s “Farewell to Kilimanjaro”

This essay by Cristina Luli analyzes and compares Steve Tomasula's short story "A Farewell to Kilimanjaro" (1993) to Ernest Hemingway's "The Snows of Kilimanjaro" (1936), bringing to light the embeddedness of media ecology and the materiality of storytelling.

24-Apr-2026
Emergent Manners of Seeing in "The Atlas of Man" from Once Human, stories by Steve Tomasula

In literature, as in science, how humans emerge remains a continuous matter of engagement. In this article, Claudia Desblaches looks at the emerging scales of human representation in Tomasulas' The Atlas of Man.

24-Apr-2026
‘Fi about Sci, Not Sci-Fi’: The Posthuman Human in Steve Tomasula’s Ascension

Being a reader of Steve Tomasula for the past 30 years means following formally and materially innovative works of art and literature that contribute to a technological reshaping of the posthuman condition. Mary K. Holland, reminded in a waiting room in 2015 of Tomasula's impact on her own critical thinking, reflects on the eerie connections in 'fi about sci, not sci-fi'.

24-Apr-2026
Hybrid Modes of Reading in Steve Tomasula's "The Color of Flesh"

In this provocation, Maud Bougerol analyzes the teetering of boundaries in Steve Tomasula's "The Color of Flesh" (2015) where the reading experience lingers between linearity and non-linearity, and words and images transgress their usual thresholds.

Materially Representing a Minority: styles of representation in Steve Tomasula’s “The Risk-Taking Gene as Expressed by Some Asian Subjects”

In challenging the tools and materials that make up a narrative, Hanna Hadjadj interrogates the representational aspects of cultures and communities in Tomasula's short story "The Risk-Taking Gene as Expressed by Some Asian Subjects" (2013).

24-Apr-2026
Situating Steve Tomasula in the Long History of the Novel

Different mediums explore our contemporary experience in alternative ways. The novel, through its many different perceptions and iterations, has a rich history in which David Banash places Tomasula's work as both timely and needed

17-Apr-2026
I Always Wanted to Be a Media Theorist Who Wrote with a Telegraph Key

With a first-hand experience of observing and participating in the inception of the internet and early machine writing, Steve Tomasula reflects on his and Joseph Tabbi's interconnected history within a new form of the sublime. Using Tabbi's collected works as a framework, Tomasula explores the posthuman experience of narrative architecture.

18-Jan-2026
Parrots on a Wet, Black Bough: Facing into AI Art

Stuart Moulthrop's meditation on AI artistic production explores the pareidolia at play in human interactions with generative models while arguing, via Wim Wenders' Until the End of the World (1991) and Greta Gerwig's Barbie (2023), for a loving approach to humanity's newest tools.

2025

28-Sep-2025
Attitudes of University Students Towards Digital Literature: Correlation Between Exposure and Learning

Eman Younis and Hisham Jubran's study investigates Arab university students' exposure to digital literature and their attitudes toward it. In doing so, they discover students feel the inclusion of digital literature in university-level literature courses should be a scientific necessity and that its absence in the curriculum compromises their professional development.

28-Sep-2025
Dark Souls as Networked Hyperlinked Videogame

Austin Anderson applies a videogame formalism methodology to Dark Souls and argues that the game's various ludic-textual structures challenge player expectations, encouraging them to engage with the game's multiplayer systems and explore fan-made paratextual materials. By defining the player's movement between these structures as an act of hyperlinking which creates a networked community, Anderson identifies these as key characteristics of what he calls the 'networked hyperlinked videogame'.

28-Sep-2025
The Problem of Instagram: Emerging Genres of Third Gen E-Lit

Sarah Whitcomb Laiola and Richard Snyder share their experience of cataloguing Instagram 'zine Filter for a travelling exhibition with The NEXT, the Electronic Literature Organisation's museum, library, and preservation space. Arguing that platforms are not merely tools for distribution but shape the very literariness of a work, Laiola and Snyder suggest that e-lit archival practices must evolve to recognize and account for the integral role contemporary social media platforms can play.

02-Mar-2025
Advertising with AI – On the presentation of authorship of ChatGPT-generated books

Tuuli Hongisto explores the problems of cyborg authorship through the presentation of ChatGPT as a co-author of literary works on Amazon. Rather than shying away from admitting that an AI took part in the writing process, these authors position ChatGPT and other LLM's as authors with their own rights, rather than tools.