electropoetics

In the following essay, Luciana Gattass discusses the formation of a Brazilian Electronic Literature Collection via analysis of works identified in the ELMCIP Knowledge Base. Positioned between the existence of geographical data and the question of a national literature, Gattass considers the role of the human critic in the age of big data.

In “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.

In 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.

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.

Commenting 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"?

Recalling 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."

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.

"At the Time of Writing" considers the role of proprioception and the embodied memory of writing and gesture as a critical component of readerly practices. Anna Gibbs and Maria Angel examine a series of works of born digital literature that use representational techniques to evoke an "ethos of touch" that is critical to the experience of the work. Gibbs and Angel conclude that feeling is key to the process of meaning-making, and that experimental interfaces foreground the importance of the body in literature.

In this essay, Davin Heckman argues that works of electronic literature often provide occasions for cultivating attention in a mutable cultural landscape. Through readings of John Cayley, YHCHI, Rob Wittig, and Richard Holeton, Heckman points to a poetics of technical estrangement by which new media is opened up to deliberative reading, and thus presents contemporary readers with the opportunity to develop critical practices appropriate for the conditions of neoliberalism.

Zuzana Husárová and Nick Montfort up the ante for experimental writing by examining the category of "shuffle literature." What is shuffle literature? Simply put: books that are meant to be shuffled. Using formal reading of narrative and themes, but also a material reading of construction and production, Husárová and Montfort show that there are many writing practices and readerly strategies associated with this diverse category of literature.