The sun had already set in Atlanta, Georgia when the attendees of the Digital Arts and Culture ’99 conference descended on the towering Sheraton Colony Square Hotel. It was Friday—the last day of a three-day conference packed full of discussions and demonstrations of art at the cutting edge of technology—and the conference banquet offered a final chance to unwind before traveling home.
Robert Coover—novelist, short story writer, and academic—was the keynote speaker. His address? A lament of end of the Golden Age of hypertext fiction and the arrival—thanks to the rising cacophony of the World Wide Web and further technological progression—of a new Silver Age, characterized not by text but by sights and sounds.
At the end of his speech, the attendees applauded.
Little did they know that hypertext had already been declared dead…
and the man who’d said it* was sat right there, in the room with them.
Hi, I’m the Barker, and this is—
electronic book review
[Introductory music]
It’s not often that an independent academic journal gets an opportunity to celebrate 30 continuous years of publication. Yet, thanks to you, electronic book review has made it. Something our editorial team—especially our founder and editor-in-chief, Joe Tabbi—is more than aware of. We discuss this and the future we’d like to forge together in our latest post, “ebr at the crossroads”, now live on the electronic book review website.
And, in “Off Center Episode 15: Surveillance Microcosms with Mathias Klang”, Scott Rettberg and Mathias Klang talk about surveillance technology, the power it brings, and the many small devices that track our daily movements.
But, this month, we thought we’d try something new… by talking about the old.
Do you remember the cyberdebates?
I don’t, actually. When they happened, I was nine and busy drawing cats on Microsoft Paint.
But they were a pretty big deal for more than one academic field. Actually, the cyberdebates could be seen as one of the many small fracture points that contributed to contemporary game studies.
And electronic book review? It was the place where the debates took place.
Our story begins at the Digital Arts and Culture 1999 conference, held at the Georgia Institute of Technology. It was a clear day on Friday 29 October when—shortly after N. Katherine Hayles’ keynote—Markku Eskelinen presented his “Cybertext Narratology” paper, where he combined the cybertext textonomy with multiple models of narrativity.
In attendance was Nick Montfort, whose review of Espen Aarseth’s Cybertext: Perspectives on Ergodic Literature (1997) was published a year later in the Winter 2000/2001 volume of electronic book review. Montfort’s review, titled “Cybertext Killed the Hypertext Star”, began with a quote attributed to Eskelinen’s presentation, one the man himself would later dispute:
“Hypertext is dead. Cybertext killed it.”
Montfort’s review, far from shying away from this stance, championed it. In Montfort’s opinion, cybertextual theory—with its embracing of computation—allowed for the inclusion and legitimization of works so far being neglected by electronic literature, a field he saw as dominated by literary theorists who paid little attention to computer science.
In fact, on a scale created by combining the four different classes of theoretical computers with Chomsky’s grammar hierarchy, Montfort positioned hypertext at the bottom.
And, as you can imagine, this caused quite a stir among ebr’s readership…
They immediately riPOSTed.
In “Cyber|literature and Multicourses: Rescuing Electronic Literature from Infanticide”, N. Katherine Hayles voiced her concern that cybertext theory erased electronic literature’s literary parent in favor of its computer game progenitor. Arguing that removal of either parent at this stage would lead to the loss of the electronic literature field itself, she proposed a new term to foster unity between literary and computer science scholars: cyber|literature.
But, while Hayles tried to encourage the continued longevity of both parents, Marjorie C. Luesebrink conducted an autopsy in “Of Tea Cozy and Link”. Here, she found Montfort’s computational-first classification approach to be lacking… and only ‘Very Old Hypertext Criticism’ to be dead. She also argued that hypertext structures did not necessitate computation anywhere external to the reader, so Montfort’s hierarchy wasn’t applicable.
If only Jim Rosenberg had known about this autopsy! In his own riPOSTe, “Positioning Hypertext in Chomsky’s Hierarchy of Grammars”, he also took error with Montfort’s positioning of hypertexts at level one… but, instead of the scale not being applicable, argued for their inclusion at level four. Making hypertexts Turing machines.
In electronic book review‘s next issue, Markku Eskelinen made his first ebr appearance. His article—originally titled “Cybertext Theory and Literary Studies, A User’s Manual”, later re-titled “Cybertext Theory: What An English Professor Should Know Before Trying”—went hard. Eskelinen applauded the inclusivity and possibilities of cybertext theory… while disparaging the ‘hype’ of hypertext and the ‘forestgumpian’ approach of American scholars to post-structuralist narratology, with shots fired at George Landow, Jane Yellowlees Douglas, and Hayles.
“A Poetics of the Link”, written by Jeff Parker, was simultaneously published in ebr. Offended by Montfort’s denigration of the hyperlink, Parker’s blend of critical and creative practice defended links by providing an overview of their forms, a creative work to show their effect, and a way for readers to submit their own. (This piece, by the way, was so unique in format that ebr‘s current website couldn’t reproduce it. Instead, a post linking to the original is provided, with an introduction by Joe Tabbi.)
Shortly after Eskelinen and Parker’s contributions, Hayles’ riPOSTe to Eskelinen’s article—“What Cybertext Theory Can’t Do”—took the moral high ground. Admitting her reluctance to engage further, she highlighted her admiration for Aarseth’s work while providing an outline of what she perceived to be cybertext theory’s limitations, including its failure to account for materiality, ‘mistaking numerosity for analytical power’… and the highly ideological stance taken by its followers, including Eskelinen.
This acknowledgment of materiality saw Matthew Kirschenbaum enter the conversation. “Materiality and Matter and Stuff: What Electronic Texts Are Made Of” highlighted the failure of both hypertextual and cybertextual theory to consider the materiality of digital texts and how turning to textual criticism could solve the problem.
And, last but by no means least, Scott Rettberg’s contribution “The Pleasure (and Pain) of Link Poetics” provided both an overview of the debate and a dive into the hidden complexities of the ‘simplistic’ hyperlink, with nuance taken towards the link’s benefits and downfalls.
So, with no agreement found and an electronic book review revamp in the works, the cyberdebates on ebr ended.
Or did they?
Do you know more? Or would you like to?
If so, then, maybe I’ll hear from you soon on—
electronic book review
*Allegedly—please see the correction in “Cybertext Killed the Hypertext Star”.