Passing On’s bleak climactic scene provides the starting point for Stephen Schryer’s essay on LeClair’s fiction.

A provocative question. I would add to it also the question: “Who are we in relation to it?” Otherwise put, after the cyborg and the posthuman, is there a way of thinking subjectivity that is commensurate with e-lit? Is e-lit intelligible to us? If not, how could it be? Mark Poster briefly and obliquely considers such questions in Information Please: Culture and Politics in the Age of Digital Machines (Durham: Duke UP, 2006).

Indeed, the technology of the telegraph and its institutions are with us today, though no longer under Western Union’s name, which suspended the service indefinitely in 2006. Today, there are a handful of companies that will do you a telegram (some arriving after Western Union’s departure), to some extent revisioning its role as a priority messaging system with a touch of old world charm. (In New Zealand, business clients can have a courier-delivered telegram for the primary purpose of debt recovery). These services are arguably vestigial, banking off nostalgia more than anything else. But fro… continue

Though this suggestion may set up a misleading comparison (not to mention that moving from ‘if’ – ‘potential’ – to ‘when’ oversteps the mark). Clearly, video games are gaining what we can understand as literary sophistication, in particular those described by Juul as “coherent world” games. But there’s no reason to think that this sort of literary game is on course to subsume the non-literary variety (for lack of a better binary pair). After all, there will always be books and video games that occupy opposite sides of a literary continuum, so it is difficult to see what is actually being compa… continue

In fact, it would be entirely logical to suggest that elit might even resuscitate reading, given the fact that it inhabits the places most likely to accommodate reading in a digital culture: screens. As Michael Joyce said memorably, “hypertext is the word’s revenge on TV” (1995, 47).