In this essay, Janez Strehovec explores the literary from the “nomadic cockpit” everyday life in the 21st Century. More than merely being cocooned by screens, Strehovec’s metaphor describes the way in which our travel through the environment is layered with navigational data, environmental surveillance, communication systems, and tied into a dynamic feedback loop. From this vantage point, Strehovec considers a number of works of digital art and electronic literature that are written precisely to be read in motion, to explore the sensations of life in the nomadic cockpit.

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.

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"?

How does the electronic literature community continue to develop? Amaranth Borsuk looks towards the print literature community, and suggests that we adopt a number of its most successful practices.

One of several early career participants at the Electronic Literature Organization's Summer 2012 "Futures" panel, Claire Donato comes down on the side of non-commercial, non-entrepreneurial, educational approaches to an emerging digital literary practice.

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.

What are we to make of current calls for "practice based" research in the Digital Humanities and e-lit fields? What about "art as research"? Stephanie Boluk sounds a caution concerning the ways that literary studies are being worked into the "instrumentalization and corporatization of the university system."

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.

Natalia Fedorova claims sees the future of electronic literature in translation: just as translation from her native Russian to English can teach us about both of those languages, translations between "natural languages" and "languages of code" can clarify what makes electronic language literary.

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."

The practice of Electronic Literature has long raised questions about literary form, literary content, the author, the reader, the moment of publication, and the artifact itself. The companion to the lifecycle of the work in its ecosystem, of course, is the editorial vision itself. In this essay, Sandy Baldwin and Tiffany Zerby call for editors and publishers of works on and about e-lit to become active participants in the process of creating the entire work and in creating the field around wo...

Giorgio Agamben has identified the “State of Exception” as the emergent principle of governance for the 21st Century. Parallel to this crisis in politics, there is the increasing currency of the term emergence in literary criticism, media theory, and cultural studies to describe the general state of change. In this paper, Heckman considers electronic literature in the "state of emergency," as both a laboratory for formal innovation and a site of critique. Specifically, this paper takes into account the relationship between literacy, law, literature and criticism through a reading of Sandy Baldwin’s New Word Order, a work that reimagines poetry in the context of the first-person shooter game.

Brian Kim Stefans proposes the need for a resistance to the "free play" associated with electronic writing, and discusses how this resistance will elevate electronic literature for both the author and the reader. He argues that poetic discharge is comparable with excess and bodily disgust, citing Sianne Ngai, and Steve McCaffery's "North of Intention." Stefans argues that avant-garde excess must be based on a balanced reflection on authorial presences. He draws his argument from his work on The Scriptor Project, which was inspired by his desire to bring "digital textuality back to the drama of the hand making marks on the page - literally dramatizing the act of writing by hand, the plays of body and mind that are erased in standard typography."

According to Fabienne Collignon, Timothy Melley’s refusal to submit “clear vectors of resistance” to "so-called democratic states" in The Covert Sphere is far from a shortcoming of the work, and instead marks its distinct quality. The absence of clear political solution, Collignon contends, informs The Covert Sphere’s achievement as a call for a change of mind in a population who, wittingly or not, have "participated in, and continue to collaborate with, a system of pretended innocence and victimization."

Chris Funkhouser and Andrew Klobucar situate the poetry anthologized in the recent collection "Gnoetry Daily, Vol. 1: a collection of poetry written interactively with computers" within a long genealogy of computer aided writing in order to illustrate how that genealogy continues to be both aesthetically generative and socially significant.

Shoba Ghosh contends that in The Book of Portraiture, Steve Tomasula’s exploration of how artists in specific historic moments narrativize uncertainty in the constitution of the subject illuminates the conceptual framework that produces a number of significant global dynamics. According to Ghosh, Tomasula demonstrates that the contemporary subject’s body has become “no more than an agglomeration of brands” that can be “fashioned in the image of desire,” though at the same time, “desire also seeks to deterritorialize itself.” For Ghosh, Tomasula’s aesthetic treatment of that subject-defining tension ultimately assists in “track[ing] the loop by which Empire and Terrorism, State and Extremism, America and its 'other' produce each other simultaneously.”

According to Janez Strehovec, e-literature operates on the model of post-Fordist immaterial production. He argues it's precisely because "a part of contemporary art (especially the new media one and e-literature) is crossing into the service sector of (new) networked economy in the post-industrial, information, spectacle-  and software society" that e-literature needs to cultivate its own autonomous context.

John Bruni contends that Cary Wolfe’s latest book "Before the Law: Humans and Other Animals in a Biopolitical Frame” discusses the “legal issues that inform our relationships with non-human animals.” Bruni writes that in doing so Wolfe dissects the process of law-making and appearing “before the law” as animals, which might be potentially harmful and eclipse the existence of animals beyond the human sphere. According to Bruni what distinguishes Wolfe’s perspective is that he does not promote any form of “ecological self-righteousness” but rather asks the question whether we need to move beyond species-based discourses that constantly pits humans and animals against each other in an essentially unwinnable impasse—to a more ethical approach that may expand the "community of living."

In his review of Christian Moraru’s recent Cosmodernism: American Narrative, Late Globalization, and the New Cultural Imaginary, Aron Pease considers the merits of the periodization advanced in that work. Ultimately, Pease argues that while the emphasis Moraru places on cosmodernism literature’s “relationality” means that the it is able to “register ‘the other’ as a concrete and organizing presence rather than as an abstract theme”, Moraru’s reliance on the nebulous term “globalization” fails to account for the extent to which the literature characterized as cosmodern reflects the political economy of late capitalism.