E-lit authors Stephanie Strickland and Marjorie Luesebrink organized a panel on the "Future of E--Lit" at the ELO 2012 conference, allowing emerging and early career authors to articulate institutional and economic, as well more familiar technological, developments that constrain and facilitate current practice. The panel papers were released in ebr in March 2014. Luesebrink and Strickland followed up with comments on the papers, offering a "progress report" on the future of the field. The individual responses are available as glosses on the essays and in full here.

The authors discuss their effort to raise critical awareness about microaggressive racist behavior with Mimesis, an interactive game set in an underwater environment where players become sea creatures, and where they feel the social force of microaggression regardless of the their race or ethnicity.

At the Frankfurt Book Fair, Ed Finn and his team attempted to "write, edit, and publish a book in three days." In this essay, Finn explains the process, outcomes, and future considerations of that collaborative experiment in writing, reading, and publishing in parallel and as performance, in the same room at the same time, as he attempts to answer the question, "What is the future of publishing?"

Vanwesenbeeck situates Mark Taylor’s recent Rewiring the Real, within a growing body of critical literature (which also includes John McClure’s Partial Faiths and Amy Hungerford’s Postmodern Belief) that regards religion as key to a robust account of postmodern culture—and for Taylor, in particular, as key to appreciating the novels of William Gaddis, Richard Powers, Mark Danielewski, and Don DeLillo

In one half of a pair of critical reviews looking at recent titles in animal studies, Karl Steel examines Nicole Shukin's Animal Capital (Shukin reviews Steel in the other half). In particular, Steel looks at Shukin's biopolitical framework, and considers how that framework challenges not only our conception of what constitutes the animal, but also--and more to the bone--our conception of the capacity of fields like animal studies.

In one half of a pair of critical reviews looking at recent titles in animal studies, Nicole Shukin examines Karl Steel's How to Make a Human (Steel reviews Shukin in the other half). In particular, Shukin discusses Steel's framing of "the human" in terms of medieval violence, and she considers what that framing can offer to today's political and ethical conversations.

Crossing the tools of fluid dynamics with those of literary criticism, Gwen Le Cor casts a new light on contemporary writing in new media. Unlike first generation, "classical" hypertexts that were non-linear in the sense of using linked textual elements, Le Cor sees Strickland and Lawson Jaramillo's poem, slippingglimpse, as a more "contemporary" instance of nonlinear writing that can be viewed (literally) as a "complex, nonlinear turbulent system."

In “…without shame or concern for etymology,” Hanjo Berressem discusses Pynchon's Bleeding Edge in the context of post-9/11 fiction. In contrast to narratives of post-traumatic melancholy, Berressem argues that Bleeding Edge is a “Jeremiad about the fall and the sins of America.” The result is an essay that makes a powerful case for Pynchon as a prophetic, if brutal, witness to American society turning towards security and control in the shadow of tragedy.

In PAIN.TXT, Alan Sondheim and Sandy Baldwin explore the limitations of expression at the borders of human sensation. Derived from a dialog between Sondheim and Baldwin on extreme pain, this essay considers how one signifies intensity and another attempts to interpret that intensity, and the challenges this process poses for affect, imagination, and ultimately intersubjectivity. In keeping with the content of this piece, the two preserve the dialog format, recreating for readers a discourse on p...

Jill Walker Rettberg’s Visualizing Networks of Electronic Literature maps the fragmentary and dynamic field of electronic literature by analyzing citations in 44 doctoral dissertations published between 2002 and 2013. Applying “distant reading” strategies to the ELMCIP Knowledge Base, Rettberg identifies key works in the field, shifting genres, and changing approaches to scholarship.

Scott Rettberg's essay, "An Emerging Canon?", highlights the potential for macroanalytic approaches to literary study, specifically in the field of electronic literature. Through his study of the richly populated ELMCIP Knowledge Base, Rettberg analyzes the impact that specific works have had within scholarly and creative communities, and enumerates the potential benefits that this work might have for the preservation, study, and understanding of the field.

In "Nature's Agents," Lisa Swanstrom discusses the agency of objects operating within networks. Specifcally, Swanstrom addresses works which allow nature to correspond with humans in a shared environment, posing provocative questions about the idea of agency itself as expressed in an ecology of action.

This essay is excerpted from Swanstrom's monograph, Animal, Vegetable, Digital: Experiments in New Media Aesthetics and Environmental Poetics (under contract to be published by the University of Alabama Press).

Maria Engberg reviews two books that describe the dialectical relationship between literary production, digital media, and literary reception from opposite ends of the historical and aesthetic spectrum. "Literary paleontologist" C.T. Funkhouser examines the born-digital poetry of the 1950s (and earlier), while Johanna Drucker writes an eye-witness account of the contemporary encounter between print literature, humanities research, and "speculative computing."

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 this ambitious piece, which was initially presented at the 2013 Paris meeting of the Electronic Literature Organization,  John Barber examines the role of sound in born digital literary works. Identifying, initially, the rich history of sound art and radio drama, Barber goes on to probe the untapped potential of digital audio as a field for future development. Anticipating John Cayley's 2018 essays on Aurature in electronic literature, Barber in this essay sees sound moving into the foreground of a transformed literary experience, rather than just augmenting text based literary acts.

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.