Welcome to the an interview series for The NEXT Museum, Library, and Preservation Space. This series comprises informal interviews to obtain a living history of electronic literature after three decades. This interview is with N. Katherine Hayles, a notable figure in the field as an academic for more than 30 years, and a critic, teacher, and lover of electronic literature.

Deena Larsen: So welcome, Kate. Thank you so much.

Katherine Hayles: Thank you for arranging this interview. I’m so happy to be here.

Deena Larsen: And what I really want to do is just get your ideas in your history about electronic literature. When did you first become aware of this field, which we call electronic literature/digital literature/new media hypertext, and what did you think of it?

Katherine Hayles: My first official entry into electronic literature was in a National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) summer seminar 1995, so sometime in the early nineties. I became aware of works like Michael Joyce’s afternoon, Stuart Moulthrop’s Victory Garden, and so forth. My initial reaction was, “Oh, my gosh! This is great!” As a word person, I love literature, but to see it enhanced with animation, colors, music and links was just wonderful. I was enamored of these new techniques, and I submitted a proposal to NEH to offer a summer seminar, which brought 12 scholars from across the country to study at UCLA.

Deena Larsen: And you had students who later became influential in the field, such as Stephanie Strickland and Marjorie Luesebrink (writing as M.D. Coverley). I know you worked with Jessica Pressman and Mark Marino as well. Who else was involved?

Katherine Hayles: Yes, Marjorie and Stephanie were in that first group. Jessica Pressman never attended a seminar, but she was a graduate student of mine and now is an esteemed professor at San Diego State University. Mark Marino did come into a later seminar, and so did a number of people in the field. It was really great to see how excited everyone was about these new works of literature.

Katherine Hayles: I was funded for elit seminars three different times in 1995, 1998, and 2001. Each time, 12 scholars were involved, so that’s 36 people. That’s a good start for an emerging field. Looking at those lists now; it’s like a Who’s Who of electronic literature up to the new millennium.

Deena Larsen: Yes, I think so. And so many wonderful works have come from those sessions. I remember that Marjorie told me she had first seen Marble Springs in your NEH seminar, and that helped inspire her to create Califia. And you taught my Disappearing Rain, and Jessica did a dissertation on that work.

Katherine Hayles: Yes, that’s right. We examined most of the hypertexts that were available then.

Deena Larsen: One of the things that I’ve noted in your writing and your theories is, if I may, very similar to mine. I was more on the creative side, saying the message morphs the media, the media morphs the message, and looking at how electronic literature embodies these elements of structure, imagery, sound, and navigation to create meaning. And I know that this has been a central tenant in your work. Could you talk a bit about the ways cognition embodies materiality in electronic literature in a different form than the printed book?

Katherine Hayles: I wrote a book on that topic called Writing Machines. This was a unique project with MIT Press with a series that had the idea of matching a print author with a book designer. I was matched with Anne Burdick, and together Anne and I wanted to create an artist’s book whose form and physicality would be in conversation with the theoretical argument. That was what you just said, that how the words are presented with interactions with the work’s semiotic meaning. I defined a “technotext” as printed material whose material instantiation has theoretical consequences. Even as I was developing this idea theoretically, I was also creating a technotext in Writing Machines. The idea that Anne and I had was to create an artist book whose form and material physicality would echo or, at least, be in conversation with the theoretical argument. The theoretical argument of that book was precisely what you just said; the way the words are presented has meaning and interacts with the semiotic meaning of the words. In my case, the physical form of the book was constantly interacting with the words on the page. I define technotext as printed material whose material instantiation has theoretical consequences. Even as I was defining “technotext”, I was using the book, Writing Machines, as an example of technotext.

In that book, there is a continuous interplay between two and three dimensions. The book is, of course, composed of two-dimensional planes on the pages, but as a sculptural object it has three dimensions of depth. For example, every book has an edge. You could use that depth as a planar surface on which words are written. On the long edge of the Writing Machines book, if you curve the book up, “WRITING” appears, and if you curve it down, “MACHINES.” To get those words to appear, you have to think about the book as a volume. That’s just an example of how Anne devised these clever strategies to instantiate the book’s argument in its physical form.

Of course, with electronic literature currently, the interplay between different elements is immensely expanded with audio, animation, color, and music, among others. If it’s well done—and there are hundreds of wonderful works in which it is well done—you get this very rich conceptual and physical interplay between the book’s physicality and its content.

Deena Larsen: It’s so interesting now that there are thousands of works, because when you were writing Writing Machines, you were examining Talen Memmot’s Lexia to Perplexia, and just a few other works. Now, there are so many more to examine. I think this is a theme throughout your academic career, and I would love for you to talk a little bit more about the academic critical side of this. How in your academic career have you found that people grapple with the materiality of their messages? The message morphs the media, the semiotic and physicality, materiality, cognition in combination, etc.

Katherine Hayles: Literary criticism as a discipline took its distinctive stamp in the middle of the 20th century, when a group of brilliant critics began a tradition that they called close reading or, as it was then known, New Criticism. Their focus was on establishing a rich understanding of how words resonate with each other.

One of the famous early works in that genre was Cleanth Brooke’s study of Macbeth; he showed that the image patterns began to resonate together and create a kind of tapestry that was, so to speak, subtextual. New Criticism complicated and enriched the way critics at the time understood how literature works. But that tradition of close reading exists in parallel with other traditions that are much more attentive to the book’s physicality, such as history of the book studies, artists book, shaped poetry, and other genres. Electronic literature continues those traditions in other media.

It was only in the later 20th century that people began to think about how you could join these two traditions and do a close reading of electronic literature in much the same way as anthropologists read physical artifacts. This opened a new chapter in the confluence between close reading and material studies, because it became obvious that the work’s material form had everything to do with what it meant. One of the chapters in Writing Machines is precisely on this topic.

Deena Larsen: When you do a close reading of electronic literature, you consider the form, the movement, the color, the links, in short—everything about the electronic format and presentation informs the content, the reading itself. And every reading is going to be different in electronic literature.

How do you see the multiple possibilities of reading an electronic literature work when you know you’re not going to get everything? For example, in my Marble Springs, maps show where characters live or are buried in the graveyard. That proximity to other characters has a great deal of meaning—but you wouldn’t know that if you went through the work and didn’t see the graveyard, or you went through and clicked on other links. So, close readings in electronic literature also depend on what you have and have not seen of the work.

Katherine Hayles: Yes, this is a famous problem. Dene Grigar and Stuart Moulthrop chose wisely when they talked about transversals. So, you transverse a work; you don’t necessarily give a definitive reading of the work. I encountered this firsthand when I taught a course in writing and asked the students to compare Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein with Shelley Jackson’s Patchwork Girl. As readers of literature, these students knew very well how to deal with a print text. But when I asked them to read Patchwork Girl, I was aghast that they thought they could read this complex and fascinating work in something like under an hour, whereas with Frankenstein, they knew they should spend ten or even twenty hours with the written text.

I devised the strategy of dividing them into teams and assigning each team a section with the idea that they would thoroughly exhaust all the links in that section. Only then did they begin to get the idea that you had to devote an equal or even greater amount of time to understanding Patchwork Girl than you did with Frankenstein, that just going through one transversal straight through left about 95% of the text untouched. That was a pedagogical challenge.

Deena Larsen: Very much so, and in fact from a writer’s point of view, if I may, I found that it takes an exponential time longer to write a work of electronic literature than it does to write straight text because you’re always thinking about the complexities. For example, I had all of the nodes of Disappearing Rain on the walls of my apartment with links for years. Since it’s a mystery story, the answer depends on which links you follow. Thus, I had to think about every possible reading strategy or at least many reading strategies. I couldn’t think about them all. But I had to traverse the work over and over again and then say, “Okay, given that the reader knows this at this point, here’s what you need to know, or here’s what you can imagine.”

My Firefly, for another example, I had to pre-program that on an excel spreadsheet, to get the six stanzas, with five lines each, and six instantiations of each line to all line up and make sense in all possible combinations.

Katherine Hayles: Yes, yes.

Deena Larsen: So, it gets complex. And I know Shelly Jackson had to do something very similar for Patchwork Girl; we all did. But now could you talk a little bit more about the depth of complexity in electronic literature compared to print texts? Did your students really understand the dimensionality of the works?

Katherine Hayles: Well, finally they did. But we had to go back to the beginning with Patchwork Girl and begin to do it systematically, and then each team made a report to the class about what they had found. For several weeks we focused on Patchwork Girl, and gradually its complexities became clear to them, I think. Students are used to distracted reading on the Internet, where they scroll quickly through something and maybe skip several paragraphs. So, the idea that you had to examine a work of electronic literature with the same kind of tenacity and careful attention that you paid to a print text was news to them and contrary to their usual habit of distracted reading on Internet texts.

Deena Larsen: Yes, and you actually have to concentrate on these readings. Thanks for elucidating those complexities! I wondered if you could talk a little bit about your academic career, and how you see this intense, pedagogical, focused work of critical analysis for electronic literature as more complex than working with a simple print text, and how you’ve integrated that into the university pedagogy.

Katherine Hayles: Of course, print texts have their own clever strategies for becoming complex. I try to avoid saying electronic literature is more complex than print literature. They both have their strategies, and I appreciate them both; I’m in love with them both, so I don’t want to disparage either. I like to consider them as two different ways of creating compelling plays with language and other semiotic systems.

I hosted an Electronic Literature Organization Conference at UCLA in 2001, and I gave a keynote with about 40 slides. Only a couple of those were on the issue of obsolescence. Yet afterwards, about 95% of the Q&A discussion was on obsolescence. Finally, I pointed out that this was a tiny part of my keynote but seemed to spark the most controversy; that was prescient of what would happen to the field. Electronic literature has never been able to achieve the importance in literary studies that it deserves, in part because of the challenges it faces in building an archive. Dene Grigar’s work at Washington State University in Vancouver, with the Electronic Literature Lab, has done a yeoman service in trying to create an archive.

The problem of obsolescence is much more acute with electronic literature than with print literature, although print literature also has had problems with obsolescence. For example, when the scroll was superseded by the Codex book, scrolls quickly fell out of favor. With electronic literature, there is an additional obstacle of obsolete software. Writers are at the mercy of the tech companies who create that software; once they quit supporting it, creative works authored in it simply become unplayable. A good example is Flash. Adobe decided they were not going to support it after December 30, 2020. Creative artists don’t have the clout to fight such decisions. So, suddenly, hundreds of literary works created using Flash instantly become obsolete and have to be resurrected in some fashion or the other. I think that has a lot to do with why electronic literature remains a small subfield within literary studies rather than a really energetic, dominant field, as it should be.

Deena Larsen: Yes, the issue with fast obsolescence explains a lot. Print scrolls are still readable where Flash works (only a few years old) are not. I was at your keynote back then, and I do remember it was a very spirited discussion.

And speaking as someone who I think more than half of my works are completely dead and unavailable: the artist has to decide whether or not to spend the enormous amount of time needed to resurrect these works. I talked with Stuart Moulthrop about this issue in 2010. Stuart Moulthrop said that even though his works in Bryce and Flash and other multimedia were dead, he, as a living artist, wanted to create more things because it’s more fun to create things than it is to preserve things. So, our artists’ tendencies are also that way. And obsolescence now means complete unavailability. I can still pick up the Dead Sea Scrolls, but I can’t open a Flash work.

Katherine Hayles: That’s true, and you could still open a scroll, and you could still read it.

Deena Larsen: But I’d like to pivot for a moment and talk about your career, if I may, and where you’ve been [for] your degrees, because I know that you’ve been honored in many places and rightly so.

Katherine Hayles: I have been extremely fortunate in receiving several major awards, and also four honorary doctorates. My first honorary doctorate was from Umea University in Sweden. At that time, they had a vigorous program in digital humanities. I was invited to participate in their convocation, and I will say this for the Swedes: they know how to party. The ceremonies included a banquet, with many boisterous songs and people getting up on the table and singing and dancing. It was great fun.

Another honorary doctorate was from Art College of Design in Pasadena, another wonderful occasion. And then one from the Royal College of Art in London, where I also attended their convocation and participated in the honored traditions of British Academia. The final one, awarded just last month, was from Cologne University in Germany, which I visited as the Albertus Magnus Professor in May 2025.

Deena Larsen: Were these doctorates more for the electronic literature portion of your work, or for the humanities, theoretical portions of your work that we haven’t touched on here?

Katherine Hayles: I have received recognitions specifically for the electronic literature part; for example, I was awarded the Electronic Literature Organization’s Marjorie Luesebrink Career Achievement Award, which was wonderful for me, because Margie was a dear friend. Much of my work lately has been in other fields, and the honorary doctorates were more related to that.

Deena Larsen: How does your work in theory of machine and human cognition and embodiment dovetail with electronic literature and your love of that field?

Katherine Hayles: It is connected through the issues of materiality and embodiment. Even in my 1999 book, How We Became Post-Human, I argued strenuously for the importance of embodiment. Too often, literary critics have ignored the material substrate of the works that they study. There’s a tendency to focus on the words as if the words had no physical reality, especially with the practice of close reading.

My insistence on combining close reading of the words with their materiality runs through all of my work—with electronic literature, with artist books, and also with the idea of the posthuman.

The importance of embodiment was what made me resist so strongly the idea that we could upload ourselves into a computer and exist in some digital space without bodies, which I thought was bizarre. This emphasis continues in my present work through the idea that human embodiment is only one form of cognition. There are other forms of embodied cognition, both with conscious and nonconscious species. In a way, the relation of human cognition to other nonhuman forms of cognition has been a through line from my earliest work in the 1980s up until the present.

Deena Larsen: Yes, and I have not had a chance to delve into your latest book, Bacteria to AI. I would love to hear a little bit about that, and your connections of the book to electronic literature as well. Again, to point out what electronic literature is, my definition has always been that if you can print something out and read it in the same way in any print form, that isn’t electronic literature. In other words, there has to be some sort of material element, like sound, image, color, or navigation that adds meaning to the work.

Katherine Hayles: Yes, exactly.

Deena Larsen: So, your latest book is about cognitive frameworks and recognizing that meaning outside of text—in other words, electronic literature fits that framework. And you delve into ways that computers, biological organisms, and non-humans understand meaning—so I think there is a connection between the non-textual elements of electronic literature and your new work?

Katherine Hayles: Yes, I completely agree with that definition. In Bacteria to AI, I suggest strategies that will help us reduce our anthropocentric bias. By anthropocentric bias, I mean the idea that humans are superior to every other life form on earth—and specifically that our cognition is superior. An important idea for me has been Jakob van Uexküll’s umwelt, roughly translated as the world horizon or world surround. His notion is that every species constructs its world through its sensory, neurological, and physical capacities. That’s as true for a mosquito as for a dog or a human. This means that we’re in an ecological system in which human cognition plays only a part.

Every species has its distinctive form of cognition, and our cognitions are interlinked symbiotically with those of other species. The human body contains multitudes, not in Walt Whitman’s sense, but because the bacteria in our gut are part of our body. There are more non-human cells in the human body than there are human cells. It’s incredibly arrogant for humans to think that ours is the only cognition that counts.

The bacteria of the title refers to a chapter showing that bacteria, too, have cognitive capacities, which humans have used to create gene editing, an incredibly powerful technology with potentially world-altering consequences. I describe conjunctions like this as technosymbiosis, a close relationship with other species in which technological mediation plays an important part. The human species is now deep into symbiotic relationships with computational media, including AI, and that is going to affect the future evolution of humans in ways that we cannot now even imagine.

Deena Larsen: I think that you’re absolutely right, that this is going to affect the future evolution of humans in ways we can’t imagine, and that we do need to think through a lot of the ways that the world thinks, the ways that bacteria think. This world view expands our vision of cognition. And I wonder now that AI is coming into so much of electronic literature as well—would there be a synergy between the computer cognition, other organisms’ cognitive frameworks, and electronic literature creations and interpretations?

Katherine Hayles: That’s a fascinating question. I’ve been writing lately about AI-generated literature, the kind of literary works that AIs invent on their own, not in collaboration with humans but as their own literary productions. This poses fundamental challenges to literature and literary studies generally, because literary studies is so deeply based on embodied human actions. AIs have a completely different physical embodiment—or instantiation, if you will—and that creates a whole new ballgame. A lot of truisms go out the window, for example, that a well-formed narrative should have a narrative arc that first engages the emotions (the beginning), complicates them (the middle), and then resolves them (the ending). But what about literature created by a Large Language Model (LLM) that has no emotions? Will a new kind of nonhuman aesthetic begin to emerge, and if so, what will it look like?

Deena Larsen: I think it will become much more important, and I’m challenging you in your next book to work on the relationships between AI and literature and meaning, and how we read and write.

Katherine Hayles: Well, I do have an essay on that appearing in Modern Fiction Studies in Fall 2025.

Deena Larsen: I’d like to ask if there’s anything you would like to add. I’ll throw the field wide open, so you can add what is important to you. After all, these interviews are for the next generation to say, “Hey, here’s what happened.” You know, I would have loved to have interviewed Dorothy Parker, or anyone else at the Algonquin. So, what would you like to say to the next generation of electronic literature lovers and writers, and so on?

Katherine Hayles: Well, that’s a deep challenge. What wisdom do I have to pass on? I guess for me the wonderful things about literature are its curiosity and innovative abilities; it is always inventing new ways to enact stories and make words dance. Its magic is always changing. You just mentioned joining AI with electronic literature. To introduce AIs into electronic and print literature is the kind of thing that I find so exciting.

What I would say to future generations is that curiosity, innovative capacity, are creative drive are really wonderful assets and should be encouraged and preserved in every way they can, including in literature, which then can flourish and remain a fascinating object of study for the ages.

Deena Larsen: Yes, and I think that I’ve seen so many examples of that innovative, creative drive. I was privileged to be the artist in residence at Washington State University at Vancouver’s Digital Technology Center in 2023-2024. I worked with so many people who are excited about this field, and I’m so happy that we will have that spark of creativity. And I think that computers have given us an outlet that we didn’t have. Everyone that I’ve met in the field, like Rob Kendall, Stuart, Bill Bly, Marjorie Luesebrink, Stephanie Strickland, and you have said that they came to the field because they had an artistic vision that could not be put into traditional formats. So, electronic literature is a vital outlet for this innovation in thinking.

Katherine Hayles: Yes, exactly. Even though my work is in scholarship rather than creative work, the vision of what literature can be now and in the future is what I find so stimulating.

Deena Larsen: Yes, it is just so amazing to see what can be out there, and I am excited for the future.

Deena Larsen: If we survive…

Katherine Hayles: If we survive indeed.

Deena Larsen: We will do our best, and we will preserve this interview.

Katherine Hayles: I thank you for the opportunity to do this interview, Deena. I appreciate it.

References

Brooks, Cleanth., 1991. From The Well Wrought Urn. Routledge Press. Oxfordshire.

Hayles, N. Katherine, Writing Machines. Cambridge, Massachusetts, MIT Press.

Hayles, N. Katherine, 1999*. How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics.* Chicago*:* University of Chicago Press.

Hayles, N. Katherine, 2025. Bacteria to AI: Human Futures with our Nonhuman Symbionts. Chicago*:* University of Chicago Press.

Jackson, Shelley, 1995. Patchwork Girl, or A Modern Monster. Watertown, Massachusetts, Eastgate Systems.

Larsen, Deena. 1993. Marble Springs. Watertown, Massachusetts, Eastgate Systems.

Moulthrop, Stuart and Dene Grigar, 2017. Traversals: The Use of Preservation for Early Electronic Writing. Cambridge, Massachusetts, MIT Press.

Shelley, Mary, 1818, Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus. London: Lackington, Hughes, Harding, Mavor, & Jones

Von Uexkűll, Jakob, 2010. A Foray into the Worlds of Animals and Humans with a Theory of Meaning. Translated by Joseph D. O’Neil. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.