Lecture on Electronic Literature: Its Types and Some Examples



Lecture on Electronic Literature

By Dene Grigar, Texas Woman’s University

Electronic literature is an emergent literary form and academic field, whose genesis can be traced to the 1989 work by Michael Joyce, afternoon: a story. As a form, it can be described as literary works created with the use of a computer for the electronic medium such that they cannot be experienced in any meaningful way without the mediation of an electronic device[i]; as a field, it is building through online journals, like the Iowa Review Web () and Poems That Go (), print publications like N. Katherine Hayles’ Writing Machines, and organizations in the U.S. like the Electronic Literature Organization (), and in Europe like trAce Online Writing Centre () both of which undertake a variety of activities such as sponsoring academic meetings, publishing proceedings, and leads projects for the development, archiving and promotion of this genre of literature.

Electronic literature is not to be confused with digital literature, print-based literary work digitalized for the web and stand-alone technologies like a CD-ROM. Work in this area draws from fields like Humanities Computing and is sustained through numerous conferences and publications, such as the Joint International Conference of the Association for Literary and Linguistic Computing and the Association for Computers and the Humanities (ALLC-ACH) and Computers and the Humanities. Examples of digital literature would include a copy of Homer’s Odyssey found at The Perseus Digital Library or an electronic edition of Emily Dickenson’s “manuscripts” at the Dickinson Electronic Archives.

By describing some of the most prevalent types of electronic literature and showing examples of each, this lecture lays the foundation for an understanding of electronic literature as a nascent literary form in order that you will become more familiar with it. Thus, this lecture begins with the assumption that the form is worthy of a sustained academic study. From that vantage point it seeks to inform you about the genre at large and offers insights into the types of electronic literature and representative works presented. I conclude with comments about the future of electronic literature and the manner in which it is currently organized and discussed. Your comments and insights into the works you study are most welcome.

Types of Electronic Literature and Examples

To date, the ELO has painstakingly catalogued over 2000 examples of electronic literary works, dividing them into two distinct categories. The first category, entitled “Genre / Length,” resembles terms used by print-based literature, such as “Poetry,” “Fiction,” “Drama,” and “Nonfiction.” The works are further broken down into “short,” “long,” and “collection.”

The second category, the one studied in this lecture, is called “Technique / Genre” and contains eight “types” of literature. In the Directory’s first iteration, these categories included “Hypertext/Other Interaction,” “Recorded Reading/Performance,” “Animated Text,” “Other Multimedia,” “Extensive Graphics,” “Generated Text,” and “Reader Collaboration.” In recent months, however, archivists of the site have rethought these categories. Changes include separating “Hypertext” from “Other Interaction” and switching the name “Extensive Graphics” to “Prominent Graphics.” It has also added a category called “Audio/Animation/Video.” So young is the field of study that even its organization and structure is in flux. Remaining the same, however, is the way the category is further delineated into traditional genres–– “Poetry,” “Fiction,” “Drama,” “Nonfiction.” Despite the goal in the recent restructuring to make the categories fit the work more precisely, the categories are still extremely broad, and as you will see, many of the works defy being easily placed in them––so many are listed in several categories simultaneously. The crux of the problem is that much of the literature mixes media, utilizing not just one but several approaches or techniques. Thus, scholars are hard-pressed to be too specific either in naming or defining the work. Further, this general approach may also be an attempt to simplify and narrow down the many different genres that have emerged over these past thirteen years yet, at the same time, be more inclusive with what it identifies as electronic literature, a reason that may explain why the archivists do not offer a definition of each of the genres it identifies. Nonetheless, if taken as a guideline rather than an “official line,” the site with its categories offers a starting place for developing an understanding of electronic literature.

Hypertext

The first category, “Hypertext,” focuses on works that utilize hypertext links and require audience participation––that is, some type of non-trivial activity that helps the work unfold in its telling. The interpretation of what these characteristics mean is broad and can vary from poetry presented as linear text linked to one another in succession as in David Hunter Sutherland’s “Five Poems” ()

to long, graphically-rich prose requiring a high degree of interaction from the reader and containing a complex organization of intratextual links like M.D. Coverley’s novel-in-progress, The Book of Going Forth by Day () to disarmingly simple hypertexts like Patricia Monaghan’s “Examination” ().

Besides hypertext, Monahan’s poem utilizes many characteristics of electronic textuality like sound, animation, and prominent graphics. What the reader discovers when approaching the work is that it begins with a series of ten questions like one may see on a physics test focusing on the basic principles of chaos theory. Clicking on each question produces a poetic “response.” These responses shift and move in unpredictable ways across the screen. The music playing in the background is repetitive and moving, seeming at first to have little to do with an academic “test.” When the reader comes to the last question, a shift occurs. “How turbulent is the heart?” makes it apparent that the examination is not really just about the chaos theory underlying physical phenomena of our world but also about the turbulence underlying human emotion, a force so great and unknown that its answers cannot come in neat formulae or be assessed objectively. Because the question posed is highly personal and subjective, the reader is forced to reevaluate the previous nine questions and their responses, and, in doing so, see the way they pertain to what is suggested in the tenth. The work deceives in its organization and drives the message home with graphics and sound. In doing so, it sets up the reader to experience, firsthand, the blurring of the boundaries of objectivity and subjectivity and serves as a reminder about the complexity of the human heart.

Reader Collaboration

“Reader Collaboration” involves the reader in some meaningful way in the creation of the work. This intervention differs from the reader involvement found in the works of “Hypertext” in that in the latter, reader moves the work––already written––along some particular path of choice, while in the former, the reader is required for the work to reach some level of completion. Examples of work found in this category include Klaus-dieter Michel’s “Chemical Cake” (), which functions like a game whereby readers collect a series of cakes; or Tom Bell’s “My Gut” (), which simulates post cards readers can “send” via email.

Jennifer Ley’s “Our Digital Lascaux” () is a collaboration of eighteen electronic artists who join Ley on an exploration to see “if one of the reasons some members of the digital literati wrap themselves in earlier, earthier metaphor is to fight the disembodied ‘manyness’ of the net.” Using the mysterious Caves of Lascaux as the metaphor for “ambiguous spaces” that offer “both protection and shelter,” the artists reflect upon their participation in the development of art in electronic spaces, drawing the reader into their musings through interaction and reader collaboration.

The opening screen for Ley’s work begins with a vertical list of search engines found on the web. The sentence beneath it reads: “the place we go to record our hunts.” To move to the next screen, the reader must click on the word “hunts.” From there a new screen appears, completing the previous sentence: “where we tangle with the modern day mammoth.” Words at the bottom left of that screen begin a refrain found elsewhere in Ley’s work: “like a small burrrr on the back of something muscular and virile I do not want to let go.” Moving through Ley’s work, the reader confronts the reality that the artists themselves have faced: We are all drawn into the electronic environment like the hunters and gatherers of yore. Despite the millennia that have passed since the caves were used by humans, the human predilection for these activities has not changed. Rather, they have moved into other spaces––virtual ones, but no less real, geographically developed, or frightening.

Other Interaction

“Other Interaction” is a category that defies easy identification. Like “Hypertext,” it incorporates multiple components of the electronic environment but with one difference: The focus seems to be on unique techniques requiring a high level of reader participation/intervention not necessarily found elsewhere in other types of electronic literature. For example, Diane Greco’s “London Eye” () combines animated images of computer screens and text, providing the reader the opportunity to follow the speaker along a story line taking place in the UK and the US.

Of those included in this type, Diana Slattery’s Glide: An Interactive Exploration of Visual Language () serves as a good example. It is described by the ELO as “long fiction in English” using “audio, animated text, hypertext, other interaction and extensive graphics.” Actually, Glide itself does not exist as a literary work but as a companion site for a print-based novel in which Glide exists as a special language. The novel, entitled The Maze Game, centers on a future civilization whose members attain immortality. The few who do not are forced to entertain the immortals in a game enacted as a dance on a maze, an act that ultimately results in their deaths. The underlying question driving both site and novel is, “What does it mean to move through a maze of language?” (Glide). In effect, the work explores the notion of a visual language, one that Slattery sees as a natural outgrowth of evolutionary intellectual progress in humankind (“Slattery Interview”).

The Glide site suggests or contains numerous literary and technical forms––novel, game, interpreter, and editor. The novel, though not included with the other components found at the site, can be purchased through regular bookstore channels. However, available for free from the site is its first chapter. The game manifests as the reader’s navigation through the various components of the site and in the game the “death dancers” play in the novel. The interpreter exists as an interactive “Oracle” that interprets the Glide language glyphs found in the novel and at the site and acts as an “interactive extension of the fictional world of The Maze Game.” Finally, the Glide glyph editor called the “Collabyrinth” helps the reader communicat[e] with and about Glide signs” with other readers in real-time at the site (Glide).

Recorded Reading/Performance

While many of the works in the category, “Recorded Reading/Performance,” are not examples of electronic literature but rather digitalized print literature for the electronic medium like Emily Dickinson’s poem “#288” (“I’m Nobody! Who Are You?”) read by a student for the Favorite Poems Project and live performances of writers reading or enacting their print-based or electronic works, like the video of Joy Harjo reading her poem, “Fishing;” some do represent electronic literary works with an audio component that enhances the unfolding of the work.

One particular work that stands from this last area out is Christy Sheffield Sanford’s “Red Mona” () an adaptation[ii] of Guy de Maupassant’s “Two Little Soldiers,” a story about two soldiers, Luc and Jean, who are befriended by a local village girl. Sunday after Sunday they see her walking her cow until one day they speak to her. In time, she joins them on their Sunday picnics, sharing some of her cow’s milk with them. Later, she secretly takes up with Luc. When Jean realizes his friend’s involvement with the girl, he kills himself by jumping off the bridge he and his friend had so often shared on their walks together to see the girl.

Sanford’s story upends de Maupassant’s by focusing, instead, on the nameless woman, whom Sanford calls Simone de Milo––a play on the name of the mythical seductress Venus. Like the half-draped statue of the voluptuous goddess, Simone, or Mona, draws men with her body and its “feminine accoutrements.” The plot, told in a combination of prose and poetry in a style Sanford calls “mixed genre,” unfolds on fifty French language flash cards. Each card carries a series of images relating to the narrative and the word or phrase to be “learned.” Upon close examination, the word or phrase slyly forms the theme of the card––or piece of the narrative––and, ultimately, helps to develop the story. The “Recorded Reading/Performance” aspect of the work is also subtle: When readers click on the card, they hear the French phrase read aloud, thus hearing the haunting voice of the female speaker and being forced into a verbal relationship with her. The flash card, “Je suis” or I am, for example, takes the reader into Mona’s character. Just as de Maupassant portrays her, this Mona lists herself as a “mistress, hostess, governess, thief, teacher, lady, and sweetheart.” This message is underscored by the fractured image of a faceless woman wearing sexy black gloves. Other words on the card mentions the “cow” the girl “herd[s],” the fact that she wants to “teach botany”––an allusion to de Maupassant’s “wall of leaves” she and Luc “disappeared” into (de Maupassant)––and hints to Mona’s “superior” position as “mistress,” a power that easily destroys the long friendship between the two soldiers.

Animated Text

For the most part, “Animated Text” includes works that highlight the movement, appearance, or disappearance of words without the addition of images or sound, like Tan Lin’s kinetic poem, “The Edge of Summer Cleans Autumn” (); or utilize movement with graphics and sound along with words, like Thom Swiss’ “Shy Boy” ().One that unites words and image into a single narrative element is the “concrete-visual poem,” “Strings” () by Dan Wabar.

Waber himself calls this work a “Flash project,” referring to the software he used to create the work. It is divided into eight parts, entitled “Argument,” “Argument2,” “Flirt,” “Flirt (cntd.),” “Haha,” “Youandme,” “Arms,” and “Poidog.” Each of these eight smaller poems are linked to one another in succession. The titles of each represent a one-word theme that the animated string, producing the “word-image,” explores. The movement of the string serves to flesh out that theme in a highly kinetic way. For example, in “Arms” the string expands and, then, contracts into first the word “Your.” This movement simulates the action one would have to take physically in order to hug someone. Next, the string stretches out again to form the word, “arms.” From this word the string moves into the shape of a circle that turns twice––a repetitive movement that serves to emphasize the motion of encircling or hugging someone. It shifts finally into the word, “me.” What is striking about this use of word and image is that they are seamlessly incorporated into the message of the work. In effect, Waber relies on the arrangement of word-image to drive home the point of the theme visually. Thus, the work expresses its message with a minimal amount of text and is highly kinetic, showing words and images as active agents in the expression of meaning.

Other Audio/Video/Animation

This new category involves literary works that unfold through animation or video and incorporate sound as a significant element. Also important to note is the level of reader intervention required. Some works, like Young-Hae Chang Heavy Industries’ “The Inland Sea” () and Adrian Miles’ “Video Blog::Vog” (), require no nontrivial activity––the reader can sit back and watch the work unfold; while others, like Talan Memmot’s “Lexia to Perplexia” (), necessitate the reader to actively participate in the work in order for it to unfold.

John Kusch’s poem, “Red Lily” (), follows the former style with its filmic quality and stands out for its effective use of sound to enhance the words and images. Taking place in three musical movements, the poem begins with the words, “As a child I envied how each living thing lets blood decide,” superimposed on a black screen. The music, a percussive remix in a slow methodical tempo like a heart beating or a bell tolling, fades in. Music and words meet rhythmically. The repetition of key ideas in the words of the poem and the motifs in the music reveal the themes of life and death. The black screen gives way to the second movement. With this shift an image of a little girl lying on the grass gazing at ducklings appears. Hers is the stuff of life. We read: “The heart meets itself like two hands.” The music playing in a loop leads us to the notion of the cycles of life. Repetition is emphasis for both words and music. As other lines of the poem fade in and out with the words, we catch “live,” “blood,” “rhythm.” The melody continues to flow. Its rhythm does not vary. The second movement ends with the admonition that, “There is no decision.” It moves toward you as if to confront and then vanishes. An image of a calla lily, a symbol of death, set against a blood red background fades in. We are in the third movement, and the theme has shifted to death: “The ear is merely bent toward blood or away.“ As in O’Keefe’s images of flowers, this lily is sexual. The words carry the meaning further with, “You are my lily, just drained or about to be filled. “ Up until this point, the poem, with its haunting melody, seemed an elegy, but with these words, we realize that the life and death the poet alludes to are that which comes with a painful love. The words tell us, “Lilies are pure, white but yours is the homing pigeon, the plunging needle, the full red glass.” Birds fated to return from where they fly combined with needles and bloody wine hint to a this terrible truth about some love: It at times can be anything but pleasurable. The poem ends with the chilling line, “You are certain as blood.” While brief and disarmingly simple, the poem draws the reader into this strange paean not to innocent love but to a “red lily,” a love experienced in misery and heartache.

Prominent Graphics

Where sound and kinesthetic elements figure as overarching elements in “Other Audio/Video/Animation,” the visual stand out in “Prominent Graphics.” The reader finds works ranging from Lewis LaCook’s interactive poem “Saint Louis” () to Deena Larsen’s mystery “Disappearing Rain” ().

One particular work that offers extensive graphics to enhance the narrative is the long poem, The Ballad of Sand and Harry Soot () by Stephanie Strickland. Originally a print-based poem that won the 1999 Boston Review Poetry Prize, the electronic version has been expanded to include hypertext functionality with four different reading paths. So while a primary reading of both versions tells the story of the unrequited love between the two title characters, Sand and Harry Soot, the electronic version opens up a secondary reading about the notion of navigating, of moving, about knowing how to proceed in life––in relationships, in choices, and in goals.

In talking about the use of extensive graphics, Jaishree Odin describes the images as “algorithmic art, webcams, scale-inversion experiments, hyperbolic geometry, digital sand etchings and so on.” In particular, many of them are taken from the Ho, a collaboration” between Jean-Pierre Hebert and Bruce Shapiro––“digital etchings” from the Sisyphus Project. According to Odin, borrowing these images from this project, Strickland was trying to recapture the notion put forward by Albert Camus that the essence of Sisyphus’ experience was “the moment of full awareness or consciousness . . . the moment [the god] overcomes his fate.” In much of the same way, Sand and Harry Soot become aware of their own beings while in the struggle with one another. Images relating to Sand are also taken from Ana Voog’s “Goldshow” and are sensual representations of a woman’s body. Taken together, “the images don't represent what is stated in the verses; rather the images express visually the forces and relations embodied in the verses” (Odin).

Generated Text

The final category, “Generated Text,” contains works that rely on either human-machine interaction (HCI) or the computer acting alone to create works that calculate, decipher, compute, parse, or arrange. “Ad Verbum” (), Nick Montfort’s short fiction reminiscent of the kind of text generated in MUD environments, and “Mad Frost” (), George Hartley’s work derived from words readers use to fill in the blanks of a form and that result in the production of a poem in the style of Robert Frost, are examples of the former method of production. Neil Hennessy’s “Jabber: The Jabberwocky Engine” () provides one of the best examples of the latter.

Described as a short poem that uses also extensive graphics, “Jabber” generates nonsense words that remind the reader of Lewis Carroll’s poem, “Jabberwocky.” When looking at the opening screen, readers see a White Box with green, blue, and red single letters or chunks of letters, floating around randomly. At the bottom of the box are two buttons” Restart and Output. Clicking on Output provides a list of words that show up in its own box in the middle of the White Box; clicking on Restart, allows the reader to begin again in the creation of the list of words.

According to the directions found below the White Box, the computer program “calculate[s]” the letters and chunks as they collide with one another to produce the words. Rules govern how these letters and chunks behave, such as blue words are “word fragments (or entire words),” green words are “compound words created from two blues ones,” and red words are “garbage words that will explode.” Experiencing the work for themselves, readers may generate a list of words not unlike this one: bote, creocisn, curinc, prec, dolises. In commenting about the work, Hennessy states that “’Jabber’ realises a linguistic chemistry with letters as atoms and words as molecules.”

Conclusion

In closing, some thoughts come to mind about electronic literature and how it fits into the current literary climate. The approach the ELO has taken in naming and organizing the work can easily be explained away as a logical outgrowth of the postmodern debate that has arisen in the print-based realm about what constitutes “Literature” but for two issues. First, that a literary form that, by its very design and presentation, defies conventions of the print medium and traditional readerly or writerly practices should, in the end, be called “Literature” and even saddled with those conventions seems highly ironic. Second, that the terms given to these works do not always match what the authors themselves have identified as the genre they are working in or the names widely circulated on the web and elsewhere for them. Terms like “Flash poetry” or “concrete-visual” poem, used to describe Dan Waber’s works, for example, have been subsumed by larger, more general category of “Animated Text.” What seem to be at work are forces underlying the development of a discipline with all of the ensuing accoutrements: a legitimate canon and a common language for discussing and critiquing its work.

These comments are not intended as a complaint about the ELO’s approach; rather, it is merely an observation made by a scholar who has long read and enjoyed electronic literature and is happy for having lived in the time of its development and organization. The truth is, however, what these works will be called by future generations of readers, scholars, and artists and how they will be created, viewed, assessed and understood are really anyone’s guess. Try as scholars may to “pin the proverbial butterfly” when talking about electronic literature, the speed at which technology is changing and developing leaves the potential of this kind of work open-ended and, so, hard to predict.

Endnotes

-----------------------

[i] Electronic literature is defined by The Electronic Literature Organization as “new forms of literature which utilize the capabilities of technology to do things that cannot be done in print. This encompasses a wide range of genres.” As shown in this paper, the ELO defies its own definition of the genre by making allowances for print-based digital literature in the category they have named “Recorded Reading/Performance.”

[ii] Adaptation describes Sanford’s treatment of de Maupassant’s story better than version does. A version occurs when “certain parts of the story have been changed or even left out.” There are actually two types of versions: authorial versions and editorial versions. In either case, it must show considerable differences from the original text. Alexander Pope’s Odyssey exemplifies, for example, an authorial version because so much of the story has been modified to suit Pope’s own taste and views. An adaptation, on the other hand, is a work moved from one form into another, as in a novel adapted for film. Since elements of the narrative have not only been modified but the form and structure in which it is told have also been expanded from text-based to include images and sound and reconceptualized from a linear telling to randomization, the term adaptation seems more appropriate.

Works Cited

Andrews, Jim. 1999. “A.” ELO Directory. . March 20,

2004.

Bell, Tom. 2000. “My Gut.” ELO Directory.

. March 20, 2004.

Coverley, M.D. nd. The Book of Going Forth by Day. ELO Directory.

. March 20, 2004.

Maupassant, Guy de. 2000. “Two Little Soldiers.” The Literature Network.

. July 23, 2003.

Dickinson Electronic Archives. Martha Nell Smith, Ellen Louise Hart, Marta

Werner, and Lara Vetter, Eds. 2000.

. July 23, 2003.

Dickinson, Emily. 1997. “I’m Nobody! Who Are You?” Favorite Poems Project.

ELO Directory. . July 23

2003.

Electronic Literature Organization (ELO). 2001. .

March 20, 2004.

Grigar, Dene. “Slattery Interview.” Forthcoming Iowa Review Web. October 2003.

. March

20, 2004.

Harjo, Joy. 1994. “Fishing.” ELO Directory.

. July 23, 2003.

Hartley, George. nd. “Mad Frost.” ELO Directory.

. March 20,

2004.

Hayles, N. Katherine. Writing Machines. Boston: MIT Press, 2002.

Hennessy, Neil. 2001. “Jabber: The Jabberwocky Engine.” ELO Directory.

. March 20, 2004.

Joyce, Micheal. afternoon: a story. Watertown, MA: Eastgate Systems, 1989.

CD-ROM.

*Kusch, John. “Red Lily.” ELO Directory.

. March 20,

2004.

Ley, Jennifer. 2000. “Our Digital Lascaux.” ELO Directory.

. March 20, 2004.

Lin, Tan. nd. “The Edge of Summer Cleans Autumn.” ELO Directory.

. March 20, 2004.

Memmot, Talan. 2000. “Lexia to Perplexia.” ELO Directory.

. March 20, 2004.

Michel, Klaus-dieter. 2002. “Chemical Cake.” ELO Directory.

. March 20, 2004.

Miles, Adrian. 2002. “Video Blog::Vog.” ELO Directory.

< .

html>. March 20, 2004.

Monaghan, Patricia. nd. “Examination.” ELO Directory.

. March 20, 2004.

Montfort, Nick. 2000. “Ad Verbum.” ELO Directory.

. March 20, 2004.

The Perseus Digital Library. 1997. . July

23, 2003.

Sanford, Christy Sheffield. 1995. “Red Mona.” ELO Directory.

. March 20, 2004.

Slattery, Diana Reed. 2000. Glide: An Interactive Exploration of Visual

Language. ELO Directory. .

March 20, 2004.

Strickland, Stephanie. 1999. The Ballad of Sand and Harry Soot. ELO

Directory. .

March 20, 2004.

Sutherland, David Hunter. 1998. “Five Poems.” ELO Directory.

. March 20, 2004.

Swiss, Thom. 2002. “Shy Boy.” ELO Directory.

. March 20, 2004.

TrAce Online Writing Centre. . March 20, 2004.

Wabar, Dan. nd. “Strings.” ELO Directory.

. March 20, 2004.

Young-Hae Chang Heavy Industries. “The Inland Sea.” ELO Directory.

. March 20, 2004.

................
................

In order to avoid copyright disputes, this page is only a partial summary.

Google Online Preview   Download