Electronic literature

Electronic literature or digital literature is a genre of literature encompassing works created exclusively on and for digital devices, such as computers, tablets, and mobile phones. A work of electronic literature can be defined as "a construction whose literary aesthetics emerge from computation", "work that could only exist in the space for which it was developed/written/coded—the digital space". This means that these writings cannot be easily printed, or cannot be printed at all, because elements crucial to the text are unable to be carried over onto a printed version.
Definitions
N. Katherine Hayles defines electronic literature as "'digital born' (..) and (usually) meant to be read on a computer", clarifying that this does not include e-books and digitised print literature. A definition offered by the Electronic Literature Organization (ELO) states electronic literature "refers to works with an important literary aspect that takes advantage of the capabilities and contexts provided by the stand-alone or networked computer". This can include hypertext fiction, animated poetry (often called kinetic poetry) and other forms of digital poetry, literary chatbots, computer-generated narratives or poetry, art installations with significant literary aspects, interactive fiction and literary uses of social media.
The definition of electronic literature is controversial within the field, with strict definitions being criticised for excluding valuable works, and looser definitions being so murky as to be useless. Scott Rettberg argues that an advantage of a wide definition is its flexibility, which allows it to include new genres as new platforms and modes of literature emerge.
History
Precursors
Scholars have discussed a range of pre-digital precursors to electronic literature, from the ancient Chinese book the I Ching, to John Clark's mechanical Latin Verse Machine (1830-1843) to the Dadaist movement's cut-up technique. Print novels that were designed to be read non-linearly, such as Julio Cortázar's Hopscotch and Nabokov's Pale Fire (1962), are cited as "print antecedents" of electronic literature.
1950s
The 1952 love letter generator that the British computer scientist Christopher Strachey wrote for the Manchester Mark 1 computer is probably the first example of literature that requires a computer to be generated or read. The work generates short love letters, and is an example of combinatory poetry, also called generative poetry. The original code has been lost, but digital poet Nick Montfort has reimplemented it based on remaining documentation of its output, and this version can be viewed in a web browser.
In 1959 the German computer scientist Theo Lutz's wrote [[Stochastic Texts]], which "for many years was considered the first digital literary text." Lutz wrote a program on a Z22 computer that "produced random short sentences based on a corpus of chapter titles and subjects from Franz Kafka's The Castle". Lutz's work has been discussed both as a very early work of electronic literature and as an important precursor to current AI-generated literature. Hannes Bajohr writes that Stochastic Texts is an example of the "sequential paradigm" in generative literature, in opposition to newer examples of a "connectionist paradigm": "Instead of hoping to recreate intuition, genius, or expression, it is the logic of the machine itself, that is, the logic of deterministically executed rule steps, that becomes aesthetically normative in the 'Stochastische Texte.'"
1960s
The 1960s were a time of literary experimentation, and there were strong connections between the art and technology scenes and concrete poetry.
Nanni Balestrini's poem Tape Mark I was composed in 1961 on an IBM 7070, and output from the poetry generator was published in a special issue of a journal edited by Umberto Eco and Bruno Munari, thus standing as the first Italian work of electronic literature. Auto-Beatnik (1961)was a program by R. M. Worthy that generated poems on an LGP-30 computer to mimic the style of Beat poetry.
Mabel Addis and William McKay's text-based narrative game The Sumerian Game was probably the first narrative computer game, although it was not widely distributed. Joseph Weizenbaum programmed the chatbot ELIZA in 1966, establishing a new genre of conversational literary artefacts or bots.
1970s
Writers and artists continued to experiment with combining art, technology and literature. An example is the installation Blikk (1970) by a Norwegian trio: artist Irma Salo Jæger, composer Sigurd Berge and poet Jan Erik Vold. Vold's readings of his poems were mixed as sound montages by Berge and combined with Jægers kinetic sculptures in an exhibition at the Henie Onstad Art Center. The work was recreated in 2022 by Jøran Rudi and is now part of the permanent collection of the Norwegian National Museum.
Another important development in the 1970s was the popular emergence of text adventure games, now more commonly known as interactive fiction. In 1975–76, Will Crowther programmed a text game named Colossal Cave Adventure (also known as Adventure or ADVENT). It possessed a story that had the reader make choices on which way to go. These choices could lead the reader to the end, or to his or her untimely death. Adventure is often called the first work of interactive fiction, although others have argued that the simulated microworld SHRDLU or Mabel Addis's The Sumerian Game were earlier and should be considered interactive fiction. Historians agree that Colossal Cave Adventure made a "significant cultural impact" in the 1970s. It has been called a "classic" "so foundational it started a genre", "the Gilgamesh of video games", and is credited with having "informed and inspired generations of players." Colossal Cave Adventure was played on mainframe computers, and spread rapidly through the ARPANET. Colossal Cave inspired many other games, the text adventure game, Zork, being one of the best known.
1980s
With the advent of personal computers, interactive fiction became a commercially successful genre, driven by companies like Infocom. Companies hired authors and programmers to write text adventure games, as Veronika Megler, who wrote The Hobbit in 1982, describes in an interview with The Guardian.
For hypertext fiction and digital poetry, the eighties were a time of experimentation in separate pockets. American hypertext author Stuart Moulthrop described discovering Judy Malloy's work at this time, "Yeah, alright, oh darn that's good. Oh, we're not that good. (..) I can remember coming away from that moment thinking that, you know, there might be a real hope for what we were trying to do because other people were doing it".
Canadian poet Bp Nichol published "First Screening: Computer Poems", written in BASIC, in 1984. Judy Malloy published Uncle Roger on The WELL in 1986/87. Michael Joyce's Afternoon, a story was demonstrated at a conference, and was then published by Eastgate Systems.
Digital artists also created works with strong literary components that have had an influence on the field of electronic literature. An example is Jeremy Shaw's The Legible City (1989).
1990s
The "Storyspace school" characterised the early 1990s, consisting of works created using Storyspace, software developed by Jay David Bolter and Michael Joyce in the 1980s. They sold the software in 1990 to Eastgate Systems, a small software company that has maintained and updated the code in Storyspace up to the present. Storyspace and similar programs use hypertext to create links within text. Literature using hypertext is frequently referred to as hypertext fiction. Originally, these stories were often disseminated on discs and later on CD-ROM. Hypertext fiction is still being created today using not only Storyspace, but other programs such as Twine.
Key works from this period include Stuart Moulthrop's Victory Garden, Shelley Jackson's Patchwork Girl (1995) and Deena Larsen's work.
Towards the middle of the decade, authors began writing on the web. Stuart Moulthrop's Hegirascope was published in 1995. Early web-based hypertext fictions include Olia Lialina's My Boyfriend Came Back from the War, Adrienne Eisen's Six Sex Scenes and Robert Arellano's Sunshine '69, all published in 1996. Scott Rettberg, William Gillespie, Dirk Stratton, and Frank Marquadt's sprawling hypertext novel The Unknown won the trAce/Alt-X Hypertext Competition in 1998. It was also featured in the Electronic Literature Collection Vol. 2, and has been analysed by a number of scholars.
The Electronic Literature Organization was founded in 1999 by Scott Rettberg, Robert Coover and Jeff Ballowe, and is still active today, with annual conferences, online discussions and publications.
2000s
In Japan, cell phone novels became popular from the early 2000s. Similar genres emerged in other countries where text messaging was well-established, including India and Europe. The first work of Indian electronic literature is probably the 2004 SMS novel Cloak Room, whose author used the pseudonym RoGue. Cloak Room invited readers to engage with the story by answering texts or leaving comments on the blog that was used in tandem with the text messages.
In North America the web was becoming the main platform for electronic literature. Caitlin Fisher's These Waves of Girls (2001) was a hypermedia novella telling stories of girlhood, using images and sounds as well as links and text. Talan Memmott's Lexia to Perplexia (2000) offered complex visual and textual layers that sometimes confuse and occlude themselves, and is described by Lisa Swanstrom as a "beautifully intricate piece of electronic literature".
Kate Pullinger's Inanimate Alice is an example of a work that began as a web novel and then saw versions across several media, including a screenplay and a VR experience. Works like The Impermanence Agent, by Noah Wardrip-Fruin and collaborators, explored the web's ability to customise a story for the reader.
An analysis of 44 PhD dissertations about electronic literature published between 2002 and 2013 found a clear shift in the genres referenced by the authors of the dissertations during this period. Between 2002 and 2008, the referenced works clustered in four distinct genre groups: interactive fiction, generative literature, classic hypertext fiction (mostly published on disk or in print) and web hypertexts, including more experimental works and some poetry.
Blog fiction and fan fiction are born-digital literary genres that also became popular in this period. Blog fictions have been a particularly popular genre of electronic literature in Africa. The literary orality of blogs has also been analysed as a feature of African American blogs.
2010s
The spread of smartphones and tablets led to literary works that explored the touchscreen, such as Samantha Gorman and Danny Cannizarro's Pry (2014) or Kate Pullinger's Breathe: A Ghost Story.
Netprov, improvisational and collaborative networked writing was another genre that developed during the 2000s and 2010s, with projects like #1WkNoTech. Instapoetry, a visual style of poetry native to Instagram became a popular success.
The web-based hypertext authoring tool Twine became increasingly popular this decade. This "Twine revolution" led to a resurgence of interactive fiction and hypertext, which now became "a mainstream form of literary game production and interaction". Notable works written in Twine that are frequently discussed as electronic literature include Anna Anthropy's Queers in Love at the End of the World (2013) and Dan Hett's autobiographical C ya laterrrr about losing his brother in the Manchester Arena bombing (2017).
As machine learning made rapid advances with natural language processing and deep learning, authors began to experiment and write with the AI. David Jhave Johnston's ReRites is an example of this new kind of generative literature and is a poetic work written as a human-AI collaboration.
Dissertations published between 2009 and 2013 still cite many works in the genres of hypertext fiction, interactive fiction, experimental webtexts and generative texts, but digital poetry also emerged as a significant genre, with dissertation authors writing about two distinct clusters of digital poetry: kinetic poetry and poetic installations in art galleries. Many of these works were from the 1980s to the early 2000s, so this may indicate an uptake in scholarly interest rather than a large change in what kinds of creative works were actually published in the 2010s.
Scholarship
Hypertext and cybertext
Digital literature tends to require a user to traverse through the literature through the digital setting, making the use of the medium part of the literary exchange. Espen J. Aarseth wrote in his book Cybertext: Perspectives on Ergodic Literature that "it is possible to explore, get lost, and discover secret paths in these texts, not metaphorically, but through the topological structures of the textual machinery". Espen Aarseth defines "ergodic literature" as literature where "nontrivial effort is required to allow the reader to traverse the text".
Historical research
Various histories of electronic literature and its subgenera have been written. Scott Rettberg's Electronic Literature provides a broad overview, while more specialised books discuss the history of specific genres or periods, like Chris Funkhouser's Prehistoric Digital Poetry and Astrid Ensslin's Pre-web Digital Publishing and the Lore of Electronic Literature.
Leonardo Flores proposes a generational understanding of electronic literature, where the first generation is pre-web, the second uses the web, and the third generation uses social media, web APIs and mobile devices. However, not all works fit within this structure, as Spencer Jordan notes, writing that "A work such as The Unknown, for example, sits uneasily between second and third generation definitions."
Preservation and archiving
Electronic literature, according to Hayles, becomes unplayable after a decade or less due to the "fluid nature of media". Therefore, electronic literature risks losing the opportunity to build the "traditions associated with print literature".
Several organizations are dedicated to preserving works of electronic literature. The UK-based Digital Preservation Coalition aims to preserve digital resources in general, while the Electronic Literature Organization's PAD (Preservation / Archiving / Dissemination) initiative gave recommendations on how to think ahead when writing and publishing electronic literature, as well as how to migrate works running on defunct platforms to current technologies. The British Library archives winners of the New Media Writing Prize in the UK Web Archive. The NEXT, run by Dene Grigar for the Electronic Literature Organization, hosts source files and documentation of many works of electronic literature and digital writing.
The Electronic Literature Collection is a series of anthologies of electronic literature published by the Electronic Literature Organization, both on CD/DVD and online, and this is another strategy in working to make sure that electronic literature is available for future generations.
The Maryland Institute for Technologies in the Humanities and the Electronic Literature Lab at Washington State University Vancouver also work towards the documentation and preservation of electronic literature and hypermedia. In Canada, the Laboratory NT2 hosts research and a database on electronic literature and digital art.
Databases and directories
The Electronic Literature Knowledge Base (ELMCIP) is a research resource for electronic literature, with 3,851 entries as of September 2, 2022.
The Electronic Literature Organization's The NEXT Museum hosts 38 collections of digital art and writing as of September 2, 2022.
The Electronic Literature Directory
NT2: Le laboratoire de recherche sur les oeuvres hypermédiatiques
African Electronic Literature Alliance & African Diasporic Electronic Literature (AELA & ADELI)
Major awards
Annual awards for electronic literature include the Electronic Literature Organization awards and the New Media Writing Prize.
See also
List of electronic literature authors, critics, and works
Cybertext
Digital poetry
Generative art (section Literature)
Hypermedia
Interactive fiction
Literatronica
References
Literary genres
New media
Electronic literature works