Electronic Literature: Discourses, Communities, Traditions

1 Electronic Literature: Discourses, Communities, Traditions Thomas Swiss "Technology has put art to the rout." David Lehman, The Last Avant-Garde, 1999 "For a long time everybody refuses and then almost without pause almost everybody accepts." Gertrude Stein, "Composition as Explanation," 1926 To hear the critics tell it, one problem with emergent digital literary and art forms is that they don't yet have established stars. Where's our Shakespeare of the Screen? Our Pixel Picasso? How long before we have a Digital DeMille? The assumption is that we’ll have them eventually -- undisputed geniuses working in what is now generally called “New Media.” But behind this assumption is another assumption, one with a long, sometimes thorny history – that the “best” or “most important” art is created by an individual, a single pair of hands in the study or studio. As a poet, I began my own collaborative, Web-based work with visual and sound artists several years ago – with a sense that the opportunities and demands of Web-based poetry, like many other New Media practices, have their roots in the shared notion of community that was integral to the development of internet. I was also increasingly interested in what Hal Foster calls “the twin obsessions of the neo-avant garde”: temporality and textuality. 1 Web-based poems -- especially 2 those involving links, animation, and attention to the pictoral elements of writing -- suggest novel approaches to thinking about time and the text. -- Thomas Swiss and Skye Giordano, “Genius,” 2000 -- Collaborative work redefines artistic labor in what is for me new and complicated ways: what is the relationship, for example, between my language and the images and sounds others create, even if under my “direction”? How do the images and sound “change” the meaning of the language (and vice versa) and in what ways can the piece be said to still be a “poem”? Collaboration allows writers and artists -- like myself and those I compose with -- to reconsider both our work and our identities, to literally see them anew, as we move from individual to composite subjectivity. Yet while the art world has sometimes been open to collaborative work – in the long shadow of Duchamp’s experiments with Man Ray, the shared labor of producing art in Warhol’s Factory, the many hands 3 needed to make a film -- the literature world has always had a hard time accepting collaborative work, even in our digital age. Hybridity With the advent of digital technologies, new forms of electronic writing challenge already-contested terms such as "literature" and "text" and further complicate boundaries between literary genres. What is electronic literature? As Margorie Luesebrink notes, it is a concept still slouching toward definition.2 Among those who regard literature as a form of essential and authentic experience, there is a persistent historical tendency to vilify "technology" -including computer-based digital technologies -- as a corrupting force. Alternatively, among those who champion the use of technology in the creation of literature, the tendency has been to glorify it as a form of liberation for both writers and audiences alike.3 Among writers and critics in both camps, their narratives embody profound desires, hopes, anxieties and fears about digitallybased literature. These narratives have less to do with "technology" and more to do with "culture"-- in this case, literary culture. They are a response to the growing electronic literature community that in complex ways -- in addition to the everquickening development of digital technologies, more powerful authoring software, and increasingly sophisticated work -- brings together artists, graphic designers, sound technicians, musicians, and computer programmers. This new community constitutes an artistic underground, an avant-garde literary movement that alternately challenges and ignores the institutional apparatus for "traditional" or "mainstream" literature.4 In the broadest sense, electronic literature includes all writing that is produced in digital form. This would include everything from the reproduction 4 of, say, Shakespeare's plays on the Web, to Sylvia Plath's poems reproduced for reading on newly-developed electronic devices such as the Rocket e-Book. It would also include Stephen King's novel, The Plant, which was downloaded from the Internet and paid for by readers in installments, starting in the summer of 2000. King's experiment brought a lot of public attention to developments in digital technology, to their impact on the materiality of texts, and to the economics of publishing. His high-profile (and seemingly successful) venture suggested a powerful new publishing model that dispenses with both traditional publishing "houses" and even with "the book" itself. It is not surprising, then, that in the second half of 2000, publishing companies like Random House and Time-Warner rushed to set up electronic publishing divisions -- planning to compete not only with each other, but also, in some cases, even with "their own" authors. More narrowly and currently less visible, another category of electronic literature is "hyper-textual" — literature meant to be read on a computer screen (not printed out, as the King novel typically was), and characterized by multiple links from pages or sections, multi-linear structures, and recursive loops. Hypertextual literature, which is primarily or exclusively language-based, generally employs temporal or spatial organizational styles that fall outside the conventions of most print texts. The best-known, most widely circulated literary hypertexts continue to be published by a small company in Maine called Eastgate Systems. Eastgate has been producing, for fifteen years now, disk-based and CD-based hypertexts such as the widely-reviewed Patchwork Girl (1995) by Shelly Jackson, afternoon: a story (1990) by Michael Joyce, and Victory Garden (1991) by Stuart Moulthrop. But hyper-textual literature -- or what Katherine Hayles, following Umberto Eco, calls "open work" -- has been available on the Web, too, for the last half dozen years.5 5 -- Ingrid Ankerson and Steve Matanle, “Anywhere,” 2000 -More recently, the example of hyper-textual electronic literature has encouraged another subcategory — that of "hyper-media” or “New Media." Hyper-media literature may or may not have a multi-linear form, but it nearly always uses graphics, sound, animation, or video as part of the content. It is typically Web-based, employing specific technologies developed for the Web and accessible at a site on the Web. Works such as Carolyn Guertin's Incarnation, a hyper-linked "walk" through a maze of language with accompanying music and graphics, is a good example. So is Jennifer Ley's Daddy Liked His With Heart, which uses animated images and midi tracks to explore stereotypes and clichés associated with the word "heart." 6 Like hyper-textual literature, hypermedia literature is a genre in flux; both are sometimes called "web-specific writing," "cyber-literature," or even, in the case of hypermedia work, "net-art." This last term clearly acknowledges its hybridity, its relation to images and sound. But the term that seems most likely to stick, at least for a while, is “New Media literature.”7 The specific technologies that enable hyper-textual and New Media literature are so new that the rhetoric of and about this literature is still emerging and therefore particularly unstable and contested. This rhetoric nevertheless carries plenty of historical baggage since there are always already material and 6 historical relationships between text-producing machines and the texts produced through them -- whether the machine is a nineteenth century phonograph and typewriter or today's networked computer. Lisa Gitelman reminds us in her study of inscriptive devices around the turn of the twentieth century that "accounts of digital textuality rely upon historically comparative explanations."8 Of course historically comparative explanations also govern, more broadly, our changing notions of the Web itself. Consider, for example, the automobile-age language of the Internet "information superhighway," which functioned as the dominant metaphor in the early years (1994-97) of the Web. While it enabled, shaped, and governed the widespread development and use of the Web, it has now largely faded from public view. Do our understandings and experiences of the Web, and the material construction of the Web itself, change —if only in subtle ways—as this key phrase becomes less productive in the social imagination and finally runs out of gas? And what terms, what ways of describing electronic literature are already beginning to shift within and against a modernist genealogy, on which they draw for their imagery as well as their approach? Hyping, Sniping, Almost Reconciling: Popular and Academic Discourses Digital literature in a hyper-textual mode, developed during the mid-1980s, was immediately trumpeted -- by those who wrote it and by those who wrote about it -- as a new arena where writing practices, aesthetics, and identities could be staged, negotiated, and transformed. From the outset, then, "electronic literature" was an ideology and discourse in addition to being a technology and a genre. Like other avant-garde literatures, it was often understood in the first phase of its development to be in opposition to or at least in competition with "conventional" writing. 7 By many early accounts, hyper-textual writing aspired to the condition of noise, not music. It meant to jam the normal literary frequencies, create a disruption, introduce some useful static. To quote George Landow, an early supporter of and writer about hyper-textual literature, "[Hyper-text will] overthrow. . . .all kinds of hierarchies of status and power. . . .[It is] radical, revolutionary."9 Published in 1992, Landow's influential book, Hypertext, articulated many of the things that early hypertext writers had been saying about their work.10 As Matthew G. Kirshenbaum notes in his brief history of hypertext, Landow fused specific strands of postmodern theory to specific works, most of them published by Eastgate Systems. 11 Starting with the straightforward fact that readers “follow” links (by clicking them) to create their own “paths” or “trails” through connected bits of language or documents, Landow explains that this not only means that no two readers read a hypertext in exactly the same way, but that the reading process is "active" and "exploratory" rather than passive and predetermined. From this modest if contestable definition, Landow then celebrated hypertext as the "embodiment" of postmodernism, the technological realization of large-scale changes in human thought and perception.12 Landow wrote his book for an academic audience. But a "popular" version of this argument, more widely read and discussed, soon appeared in The New York Times Book Review under the sensational headline, "The End of Books."13 Robert Coover, a well-published writer and colleague of Landow's at Brown University, suggested that the print novel had reached the end of its useful life and that hypertextual literature would free writers and readers from "the tyranny of the line."14 The new, computer-assisted fiction "with beginnings, middles and ends no longer part of the immediate display...accrete meaning, just as the passage of time and events does in one's lifetime."15 In addition to these extremely broad claims, Coover, like Landow, also attempted to locate the new writing more narrowly in literary history. He noted a number of "innovative" nineteenth- and twentieth- 8 century writers -- Laurence Stern, James Joyce, Italo Calvino, Jorge Luis Borges -- whom he claimed inhabited the same landscape as the new crop of hyper-textual authors. Academic writing and scholarly conference papers over the next five years debated many of the issues initially raised by Landow and Coover.16 They increasingly theorized hyper-textual writing as "postmodern" collage or as "participatory" and "interactive" writing that opened up the closed, "immersive" narrative of the traditional print fiction. 17 Meanwhile, in 1994, Sven Birkerts published The Gutenberg Elegies: The Fate of Reading in an Electronic Age, a book that attacked electronic literature. Birkerts argued for the fixed stability of the printed page and against "putting ourselves at risk" with computer-mediated writing.18 As Landow's book had opened for Coover, Birkerts' work provided a rich source for Laura Miller's 1998 publication in The New York Times Book Review -- the provocative "www.claptrap.com."19 Few essays crystallize as nicely as does this one a set of opposing ideological and discursive relations as they resonate through an emerging literary practice. Reading literary hypertexts, writes Miller, "is a listless task, a matter of incessantly having to choose among alternatives, each of which. . .is no more important than any other. . .The experience feels profoundly meaningless and dull."20 While unusually harsh in tone, Miller's piece indeed represents a common enough view of early hyper-textual writing in a literary mode: it's pointless. Not that literary hypertexts have always gotten such bad press, as I have noted. In fact, Miller references "The End of Books," writing that "six years after Coover's essay was published. . .I've yet to encounter anyone who reads hypertext fiction. No one, that is, who isn't also a hypertext author or a journalist reporting on the trend."21 By the end of her piece, Miller has declared not only the popular triumph of traditional fiction, but -- touché! -- the death of hyper-textual literature. 9 Miller's "www.claptrap.com" is one-sided and wildly unfair to the literary hypertexts she mentions. Nevertheless, her noisy partisanship brings into focus something of what was at stake -- and for whom -- in what I am calling the first phase of critical writing about electronic literature. Two different ways of generalizing about hyper-textual writing surfaced in the 1990s with very different implications. On one side are those who find the terms "hypertext" and "literature" to be oxymoronic. Like Miller, they argue that literary hypertexts distort the true processes of both creating and reading literature. On the other side are those interested in the ongoing constitution of literature in and through technological media. They see "hypertext literature" and "New Media literature" as literature first, the way "kinetic sculpture," for example, is adamantly sculpture. These are, for the most part, old arguments played out in a new age. Transformations in the materiality of literary texts, the relationship between literature and technology, between literature and other arts -- such issues have been worried over by critics and writers at least since the invention of the printing press. By the early twentieth century, the multiplication of print technologies along with new technologies of reproduction and transmission, inspired the French avant-garde to call for poetry that would recuperate reproductive technologies. Writers such as Guillaume Apollinaire and Arthur Rimbaud, for example, argued that "mechanically produced" writing might successfully compete in a more broadly defined cultural market.22 Later, in the 1960s, American writers like William S. Burroughs and Richard Kostelanetz made a similar case. Both writers explored mechanical and computer technologies in relation to composing literature (Kostelanetz called one his projects Kinetic Writings), arguing that the barriers between symbolic and commercial fields should not be rigid.23 All these writers believed that changing the structures and strategies of literature -- as indeed the use of typewriters, photographs, video, and other technologies have changed writing and reading throughout this century -- is 10 inevitable, useful.24 But Apollinarie and Rimbaud, like Burroughs and Kostelanetz, remain to this day "outsiders."25 In the popular imagination and -- to a somewhat lesser extent -- in the academy, the still dominant tradition situates literature in opposition to "technological" mediation. “Technology” is seen negatively -- as intrusive, disruptive, “mechanical.” Indeed, electronic writing often does disrupt narrative conventions and, especially, the closural tendencies of more traditional ways of reading, but not all readers or critics see that as a bad thing. 26 In fact, some critics don’t see disruption as even being something new. Joseph Tabbi points out: “Given the material constraints on print narratives, we tend to forget that, at any point within the covers of the book, the inevitability of ending may be resisted or put off.” 27 Like Birkerts in his musings on hypertext, Miller invokes a populist "we” in “www.claptrap.com” to speak for the imagined masses -- as if literary tastes and consumption habits were one simple thing and were not always fragmented, distributed across an array of niches. At one point, Miller writes about literary hypertext: "No one really wants to read it, not even out of idle curiosity."28 Later, she notes what "the common reader craves [is]. . .the intimacy to be had in allowing a beloved author's voice into the sanctums of our minds.”29 While the writing in this passage may strike some readers as approaching the purple prose found in fan magazines or the dreamy talk about literature heard on Oprah, Miller's point is nevertheless clear. And so is her anger, a manifestation, as I have noted, of the anxieties many share about digitally-based literature and its effects on literary culture, both "high" and "low." But who is Miller angry with? Although she doesn't quite come out and say it, Miller's real beef may be less with hyper-textual literature (which, finally, she does not waste many words on or read closely) than with "hypertext's champions" and the critical, academic discourse that has thus far defined the genre. "How alienated academic literary criticism is from actual readers and their desires," Miller writes, here echoing a 11 long-standing complaint that scholars have created a critical language so specialized that it excludes "actual readers."30 To a large extent, then, the first discourses surrounding electronic literature -- writing by defenders such as Landow and Coover as well as writing by detractors such as Birkerts and Miller -may have had more to do with the diffusion of "theory" and the popular reaction against it over the last twenty years than it did with literary writing practices per se. In this way, the arguments are not only about canons, but also about institutions and communities, resembling many other insider/outsider debates generated by experimental and avant-garde literary works in the twentieth century.31 Is this "first phase" of discourse about hyper-textual writing really over? Probably not, although the increasing prevalence of the Web with its plentiful New Media and hyper-textual stories, poems, and art projects seems to have made a difference in lessening critical resistance. Still, certain viewpoints persist. In a recent essay entitled "Link To Nowhere" found on the well-known britannica.com site, Neal Pollack argues about hyper-textual writing: "However beautifully written, however cleverly constructed, it's simply too busy dissecting itself to be of any real interest to the general reader."32 He notes that most hyper-textual literature lacks "deep content." While he never says what "deep content" is, and how readers might recognize it, the thrust of Pollack's argument seems to suggest that he, like Laura Miller, understands the purpose of literature to be "making sense of the chaos of this world, and our passage through it, because making sense of it is humanity's great collective project."33 The broad ideological assumptions made by both Pollack and Miller are merely asserted, never examined. Grudgingly, however, Pollack does indeed differ from Miller when he announces, late in his piece, that "it seems possible, even likely, that hypertext literature will soon slip the bounds of its medium and seize the popular imagination."34 Even Pollack’s qualified expression of the “possible” popular acceptance of 12 hypertextual literature is problematic, however, as it suggests a wish for transcendence over the materiality of language. How, exactly, might hypertext literature – or any literature --“slip the bounds of its medium?”35 Visible here again is the rift between particular ideological and historical representations of reading practices -- a rift often articulated today in the competing discourses of cultural journalism versus academic writing. The notion that the materiality of writing – its distinctive shape, its typographic or digital character -- should or even can be transcended or “slipped” is one that has been mostly disregarded in the context-oriented materialist scholarship of contemporary literary and cultural studies. Said another way, most academic critics would argue literary language is not a window to be seen through -- not, as Marjorie Perloff writes, “a transparent glass pointing to something outside it, but a system of signs," systems and signs mostly ignored in press accounts of hyper-textual literature as critics continue to look through language for "deeper meaning."36 As Nancy Kaplan writes: "Rather than lying outside the word and therefore providing a container for the work's content, the decisions that determine the page boundaries [in hypertextual literature] not only affect how a story or an essay looks; they also form constituent parts of the work's design."37 Kaplan's description brings us back to Apollinaire. That is, while newly applied to electronic literature, Kaplan's argument is rooted in the early twentieth century explanations of the typographic revolution brought about by Futurism, Cubism, and Dadaism, and, in the 1950s and 60s, Concrete or Visual Poetry. Among the proponents of electronic literature, I think we can see clearly the signs of what we might think of as a second phase of critical writing. This turn mirrors what Robert Coover, speaking about the production of literary hypertexts, has recently called "the passing of the golden age:" A decade or so ago, in the pre-Web era of the digital revolution, a 13 new literary art began to emerge...this was, in retrospect, what might be thought of as the golden age of literary hypertext. For those who've only recently lost their footing and fallen into the flood of hypertext, literary or otherwise, it may be dismaying to learn that they are arriving after the golden age is already over, but that's in the nature of golden ages: not even there until so seen by succeeding generations. [italics added]38 At any rate, if the early rhetoric in support of hyper-textual writing was, to quote Miller, "warlike, full of attacks launched against texts that can offer no defense, prove vulnerable, and ultimately yield," that rhetoric seems to be passing into history as this literature attempts -- as experimental and avant-garde writing often has -- to move from the margins to the mainstream, from noise to music.39 Enlisting different arguments, borrowing from often-neglected work on writing as a material form, such established writers as Jackson, Joyce, Moulthrop, and Hayles are increasingly, and wisely, calling for medium-specific analysis: As we work toward crafting a critical theory capable of dealing with the complexities of electronic texts, we may also be able to understand for the first time the full extent to which print technologies have affected our understanding of literature. . . .The juxtaposition of print and electronic texts has the potential to reveal the assumptions specific to each.40 Other critics, such as Carolyn Guertin, have argued that hyper-textual and New Media literature are not out to displace conventional print-based writing, but should simply be seen as a new subcategory -- the way, for example, under the broad term "fiction," "mysteries," "science fiction," "romances," and so on are 14 already included. Still other proponents make different or even contrary arguments, noting, for example, that hyper-textual literature is not a single genre, but multiple genres with different forms, structures, and grammars.41 As Nancy Kaplan writes about hyper-textual literature's critics: "Ignoring the manifold differences among particular hypertexts as well as among the authoring systems by which they were produced, they have gathered the similarities into an essence or set of essential features to postulate and then attack."42 In her essay, "Literacy Beyond Books: Reading When All the World's a Web," Kaplan makes a spirited argument for the work of learning to read this new literature, the work of puzzling out its particular literary codes and conventions.43 New Literary Communities Electronic literature, as I have suggested, is still thought of by some mostly in terms of "computers"— a great "daisy chain" of scanners and software programs, digital cameras and recording devices —rather than in terms of practice. Of course "practice" includes not only the various uses of computers in the composition of hyper-textual and New Media writing, but also, more generally, the organization of production and consumption of this work.44 In considering this organization, what can be said about some of the still-emerging institutional practices of the electronic literature community as they reflect (and diverge from) the standard practices of production and consumption in the historical literary avant-garde?45 Eastgate Systems, the pioneering company that was instrumental in first publishing (on disks and, later, on CD) and distributing literary hypertexts, managed by the early 1990s to create a kind of “local” scene for hypertext writers. Because of the use of e-mail, news groups, and Web pages, however, I mean “locality” here to denote less a place than a space: a network that brings people 15 and their ideas together. In this way, the electronic literary community, which typically works and meets in cyberspace, diverges from the historical avant-garde in that geographical place has not been a defining feature as it had been, say, for earlier outsiders, including mid-twentieth century collectives such as the San Francisco Beat writers and the New York School of Poets. Specializing in “serious” hypertexts, Eastgate’s stable of writers included such influential authors and critics as Landow, Moulthrop, and Joyce. In its early years especially, from the late-eighties to the mid-nineties, this pre-Web literary community created what might be thought of as a counter-cultural literary strand—reminiscent of many avant-garde literary movements in the twentieth century, each with their own brand of revolutionary “outsider” attitudes and insights. In its early years, this community developed aesthetic approaches and language largely outside of and in opposition to the dominant institutions of American literary culture. Eastgate supported the fledgling hypertext community and, like any small business needing to make a profit, hoped to eventually alter hyper-textual literature’s outsider status by helping to move this work into the mainstream. Resembling other “niche” publishers of avant-garde work—City Lights Books in the 1950s, which provided the Beat writers an early home; or Roof Press, which still provides a publishing outlet for “language” poetry—Eastgate offered hypertext writers a site for the community as it grew. It also offered writers a business model for selling their work, a model that included aggressive marketing. Using the tag line “serious hypertext” in all of its promotional materials, Eastgate wisely marked out a “high” literary space early on for its products, making in effect a pre-emptive strike on those critics who refused to take anything seriously composed in hypertext.46 Eastgate single-mindedly committed to promoting an aesthetic revolution not only by marketing hyper-textual literature, however, but also by selling its own software for composing in hypertext (the well-known Storyspace software) 16 and serving as a clearinghouse for books and other materials about hyper-textual literature. 47 Around the same time, starting in 1990, the journal Postmodern Culture began as an experiment in scholarly publishing on the Internet and eventually became a leading electronic journal of interdisciplinary thought on contemporary culture. While not directly connected to Eastgate, the first editors of Postmodern Culture, including Eastgate author Stuart Moulthrop, shared an interest in encouraging thinking and theorizing about electronic literature. By the mid- and late-1990s, the influence of Eastgate had diminished for a number of reasons. These included the fact that Eastgate was still wedded to selling its Storyspace software, which was now only one of a number of proprietary authoring programs available -- some of them more powerful and less expensive than Storyspace. Its status was also diminished by the fact that the World Wide Web had made the development and promotion of New Media literature easier, as well as more various and free. Thus, a greater number of authors began to experiment with hyper-textual and New Media Web-based literature, placing their work on private Web sites and finding each other -- and forming communities -- through search engines and portals like Michael Shumate's "hyperizons"48 and Alan Liu's "Voice of the Shuttle."49 These sites gathered and linked related sites from all over the world. In the last five years, too, a number of important Web-based journals have emerged, providing outlets and encouragement for literary experiments. Like the American "little magazines" that helped create the modernist canon in the years between 1912-1920, these resolutely non-commercial electronic journals with minuscule staffs seem poised to create version 1.0 of the New Media literary canon. Their editorial stances and missions echo those of earlier magazines like The Little Review, the partisan avant-garde journal that began publishing in 1914 and published early work by American writers such as Wallace Stevens, T.S. Eliot, and Amy Lowell. For example, the journal of electronic writing and art 17 lume takes an argumentative stance similar to that of the historical literary avantgarde, declaring its “mission” on its web site: lume is devoted to the exploration of possibilities for electronic writing -- the possibility of form, the possibility of meaning, the possibility of a writing that is more (or less) than it was in print. Our hope is that by creating a site focused entirely on electronic writing and art we can avoid the failures of imagination that have thus far attended the debates over the value of a medium that is still very much in the process of coming into being, and to suggest new possibilities for writing that are not dependent upon the authority of the printed word for their validation..50 Like The Little Review, The Dial, or Close-Up, little magazines that questioned the literary canon of their time, contemporary electronic journals such as lume, as well as Beehive, Riding the Meridian, Drunken Boat, and The Iowa Review Web (an offshoot of the well-known literary journal The Iowa Review), solicit the work of promising new hypermedia writers along with “more established” experimental writers like Joyce and Jackson. In an interesting twist on the tradition of gathering writers of a particular stripe into an anthology -- a tradition that has often, by its collective nature, been able to bring visibility to certain kinds and “schools” of new literature -- online journals, too, have begun publishing “surveys” of New Media literature. Of special note is Riding the Meridian, an online journal that has published two large and influential surveys, the first of which brought together web-specific work by women in 1999.51 Titled “The Progressive Dinner Party,” the survey nods to the tradition Judy Chicago pioneered in her well-know installation piece, “The Dinner Party,” recognizing and celebrating women’s contributions to art and culture. As Katherine Hayles 18 notes in an introduction to the survey of thirty-nine works, many of the pieces -while not all classifiable, perhaps, as New Media “literature” -- encourage interactive explorations of visual language in a Web-based environment that is visually and conceptually intriguing.52 The second anthology, “Jumpin’ at the Diner,” surveys web-specific work by forty men and includes pieces that mix language, image, and sound by such electronic literature innovators as John Cayley and Jim Rosenberg.53 Rosenberg’s work is striking in that he often works with the visual trope of the “diagram.” His poems employ word clusters, by analogy to the musical concept of tone clusters, as a way of disrupting syntax. -- Jim Rosenberg, “The Barrier Frames,” 1998 -- Like the early little magazines, too, the new Web-based literary journals are shaping a new literary canon by providing a forum in which New Media writers can act as critics, writing about and supporting each other's work. They are 19 reproducing the role assumed earlier in this century by poets acting as critics who began to give what has become the received high modernist canon its first, tentative shape.54 At least for now, it seems to be New Media artists themselves who are following in the tradition of The Little Review which once proudly (and amusingly) announced itself as the journal "read by those who write the others."55 Other emerging institutional support for the production and reception of electronic literature includes several dozen university courses, including those at Brown University, Georgia Institute of Technology, UCLA, and other colleges. There are also online working groups for writers such as the monthly Online Workshop for Electronic Literature, begun in 1998 by writer Deena Larson. Borrowing the traditional “workshop” approach to critiquing creative writing, authors meet in an Internet MOO space to discuss works-in-progress, give and get suggestions for improvement, and learn more about electronic writing.56 Trace, started in 1996, is another well-known online community for writers, including hypertext and New Media writers.57 Based at Nottingham Trent University in England, the community conducts its business by email, sponsors live meetings and events via the Internet, and has a large site on the Web. The Electronic Poetry Center, started in 1996 and housed at the University of Buffalo, shifts the focus from writers to readers, serving as popular gateway to resources in electronic poetry and poetics. "Our aim is simple," the home page statement reads," to make a wide range of resources centered on contemporary experimental and formally innovative poetries an immediate actuality."58 Finally, The Electronic Literature Organization, formed in 1999, is also a community that plans to grow; its "ultimate goal is an expanded readership of literature written for electronic media."59 Of all current groups serving as proponents for electronic literature, its mission may be the best-funded and the most ambitious: 20 While Austria, Australia, and the United Kingdom are making cultural investments in electronic literature, by sponsoring governmental and nonprofit organizations with programs that help to enable the development of new electronic art forms, we have not yet seen that level of commitment in the United States, the center of the Internet economy. The Electronic Literature Organization is committed to filling that gap in our cultural landscape.60 Of course where there are Web sites, there are also advertising banners and Web site awards -- in this case, both are mostly geared to encourage networking and community among those interested in electronic literature. Beehive, for example, carries advertising banners for Eastgate Systems, Trace, the Electronic Literature Organization, and other similar sites and groups. The Electronic Literature Organization carries logos for its various Web site awards, which, as Greg Elmer notes in "The Economy of Cyberpromotion: Awards on the World Wide Web," "speak to a hypertextual politics of finding and being found...promoting a hypertextually linked community of like-minded resources and interests outside of the ...subject-based default portal, search engine or net guide."61 While many writing communities begin as collective and egalitarian enterprises, however, they often change as they flow or attempt to flow from "noise" to "music." Institutional awards and prizes often signal this change. So while Web site awards may be more about building community than building a literary canon, other awards and prizes -- and there have been a number of them -- can't help but contribute to the canonization of individual writers and texts. The year 2001 will see the largest prize yet for New Media literature: $10,000 for an entry in poetry; an equal amount awarded in fiction.62 Entries in both categories are being juried with the following criteria: "Innovative use of electronic techniques and enhancements; literary quality, understood as being 21 related to print and electronic traditions of fiction and poetry, respectively; and quality and accessibility of interface design."63 What is most interesting about these criteria, perhaps, is not only that they preserve the traditional genres of "poetry" and "fiction" (therefore presumably excluding genre-blurring "net-art," etc.) while simultaneously emphasizing innovativeness, but that they also situate "literary quality" in print and electronic "traditions," thus downplaying the more fiery language of the avant-garde and playing up historically comparative relationships and judgments. Conclusion Like other avant-garde literatures before it, hyper-textual and hyper-media fiction and poetry are self-consciously experimental. Now moving into a second phase, the practices of and discourses about electronic literature in the Age of the Web are increasingly mature and expanding. In the fashion of most experimental writing, however, writers and critics of electronic literature began by defining the work through its differences from “traditional” literature. Early commentaries often highlighted the aesthetics of "rupture” and “disruption,” the ways in which electronic literature challenged common assumptions about reading and writing. As Jay David Bolter, an early theorist of and software developer for hypertextual literature, reflects in his introduction to a recent anthology of web-based writing: “Enthusiasts for new media tend to be unitarians. They ask us to believe that one media form will come to be dominant and to define our digital culture… But in fact nothing in our current media culture suggests that a single form will dominate all the others.”64 Indeed, most recently, there has been an attempt on the part of both authors and critics to understand electronic literature in an historical context that locates this work along side other kinds of creative work, including extra- or non-literary art practices such as sound art, illustration, photography, graphic 22 design, even film. Francesca da Rimini’s “Los Dias y Los Noches de las Muertas,” for example, employs streaming graphics, photographs, and audio in combination with a haunting political text that takes its cues from both the language of the military and the “statement-art” of Barbara Kruger .65 Younghae Chang & Marc Voge’s “Dakota” or “Lotus Blossom” vernacular In our work there is: no interactivity; no graphics or graphic design; no photos; no illustrations; no banners; no millions-of-colors; no playful fonts; no fireworks. We have a special dislike for interactivity. To us it's a paltry, laughable thing, like getting a kick out of pulling the trigger of a gun: click: bang. We don't get it. When we click on interactive art, we get the feeling we're the rat in the Skinner box, except there's only the miserable reward, not the shock. Art isn't reward, it's shock, or something approaching it, something we would call beauty. Our Web art tries to express the essence of the Internet: information and disinformation. Strip away the interactivity, the graphics, the design, the photos, the illustrations, the banners, the colors, the fonts and the rest, and what's left? The text.66 One of the distinguishing features of electronic literature, one of the things that make it “new” is that it generally contests the presumed clear distinction between poetry, prose, exposition, and other literary genres. Yet, as hyper-textual and New Media literature attempts to move from the margins to the mainstream, from "noise" to "music," its growing community of artists and critics represent and institutionalize this new work in time-honored ways: through its explanatory and theoretical writings; through venues such as meetings and conferences; through prizes, contests, and other public awards; and through the development of publishing outlets. I have described some of these self-legitimizing practices that exemplify the circulation of literary values and of literary-cultural politics in the last ten years or 23 more. Of course “mainstream” and “margin,” terms I have used often in this chapter, are relational and always shifting. Indeed looking at the rhetoric of and about electronic literature as it plays out among texts, audiences, and institutions is a powerful reminder that the meaning of the term “literature” itself is always up for grabs – and that “electronic” literature, whatever the future might hold for it, is currently the site of many important conversations, struggles, and debates.67 1 Hal Foster, The Return of the Real, (Boston, MIT Press, 1996), 32. 2 Majorie Luesebrink, Interview by author. "Literature in a Hypermedia Mode" Popmatters 11 September 2000. (http://www.popmatters.com/a-and-i/000909.html) 3 Paul Theberge, "Technology," in Key Terms in Popular Music and Culture, ed. Bruce Horner and Thomas Swiss (Oxford: Blackwell, 1999), 245. Theberge makes this argument related to technology and popular music. 4 Any use of the term ‘avant-garde” may be problematic, of course, but coded as it is in this chapter in terms of specific resistant/alternative articulations of literary practices, I hope it might be useful. Like surrealism, constructivism, and other historical avant-gardes that wanted to expand the writer’s authority as aesthetic innovator, New Media writers have developed a critique of the print-based conventions of traditional literature. Further, New Media literature has increasingly forced an investigation of the institution of literature, its perceptual and cognitive, structural and discursive parameters. Hal Foster’s genealogy of visual art and theory from minimalism and pop to the mid- 1990s is instructive in its reading –and has shaped my own in regards to New Media literature--- of what he calls the “neo-avant-gardes.” See The Return of the Real (Boston, MIT Press, 1996.) 5 Katherine N. Hayles, "Flickering Connectivities in Shelley Jackson's Patchwork Girl: The Importance of Media-Specific Analysis." Postmodern Culture 10.2 (2000): (http://iath.virginia.edu/pmc/current.issue/10.2hayles.html) 6 Ley’s work is at : http://trace.ntu.ac.uk/frame4/ley/leyaheart/index.html. Guertin’s work is at: http://trace.ntu.ac.uk/traced/guertin/incarnation/maze.htm/ 7 “New Media” seems to be the term writers and critics have settled on for now, using it to describe the Web generally as well as certain kinds of work being done on the Web: New Media Journalism, New Media Art, New Media Fiction, and so on. Richard Grusin and Jay Bolter helped popularize the term among academics with their book Remediation: Understanding New 24 Media (Boston: MIT Press, 1999). Museums, especially, have begun to use the term “New Media,” perhaps following the lead of Lev Manovich’s art-friendly book, The Language of New Media (Boston: MIT Press, 2000). Two widely covered art shows have helped popularize the term in 2001 among journalists and the public: “010101: Art in Technological Times” at the Museum of Modern Art and “BitStreams” at the Whitney Museum in New York. Throughout this chapter, I use the term “New Media” literature as a synonym for ‘hypermedia” literature -Web-based or CD-based literature that mixes language, images and sometimes sound. But I also note that “electronic” literature is a broader category and that “hyper-textual” literature, which predates hypermedia or New Media literature, typically does not contain images or sound. 8 Lisa Gitelman, Scripts, Grooves, and Writing Machines (Stanford CA: Stanford University Press, 1999), 5. 9 George P. Landow, Hypertext: The Convergence of Contemporary Critical Theory and Technology. (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins UP, 1992). See the back cover of the book. 10 Jay Bolter and Stuart Moulthrop were among the early hypertext writers and critics who worried over and wrote about issues such as narrative closure, hypertext's precurors, the relationship between computers and literature, and so on. See Jay David Bolter, Writing Space: The Computer, Hypertext, and the History of Writing ( Hillsdale, N.J.: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1991) and Stuart Moulthrop, " Containing Multitudes: The Problem of Closure in Interactive Fiction," Association for Computers in the Humanities Newsletter 10 1988), 29-46. 11 Matthew G. Kirschenbaum, "Hypertext," in Unspun: Key Concepts for Understanding the World Wide Web, ed.Thomas Swiss (New York: New York University Press), 135. 12 Landow, Hypertext: The Convergence of Contemporary Critical Theory and Technology, 27. 13 Robert Coover, "The End of Books." The New York Times Book Review, 21 June 1992, 25. Also at: http://www.nytimes.com/books/home/ 14 Ibid. Ibid. 15 16 Hypertext issues mapped out by Landow, Moulthrop, Coover and others were debated on panels and in individual papers most notably, perhaps, at the many high-profile world-wide conferences sponsored each year by the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM). See the Website for an archive of some of the conference programs from these years: http://info.acm.org/ 17 Indeed the notion of "immersion," of an embodied versus a disembodied 25 readership/spectatorship is one that continues to haunt arguments about not only electronic writing, but about cinema, too. See, for example, Lauren Rabinovitz's essay in this volume. Comparing "interactive" stories with traditional print-based stories, critic J. Yellowlees Douglas writes: "...highly conventionalized plots, stereotypic characters and settings make for an ease and more even pace of reading that absorbs readers' cognitive capacity more completely,leading to the absorption and trancelike pleasures of ludic reading." See: J. Yellowlees Douglas, The End of Books—or Books without End? (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2000), 146. 18 Sven Birkerts, The Gutenberg Elegies: The Fate of Reading in an Electronic Age. (Boston: Faber and Faber, 1994). 19 Laura Miller "www.claptrap.com." The New York Times Book Review, 15 March 1998, 43. Also at: http://www.nytimes.com/books/home/ 20 Ibid. 21 Ibid 22 See Carrie Noland, Poetry at Stake: Lyric Aesthetics and the Challenge of Technology (Princeton N.J.:Princeton University Press, 1999). 23 Thomas A. Vogler, "When a Book is Not a Book," in Jerome Rothenberg and Steven Clay, A Book of the Book (New York: Granary Books, 2000), 460. 24 The arguments described here, grounded in the literary world, are similar to ongoing discussions and debates about “the digital” taking place, too, in the fields of art, photography, and film, among others. Historically, media shifts create anxiety among artists and critics – the creation of photographic engraving early in the 20th century, for instance, revolutionized commercial advertising, but it also, more controversially, encouraged literary editors to include additional illustrations in their publications; it resulted, too, in the development of modern visual poetry. 26 25 Even more “outside” – in that their books are less available and they are infrequently taught in the United States -- are those writers and groups of writers who took more radical positions involving both aesthetics and literary politics. I am thinking here of the Dadaist Tristan Tzara, for example, and Raymond Queneau and the Oulipo writers who invented or re-invented restrictions of a formal nature and composed accordingly. Walter Abish’s 99: The New Meaning, for instance, consists of five sections composed wholly of collaged material taken from other writers. 26 For a discussion of Apollinaire's role in this debate, see Carrie Noland, Poetry at Stake: Lyric Aesthetics and the Challenge of Technology, 4-15. Other versions of this debate have pitted literature and literacy against television (the well-known and nationally-discussed "Why Johnny Can't Write" article in Newsweek in the 1970s) and against video games and computers more recently. See Nancy Kaplan, " Literacy Beyond Books: Reading When All the World's A Web" in The World Wide Web and Contemporary Cultural Theory, ed. Andrew Herman and Thomas Swiss (New York: Routledge, 2000), 211. 27 Joseph Tabbi, “Narrative” in Unspun: Key Concepts for Understanding the World Wide Web, ed. Thomas Swiss (New York: New York University Press, 2000), 139. 28 Miller, "www.claptrap.com" 29 Ibid. Ibid. 30 31 Examples include the French Symbolist poets, as well as Futurist and Cubist poets in the early 1900s, the Concrete poets and Lettrists in the 1950s and 1960s, the Language poets of the 1980s and 1990s, among others. See Johanna Drucker, Figuring the Word (New York: Granary Books, 1998). 32 Neal Pollack, "Link to No Where" Britannica.com 30 March 2000 (www.britannica.com) 33 Miller," www.claptrap.com" 34 Neal Pollack, "Link to No Where." 35 Ibid. Marjorie Perloff, Poetry On and Off the Page (Evanston, Ill: Northwestern University Press, 36 1998), 171. 27 37 Nancy Kaplan, " Literacy Beyond Books: Reading When All the World's A Web" in The World Wide Web and Contemporary Cultural Theory, ed. Andrew Herman and Thomas Swiss (New York: Routledge, 2000), 211. 38 Katherine N. Hayles, "Literary Hypertext: the Passing of the Golden Age." Feed (http://www.feedmag.com/document/do291_master.html) 39 Miller "www.claptrap.com." 40 Hayles, "Flickering Connectivities in Shelley Jackson's Patchwork Girl: The Importance of Media-Specific Analysis." 41 "Carolyn Guertin, Homepage. 1 November 2000 (http://www.ualberta.ca/%7Ecguertin/Guertin.htm) 42 Kaplan, " Literacy Beyond Books: Reading When All the World's A Web" 43 Ibid. 44 Paul Theberge, "Technology." 45 A few words about the term "community" may be helpful here. I am defining community as a group of writers and supporters with shared interests, goals, or orientations. As Christopher Beach points out, writers' communities are "the link between individuals and institutions."45 As I have noted, experimental literary communities have been fundamentally important to American writing throughout history, creating powerful subcultures that can address issues outside the artistic mainstream, issues that challenge the literary canon, itself an institutional structure. See Christopher Beach, Poetic Culture, (Evanston, Ill: Northwestern University Press, 1999), 8. 28 46 Eastgate still uses this tag-line. See www.eastgate.com 47 Storyspace, hypertext software for writers, enabled writers to create fairly sophisticated links. Michael Joyce and Jay Bolter developed the software in the mid-1980s. See Jay David Bolter, Writing Space: The Computer, Hypertext, and the History of Writing. 48 The URL for hyperizons is http://www.duke.edu/~mshumate/hyperfic.html 49 The URL for Voice of the Shuttle is http://vos.ucsb.edu/ 50 See http://epc.buffalo.edu/ezines/lume/moment1/contents1.html 51 The Progressive Dinner Party site is at http://califia.hispeed.com/RM/dinner2.htm Hayle’s comments on the survey are at http://califia.hispeed.com/RM/haylesfr.htm 53 Jumpin’ at the Diner, a survey of web-specific work, is at http://califia.hispeed.com/Jumpin/jukeframe2.htm 52 54 Alan Golding, "The Dial, The Little Review, and the Making of the Modern Poetry Canon," 6. Unpublished paper. 55 Alan Golding, "The Dial, The Little Review, and the Making of the Modern Poetry Canon." 56 The Trace/Electronic Literature Organization workshops, organized by Deena Larson, meet in Lingua MOO at http://lingua.utdallas.edu:7000 57 The URL for Trace is http://trace.ntu.ac.uk/ 58 The Electronic Poetry Center site. 59 The Electronic Literature Organization site. 60 Electronic Literature Organization site. 61 Greg Elmer,"The Economy of Cyberpromotion: Awards on the World Wide Web": in The World Wide Web and Contemporary Cultural Theory, ed. Andrew Herman and Thomas Swiss (New York: Routledge, 2000), 189. 62 While the $10,000 prize for electronic literature is a source of legitimization and economic support, the amount pales by comparison with cash prizes awarded on a regular basis to print poets. These prizes include the Tanning ($100,000), the Ruth Lilly ($75,000), and the Lannon ($75,000). 63 Electronic Literature Organization site. 29 64 Jay David Bolter, “Sampling the Jukebox,” 1 January 2001, http://califia.hispeed.com/Jumpin/bolter.htm 65 The piece is located at http://califia.hispeed.com/RM/fdarimini.htm The site is located at http://www.yhchang.com/ 67 Alan Golding makes a similar point about poetry anthologies in “ Recent American Poetry Anthologies and the Idea of the ‘Mainstream’,” in Andrew Roberto and Jonathan Allison, eds., Poetry, Value, and Contemporary Culture, (Edinburough: Edinburgh University Press, forthcoming). 66