Electronic literature
Electronic literature or digital literature is a genre of literature where digital capabilities such as interactivity, multimodality or algorithmic text generation are used aesthetically. Works of electronic literature are usually intended to be read on digital devices, such as computers, tablets, and mobile phones. They cannot be easily printed, or cannot be printed at all, because elements crucial to the work cannot be carried over onto a printed version.
The first literary works for computers, created in the 1950s, were computer programs that generated poems or stories, now called generative literature. In the 1960s experimental poets began to explore the new digital medium, and the first early text-based games were created. Interactive fiction became a popular genre in the late 1970s and 1980s, with a thriving online community in the 2000s. In the 1980s and 1990s hypertext fiction begun to be published, first on floppy disks and later on the web. Hypertext fictions are stories where the reader moves from page to page by selecting links. In the 2000s digital poetry became popular, often including animated text, images and interactivity. In the 2010s and 2020s, electronic literature uses social media platforms, with new genres like Instapoetry or Twitterature as well as literary practices like netprov. Although web-based genres like creepypasta and fan fiction are not always thought of as electronic literature, other scholars argue that these are born digital genres that depend on online communities and thus should be included in the field.
There is an extensive body of scholarship on electronic literature. In 1999 the Electronic Literature Organization was established, which through annual conferences and other events supports both the publishing and study of electronic literature. One focus of academic study has been the preservation and archiving of works of electronic literature. This is challenging because works become impossible to access or read when the software or hardware they are designed for becomes obsolete. In addition, works of electronic literature are not part of the established publishing industry and so do not have ISBN numbers and are not findable in library catalogues. This has led to the establishment of a number of archives and documentation projects.
Definitions
The literary critic and professor N. Katherine Hayles defines electronic literature as "'digital born' and 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 states that 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 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.
For example, a hypertext fiction is a story where the reader chooses a path through the story by clicking on links that connect fragments of text, often called lexias. In digital poetry the words in the poem may move across the screen or may involve game-like interactivity. In generative literature a single work can generate many different poems or stories. Until the early 2000s electronic literature works tended to be published on floppy disk, CD-ROM, in online literary journals or on dedicated websites. However, since around 2010 literary genres on social media platforms - such as Instapoetry, Twitterature or netprov - have come to be seen as electronic literature. The literary critic Leonardo Flores called these third generation electronic literature, following the first generation of pre-web works and the second generation of web-based works. Flores uses an inclusive definition of electronic literature, which can include social media posts with literary qualities even if the authors do not themselves think of it as literature. Fan fiction and creepypasta have also been analysed as electronic literature.
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. 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". In his book Electronic Literature, the author and scholar 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. Screenwriter and author Carolyn Handler Miller characterizes works of electronic literature as nonlinear and non chronological where the user experiences and co-creates the story, and where contradictory events and different outcomes are possible.
History
Precursors
Scholars have discussed a range of pre-digital precursors to electronic literature, from the ancient Chinese book the I Ching, to inventor John Clark's mechanical Latin Verse Machine 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 Vladimir Nabokov's Pale Fire, 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 and scholar 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 wrote Stochastic Texts, which "for many years was considered the first digital literary text." Stochastic Texts was a program written for a Z22 computer that "produced random short sentences based on a corpus of chapter titles and subjects from Franz Kafka's novel 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. The German philosopher and media scholar 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, the logic of the machine itself – that is, the logic of deterministically executed rule steps – becomes aesthetically normative in 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. The Italian poet and artist 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 the novelist and scholar Umberto Eco and artist Bruno Munari, thus standing as the first Italian work of electronic literature. Auto-Beatnik was a program by R. M. Worthy and colleagues at the computer manufacturing company Librascope. Auto-Beatnik generated poems on an LGP-30 computer to mimic the style of Beat poetry.Games designers 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. The computer scientist Joseph Weizenbaum programmed the chatbot ELIZA in 1966, establishing a new genre of conversational literary artefacts or bots. This was the decade when the sociologist and philosopher Ted Nelson coined the terms hypertext and hypermedia.
1970s
Writers and artists continued to experiment with combining art, technology and literature. An example is the installation Blikk by a Norwegian trio: artist, composer Sigurd Berge and poet Jan Erik Vold. Vold's readings of his poems were mixed as sound montages by Berge and combined with Jæger's kinetic sculptures in an exhibition at the Henie Onstad Art Center. The work was recreated in 2022 by the composer and curator and is now part of the permanent collection of the Norwegian National Museum.Another important development in the 1970s was the popularity of text adventure games, now more commonly known as interactive fiction. In 1975–76, Will Crowther programmed a text game named Adventure. 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 their untimely death. It is often regarded as the first work of interactive fiction, although others have argued that the earlier simulated microworld SHRDLU, Gregory Yob's 1973 command-line game Hunt the Wumpus or Mabel Addis's The Sumerian Game computer simulation from 1964 should be considered interactive fiction or at least as an important precursor to Adventure. Historians agree that 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." Adventure was played on mainframe computers, and spread rapidly through the ARPANET. Colossal Cave inspired many other games, including the text adventure game Zork which was regarded as 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 video game in 1982, described in an interview with The Guardian.For hypertext fiction and digital poetry, the eighties were a time of experimentation in separate communities that were not necessarily aware of each other. In Canada, the poet Bp Nichol published First Screening: Computer Poems, written in BASIC, in 1984. The Californian writer Judy Malloy published Uncle Roger on the online community The WELL in 1986/87. On the East Coast, hypertext fiction was being explored by academics and writers who met at the ACM Hypertext conference, which held its inaugural meeting in 1987. Michael Joyce's afternoon, a story, one of the most cited works of hypertext fiction, was demonstrated at the 1987 conference, and Mark Bernstein published this work at Eastgate Systems. The hypertext author Stuart Moulthrop described discovering writer and visual artist Judy Malloy's work at this time, not having realised that there were other people writing literature for computers: "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".
In France at this time, literature numérique was connected to the Oulipo literary movement, and poetry was more central to the French writers than the narrative genres like hypertext fiction that were popular in the United States. Generative poetry could be seen as a particularly European genre at the time. In 1981 the Portuguese author published the combinartory work THE ALAMO, and explicitly made the claim that computationally generated works could be literary.
Not only writers, but also digital artists created works with strong literary components that have had an influence on the field of electronic literature. An example is the Australian artist Jeffrey Shaw and Dirk Groeneveld's The Legible City, which was first exhibited at ZKM Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe in 1988. The Legible City is an art installation where the visitor rides a stationary bicycle through a simulated city displayed as computer-generated text. Buildings and streets are shown as 3D shapes consisting of letters and words, allowing the reader to "read" the city as they pedal through it.