Response to Chapter 1 of Hayles Electronic Literature

John Bork's Response to Chapter 1 of N. Katherine Hayles Electronic Literature

The purpose of this chapter - Electronic Literature: What is it? - is to define electronic literature (henceforth EL), survey its genres, expand on its differences with print literature, both in terms of composition and criticism, and provide some ideas on its preservation and dissemination, emphasizing new challenges and opportunities provided by the medium. This introduction sets the stage for the remainder of the book.

What EL is not, is the mere digitization of print literature; there must be important aspects of the work that make it “a first-generation digital object created on a computer and (usually) meant to be read on a computer“ (3). Hayles yields some ground by including in the scope of “the literary” “creative artworks that interrogate the histories, contexts, and productions of literature, including as well the verbal art of literature proper” (4). On this reading, EL may include digitizations of originally print literature, such as ancient Greek texts, provided there is a creative element to them that is natively digital.

She offers a broad survey of genres of EL, beginning with familiar “first-generation” hypertext-oriented works that everyone knows such as Michael Joyce's afternoon: a story, Stuart Moulthrop's Victory Garden, and Shelly Jackson's Patchwork Girl, many of which were created by proprietary software such as Storyspace (6). Both the nature of their composition - blocks of text (lexia) energized primarily by hyperlinks - and their means of production have been eclipsed by new works leveraging a panoply of multimedia components and navigational mechanisms, and preference to delivery over the Web via standard, browser-based technologies instead of proprietary, stand-alone solutions. Her survey includes many recent examples of EL in genres including “[h]ypertext fiction, network fiction, interactive fiction, locative narratives, installation pieces, 'codework', generative art, and the Flash poem” (30).

New modes of analysis and criticism have arisen along with the new forms. For example, it is worthwhile to examine the similarities and differences between EL and computer games; in both, the user is required to invest substantial effort to engage in the computational mechanisms, but for different purposes: “[p]araphrasing Markku Eskelinen's elegant formulation, we may say that with games the user interprets in order to configure, wheres in works whose primary interest is narrative, the user configures in order to interpret” (8). In many cases it is appropriate to describe EL as instruments that users can learn to play in order to fully appreciate their nuances. Furthermore, the program source code and operating environment supporting EL must be accounted in their analysis, since, as Hayles quotes Alexander Galloway, “Code is the only language that is executable” (35). Widening the scope to include code and operating environments reflects the fact that EL engages many skills beyond literary composition; Hayles refers to “a site for negotiations between diverse constituencies and different kinds of expertise”(38). Indeed, the appreciation of the collaborative design and production processes of most complex works of EL contacts the discipline with wider social practices, such as “the development of commercial software, the competing philosophies of open source freeware and shareware, the economics and geopolitical terrain of the internet and World Wide Web, and a host of other factors that directly influence how electronic literature is created and stored, sold or given away, preserved or allowed to decline into obsolescence” (39).

Critical engagement with the social practices surrounding EL foreground the importance of the means by which works are disseminated and preserved, not merely because electronic formats have historically enjoyed much shorter lifespans than printed books, which last for centuries rather than decades, but also because electronic formats involve a host of design decisions that are intimately tied to the early stages of their creation, not merely the publication of the finished product. Thus recommendations are offered concerning the choice of open versus closed systems, community direction versus corporate, plain-text versus binary data formats, and so on.