The Emergence of Digital Literature

When I entered this class, I was extremely skeptical that I would ever prefer digital literature to written literature. It's a topic that has bothered many people, including me, the way that technology is becoming the tool of choice for reading literature. Literature has come extremely far in the past five centuries and Katherine Hayles provides a good example of how people fear the new transformations of literature. In an excerpt from her article "Electronic Literature: What is it?" she tells a story about a monk who is caught with a printed book and the head monk fears the implications this means for the future of literature. He feared that their value as precious artifacts would be diminished if they could be produced so quickly and cheaply (A Nicholas Sparks novel is probably not a precious artifact when there are 999,999 other copies of it.) He also feared that if anyone would have access to printing then writing itself would also become compromised (Ever read National Enquirer?) He was right to fear these ideas because they have more or less proven true. Literature hasn't stopped evolving; it's made its new and improved appearance in the twentieth century as a digital force to be reckoned with. Electronic literature is everywhere. With the emergence of the new Kindle, I now wonder how long it will be before people stop reading books. Now with the emergence of electronic poems, I wonder how much time published poetry has before everyone starts using the digital version. I thought it would take a lot to convince me that digital literature has a lot to offer. However, after viewing the first few e-poems of the class, discussing the characteristics and complexity of e-poems, and attempting to create my own, I've found that digital literature isn't such a bad concept and may be here to stay. Although I will always prefer written text to that on a computer screen, digital literature is an exciting new tool and a great addition to the world of literature.

For the skeptics out there like me, you're about to become true believers in the merit of digital literature. Of course everyone will have expectations of digital literature that must be met if anyone is going to be convinced that it's worth their time. The best way to think of it is the progression of books being made into movies. When books are made into movies, so much more is added to the story that paper couldn't provide. Yes, when you read the book you can use your imagination and you have the characters and settings all built up in your mind. I'll also grant the fact that sometimes when books are made into movies, the movie version isn't as good as hoped or the characters look nothing like how you imagined them. However, the movie can add elements like music, sound effects, camera angles, spoken dialogue, lighting, and images that enhance the story and are not present in the book. Hayles says basically the same thing in her article. She says,

"Readers come to digital work with expectations formed by print […]. Of necessity, electronic literature must build on these expectations even as it modifies and transforms them. At the same time, because electronic literature is normally created and performed within a context of networked and programmable media, it is also informed by the powerhouses of contemporary culture, particularly computer games, films, animations, digital arts, graphic design, and electronic visual culture. In this sense electronic literature is a "hopeful monster" (as geneticists call adaptive mutations) composed of parts taken from diverse traditions that may not always fit neatly together. Hybrid by nature, it comprises a trading zone (as Peter Galison calls it in a different context) in which different vocabularies, expertises and expectations come together to see what might come from their intercourse. Electronic literature tests the boundaries of the literary and challenges us to re-think our assumptions of what literature can do and be." (What is it?, 2)

 

The last line is the most important point to keep in mind because it stresses the idea that electronic literature is forcing us to realize that we can take literature even further to a point where it provokes more thought than we've experienced up until now. She is not alone in this thought. Talan Memmott reinforces this idea in "Beyond Taxonomy: Digital Poetics and the Problem of Reading". He says that "the ability to cause thinking is an essential part of digital poetics and rhetoric, and it is here that literary hypermedia finds its greatest potential" (Taxonomy, 303). He not only says that it causes us to think more, he's also saying that that is where digital literature reaches its peak of importance. He doesn't stop there though. He says when people attempt to compare written text to its digital version, it "minimizes the material, performative, and computational actualities of digital poetry" because it has to be viewed as a whole and not for its individual parts (Taxonomy, 293). He explains this by using the analogy of a musician to his instrument. You have to learn how to play it and you have to actively participate with it in order to produce something substantial. You can't just touch the keys or a clarinet and you can't just blow through the opening; you have to do them simultaneously to get the full effect. He also makes a great comparison to the concept of mise-en-scène in theater where you don't just take into account the script you have to pay attention to everything else happening on stage like the costumes, lighting, and scenery. Electronic literature deserves and necessitates that same concept which is what makes it such a complex yet marvelous transformation of literature.