Online Magazine of the Visual Narrative - ISSN 1780-678X
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Online Magazine of the Visual Narrative - ISSN 1780-678X |
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Issue 23. Time and Photography / La Photographie et le temps |
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Electronic Literature. New Horizons for the Literary (The Ward-Phillips Lectures in English Language and Literature) |
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Author: Jan Baetens N. Katherine Hayles Electronic Literature. New Horizons for the Literary (The Ward-Phillips Lectures in English Language and Literature) Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press, 2008 (240 pages) |
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Electronic Literature, the new book by N. Katherine Hayles, one of the leading literary scholars in the field of digital studies and cyberculture, is mainly aimed at helping e-literature find its place in the classroom. For this reason it includes also a CD, The Electronic Literature Collection, Volume 1, containing sixty new and recent works of electronic literature with keyword index, authors’ notes, and editorial headnotes (it runs cross-platform on Macintosh, PC, or Linux). The works on the CD cover all genres explored by e-literature: hypertext fiction, kinetic poetry, generative and combinatory forms, network writing, codework, 3D, narrative animations, installation pieces, and Flash poetry, some of them very easy to grasp, others defying all classic ways of approaching literature –or rather, as Hayles argues, the ‘literary’, for the digitization of literature forces us to stretch and modify our longtime definitions of what ‘literature’ may mean. A website complements the text and the CD-ROM. It offers resources for teachers and students, including original essays, author biographies, useful links, and, most importantly sample syllabi by major theoreticians and writers such as Rita Rayley, Stuart Moultrop, and Stephanie Strickland. Together, these elements provide an exceptional pedagogical opportunity whose impact should be dramatic.
Yet, Electronic Literature is much more than a didactic summary of Hayles’s thinking on the digital revolution in one of the bastions of traditional humanist culture: the book. Although this aspect of the book is far from being unimportant (and, by the way, one can only hope that for those still unfamiliar with Hayles’s work it will function as a gateway to important books such as My Mother was a Computer or Writing Machines), Electronic Literature is also a synthesis of the research in the field as a whole, and in this sense the best possible critical overview that is currently available. Moreover, it is extremely up to date, given the numerous references to extremely recent sources, and in-depth discussions with all the authors who count in the field.
The book has five chapters. Chapter One describes from a historical as well as a taxonomic point of view the most important evolutions and (sub)genres in electronic literature, from the 1950s till the ongoing experiences in specialized centers such as the one in Browne University (also the place where the famous Storyspace software has been developed). Chapter Two, called “Intermediation. From Page to Screen”, presents some crucial insights in the way meaning is produced by the permanent translation, through various interfaces, of one system into another system, and the other way round –in this case between the two extremes that are the human body and the digital code. The notion of intermediation, which has been coined by Hayles herself, proves crucial in the understanding of what happens when literature shifts from one medium to another, and how changes from orality to print and then to a digital ecology are always the locus of complex and permanent negotiations and reframings of old and new. Chapter Three discusses the (false) opposition between the two major stances hold in the debates on the relationships between man and machine: the stance hold by Friedrich Kittler, who emphasizes the role of the medium (and the machine), and the stance hold byMark B.N. Hansen, who gives priority to the human body as the exclusive center of meaning-making. In this debate, the position hold by N. Katherine Hayles is clearly ecumenical, with a strong plea for a mutual construction of the embodied subject and the computational system. Chapter Four continues on this idea of “recursive feedback loops” and the articulation of mind, body, and machine, and uses mainly John Cayley’s work as its decisive example. Chapter Five, finally, which tackles the impact of digital culture in the ‘traditional’, i.e. traditionally printed novel, starts with a strong statement: all literature is now digital, but drives its point home in a very convincing way, not just by demonstrating that the whole chain of book making and reading is now dependent on electronic files, but by suggesting that the impact of the digital does not only determine ‘how’ we read, but also ‘what’ we read. Key examples here are Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close (J. Foer), The People of Paper (S. Plascencia) and House of Leaves (M. Danielewski).
Hayles’s book is great reading. Not only because of its clarity, of the broad scope of its references (as I have said, this book is a wonderful companion for all those eager to familiarize with the field), and of its nonpolemical tone (Electronic Literature avoids the Scylla of techno-utopianism as well the Charibdes of techno-apocalyps), but also because it makes a solid ground for further debates. Hayles helps us to leave behind a certain number of false questions (like the discussion on the primacy of either man or machine) and encourages us to broaden our vision of what she calls the literary and what can no longer be seen as just literature + cyber: the literary is really something different, which asks also for new modes of reading that escape the traditional model of ‘deep attention’, i.e. the “willingness to spend long hours with a singe artifact (…), intense concentration that tends to shut out external stimuli, a preference for a single data stream rather than multiple inputs, and the subvocalization that typically activates and enlivens the reading of print literature” (117). E-literature is not only another way of writing, storing, disseminating, printing, buying, selling etc. the (multimedial) ‘literary’, it is also another way of reading, which Hayles calls ‘hyper attention’ (and which transforms each of the abovementioned aspects of ‘deep attention’). Hayles’s interest in these phenomena proves that she is fully aware of the fact that the shift from literature to electronic literature can not be separated from parallel shifts in the field of arts and humanities (from literary to cultural studies, from text culture to visual culture, from alpha to gamma, for instance). This dimension too is crucial in this book. |
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Jan Baetens is Professor of Cultural Studies at the KU Leuven. He is also editor of Image (&) Narrative. E-mail: Jan.baetens@arts.kuleuven.be |
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