WHAT IS E-LIT? AN INTRODUCTION ENG 306U Lecture 8 Videogames and E-literature Prof. Kathi Inman Berens
LEAVING THE SCRIPTORIUM https://youtu.be/pdkucf6wxU4
TACIT KNOWLEDGE OR, HOW WE LEARN TO READ BOOKS • Letter forms • Print conventions • Cultures of book support • For example: “early reading” initiatives; libraries; school curricula with age-based targets for reading achievement; book publishing; literary prizes; fan communities; and a longstanding correlation between reading, “bookishness” and enhanced social status.
WHAT IS ELECTRONIC LITERATURE? 1. “Digital-born” = designed to be read on a computer An e-book is a printed book in e-format. It has a fixed sequence. E-literature may or may not have a fixed sequence; but it can’t be read on an e-reader because it renders dynamically on the computer. 2. Conveys “a literary aspect” = invokes or departs from print- based literary signification and reading practices. A simple test: does this work repay “close reading”? Tetris doesn’t. Life is Strange does. 3. Is it a game? Sometimes. Game-like attributes don’t disqualify it from being literary.
ISN’T ALL LITERATURE “DIGITAL”? YES , in the sense that almost all authors, and certainly all publishers, use computers to make printed books. The only thing NOT digital in the traditional publishing apparatus is the book itself. BUT: e-literature (also known as “digital literature”) CANNOT BE PRINTED OUT . T o print e-lit would force it to “lose its raison d’être ,” in the words of Prof. Serge Bouchardon (Sorbonne). Frankenstein by Mary Shelley as an e-book file could be printed out. It would be surrounded by XML code (or MOBI), but it would not lose its reason for being. Patchwork Girl a hypertext by Shelley Jackson, cannot be printed out without losing its raison d’être. A big part of reading Patchwork Girl is making choices and following their results.
“TRAVERSING” E-LITERATURE? We TRAVERSE e-literature, in a manner closer to how we traverse a game than how we read a book. Like gaming, reading e-lit is usually CHOICE-BASED.* This means that the new forms of reading digital literature invoke some of that kinetic, social and proprioceptive activity that Katherine Ibister taught us to see in games. Is there any one way to “traverse” e-lit? No. Just as in a game, how you traverse depends on the genre & the era when the e-lit work was built. Unlike a game, however, where the controllers standardize play within genres, in e-lit there is no common interface. It’s ALL experimental. *Exception: the “Flash” era of e-lit. We’ll talk more about this Thursday.
WHAT IS READING? PHYSIC AL READING A BOOK READING E-LIT • Physical intimacy with a book • Physical intimacy depends upon your • Book is portable body’s relationship with the computer. • Book is a random access device • E-lit’s portability depends upon certain factors: device, code, network, DRM. • E-lit is often not “random access.” • Access is always mediated through the machine & source code. • Some e-lit requires reader to pass through certain screens in order to access more content, “gateways.”
WHAT IS READING? LITERARY READING A BOOK READING E-LIT Few paratextual guides to navigating the work Paratextual materials orient your reading experience: • Vast generic heterogeneity, though field is only 30 years old • Title page, page numbers, margins, • Reading is contingent upon the work continuing to • Chapter divisions, paragraph breaks (prose) operate. or line breaks (poetry), • E-lit is highly susceptible to obsolescence. • Table of contents, index • “Incunabular” = first 50 years of print; we are in e- • In some cases: figures or illustrations lit’s “incunabular” phase • Avant-garde, experimental: aligned with 20 th - century modernist, anti-mainstream ethos and aesthetics.
TULLY HANSEN: “WRITING” Let’s read it aloud together. Pause on Barthleme . . . .
TULLY HANSEN: AESTHETIC Aesthetic Before we even begin reading: “Bookish" • Aesthetic is the first thing I notice in my MDA quick appraisal. • Mostly blank page • Serif font • Byline • Sign of its medial difference from a printed page: textbox color changes on hover. Writing ’s aesthetic remediates the book. Remediation= “the representation of one medium in another medium. ” Remediation is characteristic of “new media. ”* Digital files are easily remixed because they are digitally layered objects, where each layer is modular: a layer can be separated out from the whole without affecting the object’s other layers.
WHO IS BARTHLEME? Search it. And . . . . [next slide]
HANSEN’S WRITING : DYNAMIC? Writing is highly responsive to reader touch. The Internet is highly responsive to our query: who is Donald Barthelme? The temptations of reading on the web. “Distraction”? Or vital context? In this case, it proved to be vital context.
INTERRUPTIVE READING • Reading anything on the Web departs from the solitude of reading a book. • How is reading on the Web different than reading a newspaper or magazine? Ads in those media were always a “distraction.” • If our expectations about “literary reading” are that they should emulate our immersive reading experiences of books, then we are setting up e-literature to disappoint. • T o what extent is any medium (a book, or a website, or an app, or game console) a non-human agent exerting force in what and how you read?
HANSEN’S WRITING : MECHANICS
ABOUT HANSEN’S CODE • Uses a framework he found on the web called “telescoping text.” • This is a remixed notion of authorship, where originality is in reuse and application, not original authorship. Note Hansen pays tribute to the framework author by name (Joe Davis) and links to his homepage in the code. • Why is this framework suited to Writing’s literary origin story – Barthleme’s “The Game”? Repetition. • For Barthleme, repetition is a function of voice. For Hansen, it’s a function of both voice and code. (That’s what the JavaScript is doing). • Hansen’s story Writing stands alone as a compelling work; and it becomes more interesting when read as a remediation of Barthleme. • Reading both its output and the executable code – where “easter egg” rewards are planted for the curious – distinguishes e-lit from printed literature.
E-LITERATURE CLOSE READING OUTPUT & CODE • Interactive reader experience: screen output dynamically responds • Note that the entire story is one line in the code (line 3515). This teaches us to think about executable and non-executable lines of code. • “Literary Aspect” = Barthleme • T ully calls himself a “seamstress."
LITERARY “SEAMSTRESS” In 1801 the Frenchman Joseph Marie Jacquard invented a power loom that could base its weave (and hence the design on the fabric) upon a pattern automatically read from punched wooden cards, held together in a long row by rope. Descendants of these punched cards have been in use ever since (remember the "hanging chad" from the Florida presidential ballots of the year 2000?). http://www.computersciencelab.com/ComputerHistory/HistoryPt2.htm FIRST COMPUTER: Jacquard’s mechanized loom
LITERATURE AS A “BUILT” THING Let’s watch a Jacquard Loom in action : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OlJns3fPItE Why is this a relevant context to the making of literature? Let’s look at Joe Davis’s site, the guy who built T elescoping T ext framework. http://www.joedavis.co.uk
LITERARY SEAMSTRESSES Penelope, Tully, Scherazade
STRICKLAND, “BORN DIGITAL” Let’s read and know these essential definitions. https://www.poetryfoundation.org/features/articles/detail/69224
http://www.slideshare.net/jilltxt/dikult103-digital-genres-intro-lecture
“NOT FOR ALL TIME, BUT OF AN AGE” Ben Jonson eulogizing Shakespeare: “He was not of an age, but for all time.” E-literature and obsolescence. See my curatorial statement for the Library of Congress, “The Catalog and the Ephemeral .” The Wilderness Downtown and a lot of e-literature: obsolescence is almost certain.
JOHNNY C ASH PROJECT Participatory storytelling with data Modular Variable T ranscoding
WHAT’S THE THRESHOLD FOR GAME V. LITERATURE? http://papersplea.se/
HW: COLLABORATIVE LIST; BOUCHARDON Identify game you know that has a literary aspect. This could be a strong narrative element in a Bioware game; it could be an indie game (like Papers, Please or Dear Esther ); it could be a T elltale game, or a T wine game, or interactive fiction Put it on our collaborative G-doc for E-literature (like the one we did for games). This time, write • Y our name & your game • A couple sentences about what specifically makes it literary
LOAD THIS & READ IT http://scholarworks.rit.edu/jcws/vol2/iss1/6/#.WJinWPuA1gE
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