Electronic literature : genealogies, analogies, singularities

Abstract

This dissertation is premised on the idea that genealogies are drawn in literary studies as part of a critical move to purchase cultural capital from the literary canon in order to validate newness. The study of emergent electronic literature, which defines itself as born-digital and reliant on computation for its genesis, visualisation, transformation, and transmission, perpetuates this move. As such, electronic literature is habitually aligned with: figured and Concrete poetry, proto-Modernist, Modernist and avant-garde traditions, spanning millennia from ancient Hellenic examples of technopaegnia through to seventeenth-century English metaphysical poetry and the nineteenth-century French poème and thence into the earliest experiments with linguistic simplification and mathematisation, cybernetics and computation in the 1960s. So oft-repeated is this move that electronic literature’s relationships with various precursor texts have been reduced to a set of unexamined analogies the basis for which — as this project hopes to show — is often a passing or moderate resemblance combined with a suppression of those aspects that make electronic literature a truly singular development. Since examining the analogies requires a prior understanding of genre and other basic questions of literature such as what the acts of writing and reading entail in electronic literature, the first step will be to discuss the awkwardness of the epithet ‘electronic’ and the quandaries stemming from the broad strokes drawn by the term. Next, precursors representing five generations on the genealogical line (Simmias of Rhodes, George Herbert, Stéphane Mallarmé, the Noigandres, and the Ouvroir de littérature potentielle) will be identified with a view to initiating a comparative analysis between their staple texts and electronic literature texts that display ostensible amenability to the comparison. Subjected to the kind of sustained side-by-side close readings in the absence of which passing or moderate resemblances were allowed to become definite genetic traits, the analogies will prove most vulnerable upon the following points: the Concrete poetry/digital kinetic poetry analogy upon the crucial difference between ideogrammatic and calligrammatic practices, the Mallarmé/prehistoric digital and later non-interactive Flash poetry analogy upon the fundamental disconnection between white space as an illuminator of significance and whiteouts as part of a poetics of concealment, and the Oulipo/generative electronic literature analogy upon the unbridgeable gaps between constraint and code and between the clinamen and the glitch. A number of arguments will need to be rehearsed before it becomes clear why these specific vulnerabilities also represent the breaking points of the analogies. The common thread binding all of these arguments together will be electronic literature’s dual nature. As a consequence, the electronic literature discussed in Part I will be seen to subscribe at once to representative — even naïve — literalness and sophisticated abstractness, that of Part II to conceal the programming that guarantees its functioning only later to reveal an aestheticised version of its code, and that of Part III to minimise the traditional roles of author-genius and ordinary reader while asserting those of assiduous programmer-designer and actively creating reader. By the start of the concluding movement, a single-minded focus on electronic literature’s singularities will have engendered a number of doubts about whether electronic literature’s demonstrably multifarious nature and its resistance to being aligned with unorthodox, even traditionally ‘fringe’ literatures actually disqualifies it from the category ‘literature’. This is where a reconsideration of the literary framed by a particular strain of critical discourse concerning the ‘post-literary’ may point the way if not to an absolute answer to the question, ‘But is it literary?’, then to a partial answer concerning the new whereabouts of the literary.