E-Lit

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The readings we covered for this week introduced me to a completely new world. I had heard before about electronic literature, but in reality I did not understand much what it was or how it worked. For a moment I thought that it could be referring to those books that you read through an electronic devises such as an iPad or Kindle E-reader. Nonetheless, after reading the articles I can now see how mistaken I was. As a student in a department with a strong emphasis in literature, I was under the impression that literature had to be printed. The article, “Electronic Literautre: what is it? by Katherine Hayles and the book chapter “Genres of Electronic Literature” by Scott Rettberg introduced the world of Electronic Literature. To my amazement, Electronic Literature is not as new as I had originally thought and it has a well-established set of mechanism to back it up as a legitimate form of expression.
            Both Hayles and Rettberg explain that although E-lit is in constant transformation, there are organization that evaluate this form of literary production. Just as the existence of MLA and other organization for printed literature. E-lit also has the Electronic Literature Organization (ELO) and platforms such as Storyspace and hypertext authoring programs. I did a search on Storyspace and explored Afternoon a story by Michael Joyce. It is a story where the reader can play with the text and choose the sections he/she wants tor read. Storyspace allows the reader to interact more with the text in a way not possible in printed format. In a way, it engages more the reader or demands more action from the reader.

            One other thing that I was surprised to find out is that E-lit unlike printed literature can stop to exists since the platforms change or disappear. Some of the original text cannot be converted or transferred into other platforms and so the text is lost. After, reading these two articles I feel I have a better idea of what E-lit is all about, but I also know that there is a lot more that I still have to explore.

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