E-Lit
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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