The advantage of e-lit: polymorphism

Digital technologies have allowed for writing (and electronic literature, in general) to become polymorphic beyond the traditional interpretational nature of literature. In the traditional existence of literature, writers could write very clear and straightforward texts that would convey a message without any ambiguity. Writers could also be more creative and express and idea through metaphor or some other literary device. And sometimes, diction was used to present the reader with two or more meanings of the work, itself. Any other resulting interpretations were decided by social-cultural-political factors and the reader’s own personal experiences, which the author had no control over.

But with the technological advances and the creation of electronic literature, the constraint writers were tied to has change (whether you want to think of this constraint as shrinking, disappearing, or simply taking a different form, I’ll leave it to your interpretation). With works like White-Faced Bromeliads on 20 Hectares by Loss Pequeño Glazier, we find that the author now has the ability to present a reader with different forms of the same piece. And not only does the different forms present the same idea (i.e. an accidental variant), but rather it provides a substantive variant that conveys different meanings to the reader, depending of the specific variant the reader is exposed to.

Like Glazier indicates in Stringing Disturbances in Language Arrays: Reading by Close Reading, “[these new forms of writing are] an exploration of the dynamics, through computer processes, of meaning as expressed through variability” (p. 7). Writing on New Media breaks the idea that literature is monolithic in one way or another in its interpretation, all things being equal.

Finally, I’d like to bring up an idea I brought up last class session: permanence and existence. I was unsure if an ever-changing piece of literature could be classified as the same piece or different pieces, depending on the form available to the reader. The idea presented by Professor Saum Pascual—that is river is still a river even if it’s not the same water running through it—rings with Glazier’s idea of variations. As Glazier indicates, “[t]he many forms of variation should be seen not so much as different forms but as degrees of variation” (p. 6). So, instead of thinking of White-Faced Bromeliads on 20 Hectares as 256 different poems, we can, instead, see this piece shaped into different silhouettes, each conveying a different meaning than the last.

And this is an advantage technology has given to literature and writing in general, which literature did not have in it’s traditional form, in my opinion.