Category Archives: Week 10: Digital Literature – Pressman lecture and Rettberg

Week 10: Digital Literature – Scott Rottberg’s “Electronic Literature”

Posted on by
1

In “Electronic Literature,” Scott Rettberg says that “the computer is essential to the performance of the literary activity.” This line really made me stop and think. I never thought of literature as something that needed a computer to exist. For me, literature was always about printed books, paper, and words. But Rettberg shows that for many writers today, the computer isn’t just a tool for typing. It is part of how the story comes to life.

The more I thought about it, the more it made sense. Some stories or poems online couldn’t even exist without technology. They might move, play sounds, or let the reader make choices that change the story. In that way, the computer becomes part of the art. It is not just helping to present the story, it actually is the story. I find that really interesting because it changes how we think about what literature can be.

As an exchange student here at SDSU, I notice how natural it feels for people my age to experience stories through screens. We already read so much online every day — from messages to social media to news. So when literature also moves into the digital world, it feels like a natural step. At the same time, it feels strange because it is not the quiet kind of reading I grew up with. You have to click, listen, or watch. It becomes something more active.

What I liked most about Rettberg’s idea is that it connects people. The computer becomes a space where writers and readers meet in a new way. The writer is not only telling a story but also designing an experience. And the reader is not just reading but also taking part in it.

I still love holding a real book in my hands, but I think this new kind of literature shows how creative storytelling can be today. It makes me curious about what will come next. Maybe in the future, literature will not be something we just read, but something we actually experience together.

Digital Literature, A screen and page

Posted on by
2

Between Page and Screen is an incredibly interesting and creative piece of digital literature. The pairing between using a physical book and using a screen to read it relies on two tools, the book and the digital device, instead of only one. When reading the book through the reflection of the webcam a reader can also see themselves, they can see themselves reading and reacting to the story, which is uncommon, unless someone reads in front of a mirror. This aspect, seeing oneself while reading, makes readers more aware of how a work makes them feel, they can see the surprise, sadness, or joy on their own faces.

The appearance of the text relies on both a webcam and the book. Without both the text is unreadable and causes the reader to have to shelve the book or look back at the webcam disappointed. By having to hold up the book to the screen a reader must feel comfortable relying on digital technology, and the technology has to rely on the person. I find it interesting that typically only a person relies on a device, but in this scenario, the device must also rely on the person to be able to have the book to read and take symbols from, that is a unique interaction. I would like to see more pieces of digital literature like this, ones that ask for cooperation between a person and their device, not just usage in one direction, but an actual partnership between the screen.

Between Page and Screen is what I also imagine using AI generators like ChatGPT must be like for those who use it to create images of documents. In generating images from prompts the computer and the person must, “talk,” through the chat box to produce work that is made by the computer by inspired by the words of the person. In Between Page and Screen the reader communicates with the computer while turning the page and presenting the glyphs and the screen speaks back through translating the book’s story.

Week 10: Electronic literature

Posted on by
1

When reading about Electronic literature, I was intrigued with the way it developed over time. When the term was first created it was in reference to literature that was stored online, and now electronic literature refers more to hypertext fiction. I thought this was an interesting development, one I had never thought or known about before: I know nothing about electronic literature. Referencing back to Professor Pressman’s lecture about electronic lit and patchwork girl, she distinguished the differences between the two as Patchwork girl has hypertext. This new era of electronic literature and hypertext has created more interactive work and pieces of Fiction. To me, a hypertext sounds complicated and annoying to navigate, but I also find it so interesting and creative that people are able to create cohesive fiction with hypertext. It is for sure a certain aesthetic of creative work and writing, one some might have a harder time with, but I do find it very interesting how this works as a concept and how digital literature has developed over the years. “We encounter electronic literature as both a reading experience and an application, an artifact that may also encompass the tool used to produce it.” (Rettburg 3) So basically the creator of a hypertext or digital work is also a viewer and a reader at the same time, the idea of intermedia. This is an interesting context of digital media: the viewer and the reader might be having the same experience because aren’t you doing both at the same time? I found the reading “Electronic Literature” interesting in this context and it has made me think more about how I real electronic literature versus a physical book or text.

This type of literature is experimental literature, but I also think that all literature is experimental. What even separates the two? I guess format and guidelines, formal literary devices and context. But I think its interesting to think about electronic lit in this context. It lacks the normal infastructure of what literature usually is. But E-lit does create more of an experimental state unlike other forms of lit. This text mainly got me thinking about our discussion on Thursday with the modernists. They were experimenting with form and content, much like hypertext in digital lit. You can’t separate form and content with digital literature, much like what this text was saying. The tools of something effects its content, which we see with e-lit and hypertexts. Overall, a lot of thoughts abut this reading and electronic lit in general: but I think it is so interesting and I am excited to learn more!

Week 10: Is All Media Three-Dimensional?

Posted on by
1

Electronic literature scholar N. Katherine Hayles writes in 2007 that contemporary e-lit authors “explor[ed] . . .the Z-axis as an additional dimension for text display, behavior, and manipulation” (“Electronic Literature: What Is It?”). Hayles describes the work of Ted Warnell, whose TLT vs. LL (2006, strobe/flashing warning) “shifts to a dynamic surface in which rising and sinking motions give the effect of three dimensions as the layered letter forms shift, move, and reposition themselves relative to other letters” (Hayles). I am considering this spatial depth alongside our discussions of screen interfaces and my own work with Rufus Butler Seder’s Gallop! (2007), a book which combines leaf layers to produce an animated effect.

In a comment on Micaela’s post last week, Sierra mentioned otome games – a subgenre of visual novels, which themselves emerge from interactive fiction games. It’s made me think about the conventional display interface of visual novels, which generally overlay narrative text and selectable options over illustrations. While considering how Gallop! produces animation and sequence through interactions between bound layers, I’m realizing that I haven’t attended to the “Z-axis” in screen media like 2D visual novels, animation, or even the computer screen interface itself. The backlit LCD display of my computer also produces animation via interactions between layers of light and crystal. This is a 3D process. Because the computer interface produces media through X, Y, and Z axes, even what appears to be 2D screen media is materially 3D.

We therefore don’t look at a screen, but through its layers. Interactions between layers produce optical effects, much like the Scanimation barrier-grid effect produced in Seder’s Gallop!. N. Katherine Hayles has already explored computer backlighting’s “media-specific” influence on e-lit through texts like “Flickering Connectivities in Shelley Jackson’s Patchwork Girl: The Importance of Media-Specific Analysis” (2000), but I’m only now realizing the implications of the Z-axis to electronic literature. How does an e-lit work engage with the 3D spatiality of its medium?

Amaranth Borsuk’s Between Page and Screen (2005) mediates the 3D spatiality of print books by inviting co-reading between human and computer readers. As the human user physically moves the book’s QR-coded pages in view of a computer reader’s camera, the computer retrieves and displays 3D visuals that are mapped onto the visual feedback. As Dr. Pressman argues in “Reorienting Ourselves toward the Material: Between Page and Screen as Case Study” (2018), Borsuk’s augmented reality book shows that “technology is not only part of the work but also part of the text to be read and compared” (323). Borsuk’s “3D concrete poem[s]” (323) reflect the 3D spatiality of “page and screen” interfaces. Following Dr. Pressman’s example of “the piggy poem” in Borsuk’s project as an allusion to the animal skins used in medieval manuscripts (326), we might consider how animal skins themselves form outer layers over complex interior systems, and how the reduction of these systems to a single, ‘2D’ exterior layer reduces the complexity of their multidimensional, mediated bodies.

From now on, I’ll view media objects as assemblages of layers. This is kind of blowing me out of the water in terms of reframing my approach to e-lit and animation studies. Engaging with the materiality of Gallop! in concordance with Hayles, Borsuk, and Dr. Pressman’s e-lit studies reveals the multidimensionality of media and media activation. The medium cannot be flattened. How might e-lit engage with this spatiality, and with the illusion of flatness, as narrative and material conflicts?

Digital Literature – A Quiet Collaboration

Posted on by
2

Reading Scott Rettberg’s text on electronic literature, one line in particular really stuck with me. “What is really meant by ‘electronic literature’ is that the computer (or the network context) is in some way essential to the performance or carrying out of the literary activity in question” (p. 169). At first, it sounds very technical, like something you would read in a definition. But the more I thought about it, the more it started to make sense and give me a new perspective on how I see writing. Usually, the computer feels like background noise. A tool that quietly does what we tell it to. We type, it records. Simple. But Rettberg’s line flips that. It suggests that the computer is not simply the surface where writing appears. It is part of how writing happens.

That shift feels small, but it is huge. It means the computer is not just a container for words. It is a participant in them. The text depends on it. Its speed, its memory, even its glitches. The poem or story does not just sit there waiting to be read. It moves, reacts, performs. In a sense, it breathes through code. I like how this idea makes the act of writing feel less lonely. The computer becomes a quiet collaborator. Every click, every pause, every bit of code is part of the exchange. It makes me think that writing on a computer has always been a kind of dialogue, we just didn’t notice it. Maybe we never really wrote on machines, but have been writing with them all along.

Rettberg says that electronic literature “takes advantage of the capabilities and contexts provided by the stand-alone or networked computer”. (169) That line makes me think about how the machine brings its own possibilities like light, sound, movement, randomness. It adds time to text. Suddenly, literature isn’t something still, but something that happens. You don’t just read it, you watch it unfold. And that brings a strange kind of intimacy. When the computer becomes part of the writing, it also becomes part of us. The screen holds not just our words, but our gestures, our rhythms, the small hesitations between thoughts. It feels less like using a tool and more like sharing a process.

Maybe that’s what Rettberg’s essay leaves behind. The sense that writing and technology aren’t opposites. They have always been connected and electronic literature just makes that visible. It reminds us that meaning isn’t only made by what we write, but by what responds. The page, the screen, the machine that starts to write back.

Digital Literature

Posted on by
1

In our analysis of what earns a given work the classification of “book,” I am unsure if I would consider digital literature the next evolution of the book or its own entity of scholarship entirely. A large part as to why I consider electronic literature separate from the book is due to its inability to fit print publication and the traditional book format, especially because it requires technology for the literature executed by user request. As Ted Nelson describes, hypertext is “a body of written or pictorial material interconnected in such a complex way that it could not conveniently be presented or represented on paper” (Ryan, Emerson, & Robertson 170). This observation by Nelson establishes a critical separation between traditional print and born-digital literature on the basis of material fixity and the necessity of user interaction. With hypertexts, users must engage with navigation and do not always receive the same stories based on their choices which defies the constraints of the page. When Nelson outlines the “inconvenience” of formatting hypertexts onto the page, this is not just a logistical issue but a conceptual one. 

From studying Patchwork Girl in Digital Humanities last semester and seeing how different table groups interpreted the work in the DH Center, it is clear that with hypertext reader interaction radically changes narrative structure. Without a linear structure or page numbers like the traditional book, Patchwork is meant to be lost in and disorienting as a part of the user experience. I would not consider this a goal of the traditional book, however, which emphasized a separation between print and literary work made explicitly by and for the digital. In this way, the purposes of the medium present themselves as books more typically transmit information while digital literature is a heavier experimental and creative pursuit. 

As a Books class, I still consider it important to study electronic literature to understand what a book is and what it is not. The purpose of this is not to solidify the category of “book” as an elite title with prerequisites, but to interrogate our understanding of what a book does and doesn’t. With our world moving into and already in an increasingly digital age, we must ask ourselves what counts as a book when we move away from the physical page? This is also vital to consider as we prepare for what our future of reading and writing behaviors will look like.