Preliminaries
I’d
like to thank Jim Kalmbach, Ron Fortune, and the other organizers
of the Computers and Writing Conference for inviting me back to
central Illinois to give this talk. I completed my M.A. in English/Fiction
Writing here in Normal, and it was here that I began my first
tentative explorations of the Internet and of what was at the
time the very new-fangled notion of the World Wide Web. I had
my first experience of the Computers and Writing conference two
years ago in Fort Worth, when one of my partners in e-lit crime,
Nick Montfort, talked me into expanding a trip to Austin for the
Hypertext conference to include a brief visit to the C/W conference,
where he was presenting. I didn’t register on that occasion,
but Nick did manage to sneak us into the banquet, where we were
greeted warmly, and heard an inspiring keynote address from an
open-source visionary, Miguel de Icaza of the Gnome Project, that
I fear I can’t possibly compete with this afternoon. It is
indeed my pleasure to be here at this gathering again, not only
for the free meal, but also for the companionship of this group,
which has been intimately interested in, and has been producing
important work on, writing and technology for the past eighteen
years. The Computers and Writing community has done something
else that I admire a great deal: institutionalized computers and
writing curricula within Rhetoric and Composition. We’re
only beginning to do the same in electronic literature.
During
the course of this talk, I hope to do four things:
-
To
contextualize the nascent field of electronic literature within
the history of our recent past.
-
To
tell you a bit about the story of my own seduction from the
safer studies of contemporary literature and fiction writing
to the more tumultuous and invigorating world of electronic
literature.
-
To tell you a bit about what The Electronic Literature Organization
has been up to the last few years and our organizational intentions
for the years to come.
-
Lastly,
given world enough and time, to show you some recent works of
electronic literature that I find particularly intriguing, and
to give you a sense of the variety of approaches that writers
are taking to creating works of literature designed specifically
for the electronic media.
I
should probably first apologize for the title of this talk. It
is pure marketing, designed primarily to draw you here, and makes
a false promise. While I know a bit about the present of electronic
literature, I am as ill equipped as anyone in this room to make
prognostications about its future. Electronic literature has changed
so drastically, consistently and continuously over the course
of the last few years that one could play seer on the future course
of this multivalent field only at one’s own peril. But the
future is a gleaming notion, the time and place where all our
hopes reside. If I can’t describe the future of electronic
literature, at least I can cast some pebbles that direction.
I’m
not going to speak much on the past of electronic literature.
Certainly the field does have a past: hypertext as computer-based
literary technology can be traced back to Vannevar Bush’s
notion of the memex in 1945, through Ted Nelson's elaboration
of hypertext and the docuverse in the 1970s, into the innovations
of the Eastgate School in the 1980s and 90s, through to the recent
explosion of activity on the World Wide Web. Multimedia can be
traced back even further. You could start with Wagner as did Packer
and Jordan in their recent anthology, or you could move back even
further, to the Ancient Greek stage. As long as humanity has enjoyed
art, perhaps, and has differentiated its forms, there have been
artists trying to blur the boundaries between media, to bring
back together that which has bifurcated, if only to bifurcate
again along a different seam.
|
