In its original draft, this was part of the introduction to my MA
thesis. After some discussion, I ended up pulling this out to keep my
thesis more focused on the matters at hand. I really like what I wrote
here so I decided to excerpt it on my domain for my readers. I wrote
this right around this time last year.
Everything I found in electronic literature upon
discovery, the intellectual aesthetic and interplay with computers,
which had been my cherished companion since childhood, I had been
looking, searching, for in my literary studies. As a child I had played
some text adventures, known as interactive fiction, and certainly
remember their printed cousins the Choose Your Own Adventure book. I
loved how interactive those books were and the agency which readers were
given to decide their own fate and reading path. Growing up, I had a
lot of problems with motor development and coordination. This led to
many other problems including very poor penmanship. A wise teacher, when
I was in elementary school, suggested my parents buy me a computer. She
claimed that I would end up ahead of the curve because personal
computers were going to takeover classrooms before I left for college.
Wisely, my parents took her advice and purchased an Apple II for me to
do my school work on and, because I did not play well with other
children, to have an outlet for play and creativity.
Long before I became an avid reader in my teens, my creativity came almost exclusively from computers. Game designer Jane McGonigal’s recent weblog post about her experience creating detailed narratives out of Apple II games that did not already have them like Summer Games
brought back memories from my own childhood. I had a similar experience
at almost the same time by creating forms in a word processing program
with different countries and names. I created brief backgrounds for each
character and had them compete against each other on screen. Scandal,
same gender romance, athletic achievement, and other intrigues played
out in this interpretation of my gaming experience. I would not call
that literature, obviously, but I tell this story to show how my
creativity was electronically nourished before I embraced print culture
later in my teens.
I have been on the Internet since sometime in early 1995. Immediately
I became involved with participatory online culture by writing fan
fiction, posting to newsgroups and listservs, chatting on Internet Relay
Chat (IRC) and, on and off, creating journals which nowadays would be
called a weblog. At the same time, I published print based punk rock
fanzines periodically until 2005 when I began Signifying Nothing, a webzine, archive of my earlier fanzines, and podcast devoted to my endeavors in hardcore punk which continue to this day.
My interest in electronic literature came to fruition while taking a senior seminar on postmodernism with Scott Rettberg
in the spring of 2004. While being turned onto writers like Italo
Calvino, John Barth, Jorge Luis Borges, and theorists like George
Landow, Roland Barthes, and Julia Kristeva I realized that not only were
these fiction writers exactly what I had longed for all of my life from
literature, but the bridge between literary theory I fell in love with
from Kristeva and Barthes, which I had struggled with until this time,
and computers which Landow and others like Rettberg himself bridged via
their theories was a dream come true. The beginning years of my college
career were filled with frustration, failure, and difficulty. The first
step of my recovery came when I embraced electronic literature.
Reading hypertext fiction and the theories of Barthes and Kristeva in
Rettberg’s seminar improved my readings of previously read authors like
Faulkner, Woolf, and Wallace. I began researching electronic literature
and exploring the links on Rettberg’s weblog. Through these links I was
able to explore the work of other hypertext and New Media theorists
like Nick Montfort, Angela Thomas, and Jill Walker. I experimented with
and clicked through Rettberg’s hypertext novel, The Unknown,
and began actively participating in the sticker novel he authored with
Montfort. As the semester wound down, two classmates and myself began
our own weblogs, inspired with Rettberg and Walker especially, and I
moved mine to its own domain later that summer.
Since the rise of the novel the past few centuries have had some hypertextesque works of literature. Novels like Tristram Shandy, Infinite Jest, and Ulysses
can seem to those familiar with the workings of electronic literature
to have qualities which “stand out for the first time.” (Landow 1982)
When I read Sterne’s novel in an undergraduate course on the history of
the novel, I came in one morning and remarked to my professor that the
novel had a lot of the qualities of hypertext fiction which I was
learning about in Rettberg’s seminar on postmodernism the same semester.
Without knowledge of electronic literature I would have never made the
connection, which made my reading of Sterne’s novel much more
pleasurable. Experimental works of literature like Pavic’s Dictinary Of The Khazars and Nabakov’s Pale Fire also exude qualities which are emphasized by an understanding and familiarity with hypertext and electronic literature.
As Janet Murray argues in Hamlet On The Holodeck: The Future Of Narrative In Cyberspace, “the impending dissolution of Yugoslavia,” in Dictinary Of The Khazars,
“is preconfigured by the fragmentary account of a mythical lost tribe”
of three separate, conflicting, dictionaries (Murray 37). The
“multicursally” seen in Pale Fire has been seen as a branch
between not only modernism and postmodernism but as a text that has
hypertextesque qualities (Aarseth 8). Writers like Robert Coover, a
longtime advocate of electronic literature, Borges, and other
postmodernists from France and South America also write literature which
embodies many aspects of hypertext fiction.