Histories and Genres of Electronic Literature

This lightning talk will be a presentation of a new book by Scott Rettberg, Electronic Literature, forthcoming from Polity Press in Autumn 2018. Electronic literature has rapidly developed as a field of creative practice, academic research, and pedagogy. A growing concentration of critical and theoretical activity in electronic literature has corresponded to similar growth in the corpus of creative work in the international field. With few exceptions however the research monographs have been narrow in focus and aimed at specialist researchers. University teachers in the field have had to cobble together reading lists with no core text available for adoption. There has until now however been a significant lack in the literature of the field: few books so far have attempted to constitute electronic literature in a broad sense as a subject in totality. Electronic Literature presents five core genres of electronic literature in historical, technological, and cultural contexts and makes the subject more readily accessible for students and researchers at undergraduate and postgraduate levels in disciplines including literary studies, communications, media studies, creative writing, and art practice.

Electronic Literature offers readers an introduction to digital genres including hypertext fiction, combinatory poetics, interactive fiction and other game-based literary forms, kinetic and interactive poetry, and networked writing. This presentation outlines the approach, methodology, and content of the book, with a focus on why a genre-based approach to teaching electronic literature makes sense, even as genres of electronic literature are more amorphous and difficult to pin down than historical print genres of literary practice. The talk will also reiterate the importance of understanding electronic literature as shaped by specific technological platforms, by contemporary cultural contexts, and by the influence of art and literary movements of the twentieth century avant-garde.