Pages: 15

This chapter provides the theoretical foundation for the volume as a whole. Global literary studies is discussed as a conceptual framework and prior scholarship on digital literature is surveyed. The chapter then outlines the structural logic of the volume and offers summaries of the following chapters.

Pages: 3

No chapter abstract available.

Pages: 13

Unstable texts have long been an ideal in digital literary theory. These were once author-scripted domains in which readers could only choose from set paths but, with Web 2.0, more genuine readerly creativity is now possible. Readers can rewrite texts, radically changing narrative outcomes, or remix them with other texts, fan fiction style. This chapter examines three case-studies, drawn from Australia and Italy, blending postmodern remix aesthetics with literary culture. Each maintains some degree of editorial oversight in the interests of quality control. Can the electronic literature (eLit) community’s commitment to democratic access be squared with its insistence on a neo-Modernist aesthetics of difficulty? Or, in the social media age, does the definition of ‘electronic literature’ need broadening?

Pages: 15

The aim of this chapter is to offer alternative approaches to established genealogies, historical models, and broad typological frameworks used to study e-literature. The historical models offer either a generational-based (first, second and third) or a Web-based classification (pre-Web, Web, and post-Web). The most broadly theoretical typology distinguishes between modern and postmodern e-literature. However, if one wants to look at e-literature as a global phenomenon of diverse practices and cultures and considers– for example – unequal access to digital technologies, some of the models will be of little use. In this context, the chapter offers sets of secondary distinctions that allow for alternative groupings and ungroupings of texts.

Pages: 14

The relationship between stories and games has become seemingly more complicated in recent times with the emergence of digital games and other narrative forms that have a ludic (gamelike) character. Critical theoretical framework from Game Studies has thus been used to analyse earlier narrative media and theoretical framework from literary studies has been used to study games. What is remarkable, however, is that certain theoretical frameworks from literary studies have not made it into the discussions of games: one prominent omission is that of postcolonialism. As a literary framework, postcolonialism opens texts up to questions of inequality and facilitates reading against the grain from a subaltern position. Advancing emergent work on videogames and postcolonialism, this chapter shows how any reading of the ludonarrative digital text benefits from postcolonial reading strategies. Two case studies are considered. Both span multiple narrative media, and in both narratives, the postcolonial angle is a persistent presence which, as this chapter argues, continually disrupts and diversifies the reading(s) that are conventionally made available to us.

Pages: 3

No chapter abstract available.

Pages: 14

Video games provide players with unique opportunities to play with identities and stories, and at times this narrative play can lead to new, potentially queer encounters with difference, embodiment, and humanity. This chapter explores SOMA (Frictional Games 2015) as a case study for narrative play and embodiment in games. A first-person, narrative game set in a post-apocalyptic world, SOMA tasks players with surviving and confronting themes of transhumanism, embodied cognition and identity, and the political costs of posthuman futures. SOMA exemplifies narrative difference in games and beyond––how we construct, play with, and experience our worlds differently.

Pages: 12

This chapter examines the phenomenon of “creepypasta,” a new genre of horror fiction, and argues that this narrative form has emerged as a result of the technological affordances of the digital media environment. While past scholarship has drawn attention to the similarities between creepypastas and older narrative forms such as folk tale, legend, and myth, little academic attention has been paid to the ways in which the digital medium in which these stories are presented fundamentally influences the progression of their narratives via disruptions to the traditional positionality of the reader to the text. This chapter considers the manner in which digital affordances structure these narratives and facilitates interactive, sensory reading experiences which draw readers into the story in a way that muddies the distinction between subject and object, and allows the story to encroach upon the lives of readers in unprecedented ways.

Pages: 12

The emergence of social networking sites has greatly transformed the concept of autobiography. This chapter studies the Facebook community page Women with Fibromyalgia as a form of digital pain narrative with reference to the fields of feminist disability studies and autobiography studies. A Facebook community space can be understood as a life narrative written through the interaction of several authors and readers. This chapter discusses how a private community space such as Women with Fibromyalgia structures a narrative based around the female body in the context of disability. Women’s experience of chronic pain creates a community linked together by the idea of double marginalisation.

Pages: 3

No chapter abstract available.

Pages: 15

Erasure is a set of material, literary, and visual composition techniques that has gained global momentum in the past two decades, amid the post-Internet context. This impulse to erase is a result, in part, of the contemporary social and technological context—the abundance of online information, databases and digital archives that host creative works, and social network sites—, as well as of the creative practices fostered by this overflow of sources: appropriation, copying, reuse, and remix. Erasure is often employed with formalist, rewriting, and poetic purposes, but also with political concerns that tie it to social inequality and silenced individuals, censorship, state and corporate surveillance, and obfuscation. This chapter overviews these aspects by contrasting works from non-Anglophone authors from Chile, China, Germany, Italy, Portugal, and Taiwan, with Anglophone authors who have dual cultural background.

Pages: 22

This chapter analyses some new ways of digital cartoon production that have been adopted in social movements in Hong Kong over the past few years. Two tendencies can be seen in the production of such cartoons: the first one is there are more citizen cartoonists who incline to remain anonymous, probably due to the fear of repercussions. The second tendency is independent cartoonists’ affinity to produce cartoons in dialogue with other cartoonists’ works. I will focus on a case study of digital cartoons produced loosely collaboratively under the interactive conditions offered by social media. These digital cartoons can be read both independently and together with other cartoons that are intertextually or dialogically linked.

Pages: 15

In this chapter, the two media technologies of computer and cinema are investigated as distinct media types that open new horizons for materializing meaning of the 2011 Egyptian revolution. The chapter adopts a two-pronged comparative approach and the affordances and constraints of media used as creative frameworks are scrutinized. In addition, the chapter also reflects on the sociocultural and political contexts surrounding the use of these media. The two-pillar methodology helps create a clear idea of how the January 25th revolution as a political activist practice was channeled through different media, providing a capacious purview of sociocultural and cross-cultural aspects of the landscape in which the artists under study operate.

Pages: 15

The American writer Bill Bly’s We Descend is an early exemplar of “archival fiction,” an emergent contemporary genre that employs a poetics of documentation and preservation, of curation and transmission, and is also one of the longest running hypertext sagas in electronic literary history. In We Descend, as is the case with archival fictions more generally, lurking in the background are the real and ever-growing concerns over how ideology coupled with digital technology threatens the boundaries between fact and fiction, document and hoax. However, this chapter notes that what sets We Descend apart is how Bly employs the linking mechanisms of hypertext as a means for collating and annotating the writings in the archive, effectively thematizing the affordances of the medium into the story’s archival structure leading to patterns of interpretation and interpolation across the archive. Similar to how the Editor is called to ‘disauthenticate’ the Scholar’s attempts to authenticate the archive, readers are invited to historicize and appraise all of the writings, evaluating the motivations of their authors, and to seek out hidden writings existing behind gated links that may unlock truths about the archive.

Pages: 3

No chapter abstract available.

Pages: 15

Ananse Ntontan and Sankofa are two examples of Adinkra, which are sacred philosophical symbols that communicate important messages and represent cultural concepts. They were created by the Akan, found along the coast of West Africa, even though they have been exported across the globe. While there are hundreds of Adinkra symbols, Ananse Ntontan and Sankofa are among those that foreground folkloric traditions through their associated meanings. This chapter employs these two symbols as theoretical framework to propose a new approach to African digital literature. Through an analysis of thematic and stylistic tropes in a selection of case studies, this chapter shows how contemporary digital stories are linked to African oral tradition and are informed by a complex history that is connected to the literariness of Ananse Ntontan and Sankofa.

Pages: 14

This chapter focuses on the way voice transmits musical, sonic and linguistic effects to convey meaning in digital literature. It also argues that one of literature’s missions is to express the inexpressible and that sound (using the voice as a vehicle) is a particularly good way to do this, because it is a strong agent of affect. Analysing the works of several digital media artists and electronic literature writers, this chapter demonstrates the range of voice in digital literature from singing to speaking, both acoustic and electronic. Voice tends to be viewed as natural, acoustic, human, individual, expressive and transparent but is fundamentally the opposite: plural, unstable, opaque, multi-layered and mediated. This is highlighted in electronic literature where voice is often technologically manipulated through synthesis, multiplication, sampling and processing.

Pages: 14

In literary fiction, voice is a manifestation of the mind, the vehicle for a character’s experience. Literary narratology studying first-person narrative focuses on discursive voices that mediate the narrating self and experiencing self in the text. The remediation of first-person narrative into digital audio drama complicates the concept of voice. Audio drama may thus have an impact on the interpretive ambiguities of the written text – by settling, for example, how specific instances of voice materialize. This chapter studies H. P. Lovecraft’s short story “The Statement of Randolph Carter” (1919) in its original print form, as an audio drama, as well as an interactive literary podcast. The chapter’s theoretical and methodological framework has to do with intermediality. The study of voice in the versions of Lovecraft’s short story here puts emphasis on interpretation and its medial bases.