Have any works appeared in digital media whose interest goes beyond novelty value?
Over at Expressive Intelligence Studio, Noah Wardrip-Fruin’s post “Johanna Drucker is Pulling My Leg” is attracting a lot of interesting commentary. The post is response to Johanna Drucker’s review of Matthew Kirschenbaum’s Mechanisms: New Media and the Forensic Imagination. In the last paragraph of her review, Drucker writes:
Paying close attention to the incunabular work of Michael Joyce is all very well from a historical perspective. Likewise the close reading of the primitive, almost pre-historical Mystery House and the elaboration of fan frenzy in hacker communities in the Agrippa tale are justified by the novelty of these curiosities. But do any of these works have literary qualities that merit our critical engagement? If these weren’t digital texts would we read them as literature? For all my respect for these folks, I doubt it. Have any works appeared in digital media whose interest goes beyond novelty value? Not yet.
I tend to disagree, pretty strongly, with both the idea that those works don’t merit critical engagement*, and particularly that *no* works have appeared in digital media media whose interest goes beyond novelty value. At the same time, I think I understand where Drucker’s overstatement is coming from. Novelty is clearly a value in our field, and it would be a problem if novelty were the only value we paid attention to. The thing that particularly irritated me about Drucker’s comment is that I think a lot of readers of Digital Humanities Quarterly, including some of the type of people who pass judgement on NEH digital humanities grant proposals, are likely to that comment at face value, when in fact, reading contemporary electronic literature proves it not to be the case. Anyway, it’s an interesting discussion I thought I would pass along and encourage you to read.
Another thought presents itself, however, that it might be worth provoking a discussion here towards answering Drucker’s question. What works do you think go beyond novelty value?
* (although ok I’ll grant that the writing in Mystery House is pretty laughable)
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6 Responses to “Have any works appeared in digital media whose interest goes beyond novelty value?”.
It’s over 10 years old now, but I still carry the memory of being stunned after finishing “Photopia” — and them immediately playing it over again to see what kind of agency I had over the outcome. There are better games, and there are better short stories, but Cadre created an effect in me that couldn’t happen in any other genre.
I would venture that Facade, September 12, and Patchwork Girl also have more than novelty value. There are many others, of course, such as Adventure — for inspiring the first games studies Ph.D. dissertation and the MUD genre — but these will do for starters.
Does the world need a new digital anthology to address this question?
One line in the article seems to dissolve her argument:
“If these weren’t digital texts would we read them as literature? ”
What the hell? They are digital texts. It’s like saying
“if cars didnt have engines would we still want to drive them?”
(wow…that analogy really fits actually)
What the hell again?
I think the problem comes from the “lag”. What I mean is that often scholarship lags behind the movement. Yes, there used to be a problem with people simply porting/pasting relatively bad writing into clumsy software. But most authors (certainly we charming poets) see all elements of media and interface etc as vital. blood-linked, elements of the writing. TEXTS are more than simply words.
So to suggest, even in one line out of a hundred, that we remove the digital from Electronic Literature for analysis….is odd and telling.
Jason Nelson
Er…. Jason, to stick with the automotive metaphor, I think Johanna is saying something like “That’s an interesting concept car, but I wouldn’t want to depend on it to get me to work every day, or get me around the race track fastest, or haul a load for me across the country.”
But there was a time when every automobile was a concept car, and as you point out, the horsey set found autos eternally lacking because of their very horselessness.
Patchwork Girl by Shelley Jackson. It is an exemplary work. It also is a work with much in common with many of Druckers artists’ books. Though, actually, when I think about it, it works (and succeeds) as literature MORE than many of Drucker’s artists’ books. To bad it isn’t available online since it is still published by Eastgate Systems. (It is time for a new edition.)
This leads me to the question: Why doesn’t Drucker make conventional books? Why “artists’ books”? Like Drucker’s work (and the work of other book artists’), Jackson’s Patchwork Girl is aware of how its existence challenges and comments on the classic form of the literary novel and the print culture from which it emerges.
Furthermore, how many artists’ books work as literature? A small percentage. But most are trying to work as artists’ books not as literary works. And that’s fine. The same can be said with new media works and games.
The potential for great literary works of electronic literature still exists. Unfortunately, Drucker has a basic point (though I agree with Scott that she has overstated it), there are few works of electronic literature worth reading.
More folks interested in reading and writers interested in producing electronic literature, shouldn’t just be playing games and learning programming, they should also be studying the history of the book, artists’ books, and the history of the relevant movements in the literary avant-garde like the OULIPO. That might seems like a tall order, but I think this is what is required to produce a relevant electronic literature that can see a path for the future in the shadow of the print culture past.
It’s a sweeping comment to make…
I don’t like it because it is uses generalization to make its point more provocative. And, the generalization is applied narrowly, as if it pertains specifically to electronic literature.
I have often found myself reading a piece of “highbrow” literature or poetry (in particular, the kind of stuff that is produced by literary artists with MFAs) and asking myself if this person would be writing if it weren’t for the highfalootin’ sort of theoretical self-consciousness that happens when you sit around reading literary theory and then trying to make something artsy. (I remember going to an art show with a student who read a bunch of psychoanalytic criticism and then painted a bunch of phallic objects to signify the “repressed” libidinal turbulence surging underneath… well… what appeared to be a typical, hard-partying, 20-something, tomcat.)
On the other hand, I think that most theory-heads… especially the successful ones…. get good at covering their tracks or demonstrating the validity of their critical approach. I, for instance, enjoy Paul Auster’s City of Glass. Even though it seems quite clearly to take up critical theory in its pages, it happens elegantly, it is crucial to the story without being obtrusive… and at the points that it is obtrusive, it is a part of the world of the book. For me, it works.
I think the problem with electronic literature might be in the relative openness where digital artists work. Sure, we can all (artists and critics) get caught from time in the pointless sort of theoretical mucky-muck in an effort to make our work seem more edgy and advanced…. but there are also times when the edginess is real. The substance of innovation in electronic literature tends to happen at the level of form rather than content, or rather, the formal innovation is more immediately apparent. Because the tools are new, there is a lot of exploring to do. And artists are going to try it out. And many people who pay attention are going to look at it through this lens (an analogous situation might be that of Giotto, whose contemporary audience seems particularly interested with the formal character of his work, while his work was commissioned for devotional reasons).
I think a lot of the more subtle linguistic, narrative, and theoretical aspects of the work can get crowded out (either as the artist works or as the critic reads) by the surging formal innovation that this opens literature up to. The subtlety might there in a given work, but a superficial reading does not see subtleties…. Especially if you are committed to discussing the novelty, which is virtually impossible to miss.
A second difficulty is that “writing” in electronic literature sometimes happens at the level of storyboarding or stage directions, and there is little conventional text to subject to the traditional kinds of analysis. On piece that I enjoy in this regard is Jason’s Panhandle. The writing itself is good, and you could almost copy and paste the text into a good story about a guy in the Panhandle. But where I really enjoy it is in atmospheric quality of the piece, which aids in the suspension of disbelief (although I think the phrase “willing suspension of disbelief” itself might be worn out…). The Unknown is a piece which is terrifically fun to read… and while I don’t know that the individual bits of writing are terribly innovative… but reading it as a hypertext makes it dizzying in a way that I don’t know could be accomplished in print. It drips with an ad-hoccishness and fraud that MAKES the free-wheeling character of the story real to me in a way that I always wished Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas was. I used to read Fear and Loathing as sort of a dream that had been foreclosed to me. When I started reading the Unknown, I felt that I WAS on the journey. On the one hand, you could argue that it is gimmicky, but somehow it works. And, finally, Donna Leishman’s stuff is tricky because it looks so slick… I find myself getting caught up in how cool it looks… but she creates these great little worlds.
It will take time, I think, for general readers to get beyond the initial weirdness of electronic literature. Now that, for instance, the Gothic Novel is established literature, many people can write competing dissertations on minute aspects of the Castle of Otranto… and have committees of established scholars take it seriously.
(Interesting aside to John: A number of my undergrad students had that “Aha!” moment reading Shelley Jackson’s My Body–a Wunderkammer…. where they said, more or less, this stuff isn’t just neat to look at… it’s interesting!)
Drucker’s comment a valid one…. but it should be extended to cover writing, in general. Science Fiction, Literature, Poetry, Music, etc. they all can fall into the trap of a dry, uninspiring novelty. Most pieces of “art,” while they might be meaningful to someone, are not special to me. But it doesn’t mean I am going to stop looking for something that I think is special in a big way. And, while novelty itself cannot sustain a culture, novelty plus a great story or a compelling ethical lesson or a beautiful aesthetic experience can be very valuable.
Great post and comments all. At first I was going to chime in by listing some of my favorite works of e-lit that I think are the opposite of “novel” but then realized that the real problem with ANYONE (which unfortunately includes Drucker) who dismisses e-lit as being merely gimmicky (almost exact words that Perloff also used some years ago) just doesn’t know how to read e-lit and is probably mistaklenly applying bookbound standards to interpret the digital . It’s true that the writing, the language on the surface, for some works isn’t first-rate, but if the work as a whole appears “novel” then probably it does have first-rate design or a first-rate interface which not only can be read but also immediately makes it valuable rather than merely novel. Actually, as I write, the more I wonder why “novel” has to have a negative connotation – novel means beautiful on the surface and surely this describes so much 20th and 21st century art and writing?
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