For this week, our English 16 class read N. Katherine Hayles’ publication, “Electronic Literature: What is it?”

N. Katherine Hayles is an expert on the subject of electronic literature
Source: www.rit.edu/alumni

I want to start by providing a little information on the author, as I found myself somewhat surprised after doing some background research. N. Katherine Hayles is a postmodern literary critic who currently teaches in  and directs the Graduate Studies Program in Literature at Duke University.  Actually, to be honest, I was surprised mainly by her age. Hayles’ current work focuses on American and electronic literature. Interestingly enough, her career did not begin in those realms. Rather, she received her Bachelors degree in Chemistry from the Rochester Institute of technology, and her Masters in the same subject from the California Institute of Technology, before working as a research chemist for a number of years. Eventually, Hayles returned to school to earn her Master’s in English Literature from Michigan State, and a later Ph.D from the University of Rochester. In addition to her drastic change of anemic/career interest and extensive schooling in two diverse subjects, I was surprised to learn Ms. Hayles’ age. With all due respect, after reading her study on literature in its electronic form, I expected the author of such an article to be younger. N. Katherine Hayles is in fact 69 years old, which I find impressive due to her expertise on the  progressive realm of digital literature, especially given the technological generation gap that pervades society today. Nonetheless, Hayles’ considerable research and teaching experience make her a valuable source on the links between technology and literature. She has taught at Duke University, UCLA, Dartmouth, and the University of Iowa, has published many recent books and essays (such as “How We Think: Digital Media and Contemporary Technogenesis” in 2012, and Electronic Literature: New Horizons for the Literary in 2008), and has received several awards, including the GreaterThanGames Humanities Lab Grant from the Franklin Humanities Institute, and the NEH Fellowship from the University of Southern California.

Just as the history of print literature is deeply bound up with the evolution of book technology as it built on wave after wave of technical innovations, so the history of electronic literature is entwined with the evolution of digital computers as they shrank from the room-sized IBM 1401 machine on which I first learned to program (sporting all of 4K memory) to the networked machine on my desktop, thousands of times more powerful and able to access massive amounts of information from around the globe. The questions that troubled the Scriptorium are remarkably similar to issues debated today within literary communities. Is electronic literature really literature at all? Will the dissemination mechanisms of the Internet and World Wide Web, by opening publication to everyone, result in a flood of worthless drivel? Is literary quality possible in digital media, or is electronic literature demonstrably inferior to the print canon? What large-scale social and cultural changes are bound up with the spread of digital culture, and what do they portend for the future of writing?

Hayles’ essay that we read for class today defines what electronic literature is (“digital born” and created/read on the computer), tracks the growth of the developing genre of electronic literature,  discusses its problematic overlap with print versions, and emphasizes the strengths of electronic lit, as well as the necessary adoption of new approaches in working with and analyzing it. I was fascinated by the genre’s broad scale and variety of forms of digital literature. Never before have I heard of hypertext fiction or interactive fiction, and the idea of “alternating game play with novelistic components” and three-dimensional literary publications like “The Possession of Christian Shaw” are foreign concepts to me. The creation of the CAVE and the ability of technology to “integrate real-world locations with virtual narratives” is another example of how literature is expanding to an entire new media form. Hayles explains how, similar to the twentieth century “explosion of interest in the book as a medium,” the expansion of electronic literature has created the demand and opportunity for programmers and writers to develop this art form. Furthermore, she calls for a consequent society-wide adoption of cognitive shifts, analytical approaches, and creative imagination growth.

Print Literature: A thing of the past?
Source: www.fotopedia.com

Hayles’ article contained many more ideas and important pieces of information, but what I mainly took away from it was this: literature is no longer restricted to print form. Like nearly everything else in our world, it has transcended to the rapidly-growing virtual realm; it has reached new technological heights. As a student, I see this on a daily basis. Most of my assignments involve literary or research publications that are intended to be consumed and interpreted online. Most of the work I compose is written on my laptop, and published or shared via email or a virtual database. Call me old-fashioned, but I feel a bit nostalgic for the days of paperback novels. I still buy my recreational reading in paper form, and I refuse to ever buy a Kindle (at least, I say that now). But this article summed up the purpose of this course in a nutshell, because the majority of writing today is done so digitally. Regardless of how I personally feel about that change, it is a fact of our society, and we all need to adjust our perspectives accordingly.