The Times on E-Lit
With “Call Me E-Mail: The Novel Unfolds Digitally” The New York Times has today published a long story on electronic literature, following closely on the heels of a story on game studies. Remarkable!
The article even gives a few paragraphs over to yours truly. To whit:
Noah Wardrip-Fruin, a 31-year-old traveling scholar at Brown University and visiting researcher at the University of California at Santa Cruz, said texts that take the form of fictional digital artifacts like e-mail or blogs held promise for a generation that grew up with computers. “I read more on the screen than I do on paper,” he said, “and I’m pleased to see people take imaginative writing and put it into the spaces where we do our living.”
Mr. Wardrip-Fruin compared “Intimacies” to an epistolary story by one of his students that consisted of e-mail messages with attached photos and diary entries and that was published through a Yahoo e-mail account. He said that such projects, as well as some narrative and life-simulation video games, qualified as literature worthy of attention.
“These are forms of e-writing as surely as experimental hypertext poetry,” he said. “We just have to understand that like traditional literature, e-literature has a range of styles, including popular ones.”
What will take electronic literature to the next level, Mr. Wardrip-Fruin suggested, are multimedia projects involving so many inventive procedures that they cannot be reproduced or mimicked on paper. “Think of the textual analogue to video games,” he said. “You can’t really capture the way a video game works by printing it out; that’s what will have to happen with electronic literature for it to become popular.”
While I was interviewed by the Guardian last year, it’s still novel to see my musings end up in the paper. I remember leaning against the counter, with the redwoods out the window, and saying that the direction for future e-lit that interests me most is work that is so interactive and procedural that it might be considered “the textual analogue to video games.” (I don’t remember tying this to the issue of popularity, but I imagine these quotes are from a recording of our conversation.) Given that I have the opportunity here, I’d like to develop this notion a step further. Just as the images in computer games function with a certain logic of images (think of collision detection) so the e-lit I’m interested in exploring operates with a certain logic of language (think of textual instruments). That’s the type of interaction, those are the types of procedures, that I think hold the most promise for our future experimentation.
Just in case the Times archive is having trouble, I’ve put a copy of the article’s text here. There’s also a thread on GTxA, where people can leave comments.