Electronic Literature by Scott Rettberg

Abstract

Reviewed by: Electronic Literature by Scott Rettberg Steve Tomasula Scott Rettberg, Electronic Literature. Polity, 2019. vi + 247 pp. "Imagine a book" (1), begins Scott Rettberg's magisterial overview of electronic literature and its antecedents, founders, critics, theories, technologies, and cultural contexts. This is no easy task, given E-Lit's galaxy of forms and the fact that some works may be impossible [End Page 395] to revisit, even a few years after they were created. Indeed, it's telling that every book about electronic literature (many of which are considered here) begins by explaining what it is and is not. So does this landmark survey, though it comes over thirty years after the genre's early works. Luckily for readers, as one of the founders of the Electronic Literature Organization (ELO), Rettberg is in that rare position of a historian who has a living memory of nearly all the major works and figures of his subject. He begins by asking readers to imagine the printed book as a platform: a particular reading technology. What makes the printed book a particularly good platform are its affordances, such as its elegant navigation system (page numbers). Next, he asks readers to imagine books that offer different affordances: for example, a book that links to other books, that has a sound track, or that can be co-authored by an entire town. Unlike a print novel on a Kindle, electronic literature was created with digital tools to intentionally make the affordances of a digital platform part of the reading experience. The works range from programs that generate poetry to the code of these programs as the site of the actual artistry. Other examples are as different as John Cayley's kinetic poetry or Amaranth Borsuk and Brad Bouse's virtual pop-up books. E-Lit can be site specific, as is John Craig Freeman's Border Crossing, which uses augmented reality to mark each spot in the desert along the Mexican-US border where an actual migrant died. E-Lit can be networked as a game across thousands of users, or experienced one at a time in a Cave Automatic Virtual environment (CAVE). Its text can be multimodal, as is Stephanie Strickland's mapping of poetry onto video or the sound poetry of Ian Hatcher's Drone Pilot. Netprovs (or Net-provocations) are collaborative, as is Rob Wittig and Mark Marino's infamous Occupy MLA, where Twitter users sought to shame institutions of higher learning for their dependence on low-wage, adjunct faculty. Rettberg incorporates critics who have been engaged with this work over the decades, including N. Katherine Hayles, Jessica Pressman, and Chris Funkhouser. The discussion of literary theory, programming languages, and digital tools used to create the works (CSS, JavaScript, Flash, and others) that inform this book could fill an encyclopedia on their own. Rettberg seems to have recognized his first task as trying to not be the proverbial blindfolded critic who defines an elephant by holding its trunk, leg, or tail. Especially with E-Lit, the tail can morph into a fish or a song. Rettberg delineates five core genres as his chapters: Combinatory Poetics, Hypertext Fiction, Interaction Fiction and Other Game-like [End Page 396] Forms, Kinetic and Interactive Poetry, and Network Writing. He acknowledges that his groupings are somewhat arbitrary in that each of them interweaves with the others, builds on them, and expands into other disciplines, as does Alison Knowles's The House of Dust, an early example of computer-generated poetry that also had iterations as a performance of pages thrown from a helicopter, a gallery installation, and a concrete shelter. A myriad of creative works could fall into one of these genres (he notes that the Interactive Fiction Archive alone lists thousands of works). Throughout Electronic Literature, though, there is an acknowledged bias toward "works that privilege good writing . . . over difficult puzzles" (101), that "sit outside the commercial mainstream" (116), are "self-consciously constructed as poetic or narrative works," and pull from literary traditions even as they challenge the conventions of literature. Rettberg's method, then, is to tease out connections between the works of electronic literature—such as the (digital or predigital) traditions they emerge...