Is Contemporary Women's Writing Computational? Unraveling Twenty-First Century Creativity with Penelope at her Loom

Abstract

“Literature in the twenty-first century is computational,” Katherine Hayles advances in her contribution to a recent issue of New Literary History that explores the question “What Is Literature Now?” (Hayles 2007: 99). Contemporary literature, conceived as the whole system of literary production, reception, and distribution, is permeated at every level by computation. It does not exist without electronic digital computers and cannot be thought outside of them. This computational character of contemporary literature, Hayles concedes, is most evident in hypertexts: “literature that is ‘digital born’, created on a computer and meant to be read on it” (Hayles 2007: 99). Yet digitality is not only central to electronic literature. “Almost all print books are digital files before they become book,” Hayles writes (99). Digitality therefore is not peripheral, but at the core of contemporary literature. This, she maintains, has far-reaching consequences for the field of literature: “The implications of intermediation for contemporary literature are not limited to works of electronic literature but extend to contemporary print literature and indeed to literary criticism as a whole” (121).