Pandemic Genres: Processing the COVID-19 Pandemic through Electronic Literature

Abstract

This essay surveys works of electronic literature and digital art initiated in the earliest months of the pandemic that are reflective the specific conditions and anxieties of the period. Here, we offer critical readings of these works to provide a better understanding of how electronic literature and digital art were used to process the experience and communicate the experience of the COVID-19 pandemic. Through an analysis of 13 works by 18 authors, certain traits and commonalities are identified as characteristic of a period-specific genre of COVID E-Lit. These include: an impulse towards the post-digital with crossovers both to analog artistic practice and forms such as net art more common to the early web; a focus during the periods of lockdown on domestic, local, and interior environments; digital takes on a chronicle mode of storytelling familiar from prior pandemic periods; meditation on the loss and substitution of shared public space; use of text generation to represent repetitive and interminable experiences of the pandemic; consideration of the virus itself as a language and on language as a manifestation of power and control; the influence of ubiquitous visualizations and statistical representations of the pandemic; and a desire to wrestle with the implications of the massive cultural shift to digital platforms that took place during the pandemic.