Master thesis presentation

This what I have managed to write so far as part of the masteroppgave seminar. I am still in the beginning and there is a lot to read and research before I write more but this was obligatory so I couldn't postpone it. On the other hand the fact that I had to write something helped me in thinking about my master thesis even more.
This is the text I submitted.

Quality in electronic literature

Introduction


Digital literature, network fiction, hypertext fiction, cybertexts are just some of the terms used to describe what Katherine Hayles (2008) calls “digital born” by which she means “...digital object created on a computer and (usually) meant to be read in a computer (p.3). Electronic literature has been around for quite a while, the first work Michel Joyce's afternoon: a story a started circulating in 1987 but was published in its entirety in 1990. Even though there is quite a lot written on this topic it is still considered a relatively new field of study that is more in the background rather than in the mainstream of literature. Eskelinen (2008) in his paper “Electronic literature without a map” laments the lack of influence that this literature has and the lack of interest for this field and especially lack of audience (or readers):

Compared to many other cultural niches, there are neither crossover successes attracting wider audiences, nor popular forms and genres of electronic literature. This condition situates electronic literature in a position similar to various avant-garde movements, although without the latter’s cultural impact and influence.


Research questions

Katherine Hayles defines different generations of electronic literature works based upon the techniques they have used. The first generation which uses mainly hypertext technology for building up their stories and uses a programme called Storyspace which provides the tools needed for creating their works. The previously mentioned work of Joyce afternoon: a story is the first work of this generation and widely praised, another one that deserves our attention is Shelley Jackson's Patchwork girl (1995). The second generation uses the World Wide Web and all its affordances in the creating process and one of the main elements is multimodality, the combination of words, pictures, videos, sounds to create meaning. The works that I will be looking into are Caitlin Fisher's These waves of girls, Kate Pullinger's Flightpath, Judd Morrisey's The jew's daughter. The third generation, which Ensslin calls cybertext generation doesn't have the large body of works that the previous one has but nevertheless its main characteristic is that the machine (code) takes control of the work and controls the reading. Among the works that I can mention here is Stuart Moulthrop's Hegairoscope.

The question that will guide me in writing this thesis will be with defining what do we mean by quality when we talk about electronic literature and obviously here we must take into consideration both the literariness and also the ways in which the story is put together like the way the different elements of it communicate with each other. By looking at the works mentioned above that are considered as the masterpieces in electronic literature I will try to find out what qualities make them such. This will be contrasted with less known works in order to pinpoint the second rate works and what makes them such when compared to the first-rate ones.

Electronic Literature Organization when giving awards for the best works have put forward some criteria that must be fulfilled and these will be of help to orient myself when answering the questions about quality. These criteria are:

Innovative use of electronic techniques and enhancements.
Literary quality, understood as being related to print and electronic traditions of fiction and poetry, respectively.
Quality and accessibility of interface design.

(http://www.eliterature.org/Awards2001/criteria.php)

While trying to answer the question about what is quality when we talk about electronic works I anticipate that there will be other questions that will need addressing and that have to do with the new literariness that digital works are developing. This has been particularly addressed in David Ciccoricco's book “Reading network fiction”. Other questions regarding difficulties and gratifications that the reader might encounter en route will be of interest because a good digital work is supposed to be both challenging and at the same time pleasing, otherwise the reader might not continue reading it. This is a particular challenge in the electronic literature field because each work is unique and despite the fact that some works might share certain elements, they still have to be unique in order to stand out (and fullfill the ELO criteria)

Electronic literature poses other challenges when it comes to studying or analysing it and these are connected with finding a theoretical body that takes into consideration all the different aspects of digital works. Since this kind of literature combines many fields within itself, we cannot expect to have a clearly stated set of theories ready for use. Therefore this paper is more of an adventure than a set out journey and this is the reason that it is at the same time exciting and scary.

The background for choosing this topic

“For those of us interested in the present state of literature and where it might be going, electronic literature raises complex, diverse and compelling issues” (Hayles, 2008, p. 43).

I have always been interested in literature, particularly English literature since I have studied it in the bachelor level and I think that this new manner of creating fiction works is something that I would like to immerse myself into by both reading them and trying to find the elements and the characteristics that make them unique and worthwhile spending time in reading/watching/experiencing them. The World Wide Web creates an opportunity for everybody to express their creativity in different ways, nevertheless it is important to have the knowledge of how to separate the wheat from the chaff. While print literature has an established history and its classics have withstood the test of time, electronic literature lacks this and therefore to try to find quality and to try to answer questions about it seems to me to be a practical issue as well as an interesting one.