MLA Convention 2020: Documenting a Graduate Course in Electronic Literature with Scalar

Section III: "Digital Interventions"

In the fourth chapter of Anarchists in the Academy, titled “Digital Interventions,” Spinosa analyzes four e-lit pieces and argues how these pieces take an integrative approach to meaning-making and how they ensure readers’ agency in various degrees. The four pieces are: “Seattle Drift” (1997) by Jim Andrews, Code X (2002) by W. Mark Sutherland, “The Dreamlife of Letters” (2000) by Brian Kim, and The Dead Tower (2012) by Andy Campbell and Mez Breeze. Even though these pieces are different in genre and their time-period, Spinosa observes a common trend in these pieces that exemplifies some of the tenets of postanarchist theory of literary studies. Particularly, all these authors “desire to re-engage with their audiences to remedy . . . the separation between author, text, and reader that continues to characterize literary and digital culture” (153). In this chapter, Spinosa explains how the digital intervention has made “free and agential reader engagement” (153) possible by looking “closely at the ways in which each text is situated within existing (mostly print-based) reading traditions” (153).

Spinosa begins the analysis by emphasizing how these four pieces embody Katherine Hayles’s “propositions about digital literatures,” discussed in her book Electronic Literature. Spinosa lists three of the propositions by Hayles that are illustrated in these works:
    First, these works demonstrate the ways that “verbal narratives are simultaneously conveyed and disrupted by code” (Hayles 135).
    Second, the way these pieces uses digital medium to “engage with readers” (Spinosa 154) exemplifies how “distributed cognition implies distributed agency” (Hayles 136).
    Third, all these works illustrate their authors’ intention in disrupting the “habitual ways” the audience use “networked technology” (Spinosa 154). According to Hayles, readers/audience often lose certain amount of agency because of the “subconscious or unthinking action” while using technology (Spinosa 155). Spinosa claims that these works reveal how the “literary or poetic use of digital language can intervene” in the habitual ways audience interact with networked technology” (Spinosa 155).

Using Hayles’s propositions as a framework for analyzing these works, Spinosa argues that these works of literature exemplify how digital medium can intervene to “efface authorial power over a text” to “[empower] and [invite] the readers to take part in the literary process” (Baetens 7 qtd. in Spinosa 155). These pieces not only reveal the potential of digital medium for engaging readers in meaning-making process, but also reveal those habitual ways that hinders readers’ agency.

Before reading Spinosa’s analysis of the e-lit pieces in this chapter, I looked at the e-lit pieces myself to see how my engagements with these pieces differ from Spinosa’s. I was intrigued by Spinosa’s analysis of “Seattle Drift.” The first work that Spinosa analyzes in this chapter is Jim Andrews’s “Seattle Drift,” a kinetic poem that allows the readers partial agency as they can make the words of the poem drift and stop their movement whenever they wish, by clicking hyperlinked options on top of the poem. Spinosa argues that even though the drifting of the word in this poem seems “random,” the drifting is controlled by “three primary forces”: reader, author, and algorithm. Reader controls the drifting by starting and stopping it; Andrews has designed this poem and created the code and the algorithm; and the algorithm and source code facilitate the movement of the words.  Thus, the movement of “Seattle Drift” is “partially randomized and partially organized with the reader’s agency” and this agency is limited in determining when to begin the rifting and when to stop (Spinosa 158-159). Spinosa Katalin Sándor’s term “limited interface-rhetoric” to describe this limited agency (Sándor 150 qtd. in Spinosa 159). Spinosa notes the poems invitation to the reader “do me” as an example of desire for an erotic and sadomasochistic relationship with reader, generated by reader’s “non-traditional actions” upon the poem (Spinosa 160). This desire is visually presented by the way the motion of the drifting words replicate ejaculation. According to the algorithm of this poem, the drifting will not stop until the reader stops it and the drifting will continue beyond the screen. Thus, Spinosa claims, Andrews uses concrete poetry to show the possibilities of digital intervention.

My response to “Seattle Drift” was completely different than Spinosa’s. If I have not read Spinosa, I would have never thought that the poem embodies desire and the movement of the words exemplify ejaculation. Since Electronic Literature resists the idea of unidirectional interpretation and audience engagement and prefers multivalent audience responses, I wonder, how does this concept work with individual author’s purpose of creating a particular piece of e-lit? How do the authors of e-lit pieces view these diverse responses from their audience that may significantly change the intended meaning of their work?

I am fascinated by the paradox of meaning here – on the one hand, the scope of multiple ways of audience engagements seems liberating and enriching; on the other hand, there seems to be an underlying tension between the ways the authors want their audience to engage with their e-lit pieces and the way the audience actually engage with those pieces. This is just a novice reader’s thought!
 

This page has paths: