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

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This page is referenced by:

Troy Rowden's Case Troy Rowden
Second Year MA Student (Rhetoric and Composition)
Department of English, Washington State University
Email: troy.rowden@wsu.edu

windsound at the Heart of Electronic Literature

windsound, by John Cayley, is a work that offers insights to many issues central to the field of Electronic Literature upon its traversal. In this paper, I offer an explanation of the processes that perform it and an argument for how we should engage with it based on a brief literature review of some fundamental issues to the field. Using this understanding of the processes, I argue how Stanley Fish’s Affective Stylistics, a branch of reader-response theory, can be used to solve the problem of effectively appreciating both the unseen “text” and seen “scripton” of Electronic Literature pieces (Aarseth 63). I then perform a close reading of windsound using my understanding of Fish’s Affective Stylistics and the understanding of the work I derive from the investigation in the first half of the paper.

Analyzing windsound with this methodology will serve as a case study for how it can be applied to other works. windsound interrogates humanity’s reliance on language to express and engage with our expression of fundamental human experiences, but it is also demonstrating how aurality can be used to move us “forward” (Cayley, “Grammalepsy”) into a culture of aural literature, what Cayley calls “aurature” (“Aurature at the End(s) of Literature”). Affective Stylistics offers the user/reader (UR) a way to critically engage with how the work affects them using interpretation of what they experience and forces them to understand that experience considering the medium and the underlying processes and mechanics that shape it. As a branch of reader-response theory, it will not allow us to pay supreme attention to the “social text approach” (Portela para. 34), answering questions like what a work points out about various social injustices or historical conditions of the author, for example. But it does allow the UR to appreciate how the unique elements used to compose and perform born-digital work influences the interpretation of it.

Humans are dependent on signifiers and the way they or the environments these signifiers are presented in change to generate meaning. Where the environment of the signifiers is concerned, we are also forced to ask how our engagement with the work changes its meaning, given a different interface or interaction mechanic will yield a different interpretation. Electronic Literature is a field of many texts that manipulate all these elements and more, either through movement, sound, text, or haptic transformations. We must figure out what the text does before we can understand what it means. Works that do, need attention to doing.

The UR and work form an interlocking cognitive system or assemblage (Portela para. 8; Hayles). To fail to account for the materiality and procedures producing the experience along with how symbolic meaning is manipulated in the UR’s imagination and emotions over the course of engagement with a work is to fail to account for experiencing the piece. It is to fail to account for interpreting it. And such negligence will also not allow accurate preservation if such attention to the affect of engagement is lost. To accurately preserve a work in e-lit is to accurately preserve the experience of the work as mediated by the technology the work was originally presented in. What does the work do and how does the work operate cannot be separated.

I believe adopting Affective Stylistics will open the field in a few ways, but in a way that forces new readers, authors, and critics alike to grapple with what is essential to interpretation of e-lit. As Caitlin Fisher points out in “Future Fiction Storytelling Machines,” Electronic Literature is not widely read, even by authors who compose it, “Twenty of us in that hallway, a quick straw poll revealing that we had collectively written about 25 hypertext works that year and had collectively read two...” The fact that Fish’s Affective Stylistics was introduced almost 50 years ago also reveals that, despite various e-lit critic’s insistence on how radically different interpretation of e-lit is, the foundations of proper interpretation of an e-lit work can be traced back to a larger history of literary and broader artistic and humanities criticism. This is because the fragile postmodern subject is still the center of interpretation now as it was starting to become then. The center of interpretation of e-lit and other art forms lies with the interpreter. Students, teachers, and other scholars of e-lit can trace the field’s roots and criticisms back to criticisms of other art forms, kinetic art, traditional poetry, media studies etc.

Affective Stylistics allows us to determine the validity of descriptive theories of linguistic interpretation and how exactly we experience works. windsound is extraordinarily important to Electronic Literature because it forces us to consider interpretation of the machinations and processes along with the textual and visual outputs we experience. It forces us to ask what it is we are doing when we read and are read to, what we are doing when we see and hear, regardless of the methodology we approach it with. Affective Stylistics is not the only way into answers; it just offers an extremely useful way to answer to these questions and one that can help us join our contemporary voices to longer histories of criticism.

Works Cited
Aarseth, Espen. Cybertext: Reflections on Ergodic Literature. Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997.
Barber, John. “Re: Windsound and Storytelling.” Received by Troy Rowden, 25 Apr. 2019.
Barber, John. “Sound at the Heart of Electronic Literature.” Electronic Book Review (ebr): Digital Futures of Literature, Theory, Criticism, and the Arts, 2 Dec. 2018, https://electronicbookreview.com/essay/where-are-we-now-orienteering-in-the-electronic-literature-collection-volume-2/. Accessed 21 Feb. 2019.
Cayley, John. “Aurature at the End(s) of Electronic Literature.” Electronic Book Review (ebr): Digital Futures of Literature, Theory, Criticism, and the Arts, 5 Feb. 2017, https://electronicbookreview.com/essay/aurature-at-the-ends-of-electronic-literature/. Accessed 20 Feb. 2019.
Cayley, John. “Grammalepsy: An Introduction.” Electronic Book Review (ebr): Digital Futures of Literature, Theory, Criticism, and the Arts, 5 Aug. 2018, http://electronicbookreview.com/essay/grammalepsy-an-introduction/. Accessed 27 Jan. 2019.
Cayley, John. “What is Transliteral Morphing?” https://programmatology.shadoof.net/index.php?p=contents/transliteral.html. Accessed 26. Jan. 2019.
Cayley, John. “Windsound.” P=R=O=G=R=A=M=M=A=T=O=L=O=G=Y, https://programmatology.shadoof.net/?wsqt. Accessed 26 Jan. 2019.
Fish, Stanley. “Literature in the Reader: Affective Stylistics.” New Literary History, vol. 2, no. 1, 1970, pp. 123-162, https://www.jstor.org/stable/468593?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents. Accessed 25 Feb. 2019.
Fisher, Caitlin. “Future Fiction Storytelling Machines.” Hyperrhiz: New Media Cultures no. 17, 2017. doi:10.20415/hyp/017.e01. Accessed 24 Feb. 2019.
Grigar, Dene. “Expanding the Pathfinders Methodology: Capturing Live Stream Traversals & Social Media Conversations.” Rebooting Electronic Literature: Documenting Pre-Web Digital Media. Volume 1. Electronic Literature Lab: Scalar, 2018. Accessed 22 Apr. 2019.
Grusin, Richard. Premeditation: Affect and Mediality After 9/11. Palgrave Macmillan UK, 2010.
Hayles, Katherine. “Literary Texts as Cognitive Assemblages: The Case of Electronic Literature.” Electronic Book Review (ebr): Digital Futures of Literature, Theory, Criticism, and the Arts, 8 May 2018, http://www.electronicbookreview.com/thread/electropoetics/translative. Accessed 3 May 2019.
Kirschenbaum, Matthew G. “Electronic Poetry.” The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics. 4^th ed., 2012. ProQuest Ebook Central, https://ntserver1.wsulibs.wsu.edu:2092/lib/wsu/detail.action?docID=913846. Accessed 23 Apr. 2019.
Mencía, Maria, Søren Bro Pold, and Manuel Portela. “Electronic Literature Translation: Translation as Process, Experience and Mediation.” Electronic Book Review (ebr): Digital Futures of Literature, Theory, Criticism, and the Arts, 30 June 2018, http://www.electronicbookreview.com/thread/electropoetics/translative. Accessed 26 Apr. 2019.
Moulthrop, Stuart, and Dene Grigar. Pathfinders: Documenting the Experience of Early Digital Literature. Nouspace Publications: Scalar, 2015. Accessed 25 Apr. 2019.
Moulthrop, Stuart. “Intimate Mechanics: One Model of Electronic Literature.” Hyperrhiz: New Media Cultures, no. 17, 2017. doi:10.20415/hyp/017.e03. Accessed 23 Feb. 2019.
Portela, Manuel. “The Machine in the Text, and the Text in the Machine.” DHQ: Digital Humanities Quarterly, vol. 4, no. 1, 2010, https://www.researchgate.net/publication/277171529_The_Machine_in_the_Text_and_the_Text_in_the_Machine. Accessed 24 Feb. 2019.
Tyson, Lois. “Reader-response Criticism.” Critical Theory Today: A User-Friendly Guide, 2nd Ed. Routledge, 2006. pp. 169-206.
Welch, John. “Of Programmatology.” Fourthdoor, Digitalis 3, pp. 13-17, http://www.fourthdoor.org/pdfs/5.3.pdf. Accessed 25 Feb. 2019.
windsound. BrownDigitalRepository, uploaded by John Cayley, 31 Jan. 2006, https://repository.library.brown.edu/storage/bdr:766943/MP4/. Accessed 26 Apr. 2019.
Zuern, John. “Where are we now?: Orienteering in the Electronic Literature Collection, Volume 2.” Electronic Book Review (ebr): Digital Futures of Literature, Theory, Criticism, and the Arts, 9 Nov. 2011, https://electronicbookreview.com/essay/where-are-we-now-orienteering-in-the-electronic-literature-collection-volume-2/. Accessed 21 Feb. 2019.