Three Holy Grails, Seven Types of Crisis, and a Partridge...

Brian Kim Stefans keeps up the good work of publicly posting his class and conference materials, and making available resources for the study and theory of electronic literature. Most recently, he’s posted a handout for a talk he gave in 2008, which elaborates the three “Holy Grails” of electronic literature, and seven types of “crisis” which animate to such works. For example, the three grails:

1. Writing Without the “Author”: To write a piece that can be read several different ways – none predetermined by the “author” – which will provide distinctive, compelling reading experiences each time – that is, displacement of the “author” onto the algorithm.
2. Reading Beyond the “Page”: To write text for an environment that serves a textual function at nearly all times while maintaining the illusion of a dynamic, three-dimensional, processed space that is moving as far away from the “page” as possible.
3. Writing/Reading as Gameplay: To create a programmed object that serves equally as a piece of literature and which also serves as a “game” with all the “fun” implied in such a title — that is, to in­corporate the user completely into the world of algorithm and the world of the screenspace.

And the first two crises:

1. Crisis of ESCHATOLOGY — we are not sure where, in the standard narrative paradigm, poetic paradigm, or essayistic (syllogistic) paradigm, we are located nor can we, for the mo­ment, imagine the end.
2. Crisis of SIGNIFICATION — something has occurred in our understanding of conventional relationships between word and thing, or even letter and word; language seems to be becom­ing pure inscription and “non-referential.”