Charting the Digital Literary Sphere

&KDUWLQJWKH'LJLWDO/LWHUDU\6SKHUH 6LPRQH0XUUD\ &RQWHPSRUDU\/LWHUDWXUH9ROXPH1XPEHU6XPPHUSS $UWLFOH 3XEOLVKHGE\8QLYHUVLW\RI:LVFRQVLQ3UHVV )RUDGGLWLRQDOLQIRUPDWLRQDERXWWKLVDUWLFOH KWWSVPXVHMKXHGXDUWLFOH Access provided by James Madison University & (Viva) (4 Oct 2016 20:51 GMT) SIMONE MURRAY Charting the Digital Literary Sphere hat is the relationship between digital communi- cation technologies and contemporary literary cul- W ture? In some ways, it is a question rarely posed at present, largely because it has been posed so often before and the often grandiose predictions formulated in response have so lamentably failed to materialize. Since the late 1980s, pro- ponents of literary hypertext and later network-inspired variants such as interactive fiction and Twitterature have challenged literature’s traditionally linear-narrative and single-author characteristics.1 Roughly simultaneously, from the early 1990s, constant academic speculation over the imminent “death of the book” cast doubt upon literature’s traditional print-culture format.2 That e-books have demonstrably failed to date to eliminate codex book sales, and that even the most critically acclaimed hypertext fictions remain curiosities in the literary canon, their dissemination beset by problems of software and hardware obsolescence, has rendered the question of digital technologies’ impact on contemporary literary culture Research and writing of this article were made possible by the Australian Research Coun- cil’s Discovery Projects grant scheme (2012) and Monash University’s Advancing Women’s Research Success grant project (2014). 1. For examples of “first-generation” digital literary theory and criticism, see Bolter; Coover, “End of Books” and “Hyperfiction”; Delany and Landow; and Landow, Hypertext 3.0 and Hyper/Text/Theory. For more recent research, including into literary uses of social media, see Douglas; and Page and Thomas. 2. For a feminist take on these changes, see Spender. An indicative range of mid-1990s perspectives can be found in Nunberg. Contemporary Literature 56, 2 0010-7484; E-ISSN 1548-9949/15/0002-0311 ᭧ 2015 by the Board of Regents of the University of Wisconsin System 312 ⋅ CONTEMPORARY LITERATURE a passe´, almost embarrassingly naive, inquiry.3 There is a weary sense that, as a discipline, we have been around this block before. Yet the manifest failure of futurists’ more eschatological predictions to come to pass is not reason to abandon the question of the digital’s significance for literary culture. Rather, it should serve as a spur to provide better answers—newer, alert to the risks of rhe- torical overreaching, and attentive to the varied and sometimes con- tradictory permutations of contemporary culture. For the Internet offers an abundance of what in earlier print- and broadcast- dominated eras was collectively termed “book talk”: book review websites, self-cataloguing library networks, author home pages, publishers’ portals, online book retailers, archived writers’ festival sessions, and recorded celebrity author readings. Indeed, the chal- lenge for contemporary bibliophiles is not to locate literary content of interest online but, rather, to sift the perspicacious and illumi- nating wheat from the chaff of vapid adulation and naked self- promotion.4 For literary studies to ignore this rich seam of online biblio-enthusiasm simply because the question of the digital-literary interface has been posed before and the answers found wanting risks looking like smug self-satisfaction on the part of print-culture’s erstwhile defenders in the face of earlier waves of digital booster- ism. More pervasively, for a discipline fearful of the impact of neo- liberal political agendas on research funding allocations, student enrollments, and graduate employment prospects, it is needlessly self-limiting to dismiss such ample evidence of continued public enthusiasm for matters literary.5 I do not mean to suggest that academe has, since the turn of the millennium, remained silent on the relationship of digital media to literary culture. Insightful and productive work on the significance of electronic and self-publishing, the game-changing role of online 3. For discussion of problems of longevity and canonicity in digital literature, see Montfort and Wardrip-Fruin; and Ensslin. 4. For mainstream media discussion of how to find good book blogs, see Sullivan, “Suggested Trail” and “Bookworms.” 5. James F. English’s The Global Future of English Studies provides a perhaps surprisingly optimistic take on the future of literary studies as an academic discipline. Jim Collins withholds condemnatory rhetoric and investigates contemporary popular literary culture with enthusiasm in Bring on the Books for Everybody and “Reading, in a Digital Archive of One’s Own.” MURRAY ⋅ 313 book retailers, and the impact of digital media on reading practices exists.6 But most striking is how often it is found, piecemeal, at the fringes of better-established disciplines, such as book history (whose very choice of name signals its unease with contemporary developments), nationalist literary studies (despite the Internet’s structural undermining of national boundaries), cultural sociology (though traditionally restive with specifically literary judgments), and cultural studies (long more attuned to screen media than to the codex). Lacking is a unifying term that could give focus and coher- ence to a currently scattered body of work. I propose the umbrella term the digital literary sphere. This wording denotes not detailed close readings of specific digital literary experiments, nor the unfolding rivalries between specific e-book reader technologies, both of which are amply chronicled elsewhere. Rather, it encom- passes the broad array of book-themed websites and other digital content whose focus is contemporary literature and its production, circulation, and consumption, however blurry that tripartite dis- tinction has been rendered in an era of Web 2.0 and social media. For it is clear that while e-book formats are undeniably encroaching upon the codex as literature’s dominant platform, and that pockets of specialist interest in niche digital-literary experiments remain, the vast majority of online literary discussion concerns traditionally linear, single-author narratives published either in print form or in e-book versions that closely mimic the codex experience. What is required academically to do justice to these developments is a socio- cultural conceptualization of the digital-literature interface that is both contextual in focus (rather than belletristic or technocentric) and contemporary in outlook, so that we may gain greater insight into digital media’s role in fashioning twenty-first-century authorial careers, publisher prospects, public understandings of literature, critical judgments, and reader behaviors. By the second decade of the twenty-first century, digital environments have clearly ceased to be severable appendages to a properly print-focused literary uni- 6. For a masterful cultural sociology of U.S. book retailing, see Miller’s Reluctant Cap- italists. For an anthology of digital literary studies approaches, see Siemens and Schreib- man. For more general discussion of the book in the digital era, see Collins, Bring on the Books; Darnton, Case; Lang; and Striphas. 314 ⋅ CONTEMPORARY LITERATURE verse. But it is equally true—perhaps contrary to some of the more imperializing claims of media studies—that literary discourse and its characteristic dispositions continue to shape the nature and norms of online book talk, rendering it distinct from online discussion of other cultural forms. It is this complex interface of literary- digital mutual interpenetration that demands detailed analysis, so that literary studies may document and better comprehend an epochal moment in literary culture’s adaptation to and colonization of a newer communications format—an era of veritable digital incunabula. My project’s charting of the digital literary sphere operates at the confluence of three dynamic academic fields: book history or print culture studies; digital media studies; and electronic or digital literary studies. While each discipline is expanding, they have thus far typically failed to engage with one another directly. While the Author is a foundational concept in literary studies, its theorization was not prevalent in the Anglophone scholarly world until translations of Roland Barthes’s and Michel Foucault’s books of the late-1960s drew attention to the way in which academic ven- eration of the “author figure” functioned to shut down the innate polysemy of texts. During roughly the same period, but starting from a diametrically opposed, empiricist position, the bibliograph- ically inspired discipline of book history has sought to reconstruct the historical, institutional, and material characteristics of authorship’s development. These crystallized in the early twentieth-century appearance of the professional (typically male) author—able to live by his pen, vigilant in protecting his international copyrights through the medium of a literary agent, and staging strategic inter- ventions into the public sphere.7 Situated methodologically between these two approaches has been a third strand of culturally inflected legal scholarship which traces the emergence of the Author as a 7. For studies of the rise of literary agents from the late nineteenth century to their contemporary kingmaker role in the literary industry, see Delany, Gillies, Hepburn, McDonald, and West.

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