DOCSLIB.ORG

Spatiality As a Governing Principle of Digital Literature

Total Page：16

File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb

Download full-text PDF Read full-text
Spatiality As a Governing Principle of Digital Literature The Ergodic Revisited: Spatiality as a Governing Principle of Digital Literature James Barrett Umeå Studies in Language and Literature 28 Department of Language Studies Umeå University 2015 For my father, James Arthur Barrett (1940-2013) "Reading maketh a full man, conference a ready man, and writing an exact man" - Sir Francis Bacon, Of Studies (1625) Responsible publisher under Swedish law: the Dean of the Humanities Faculty This work is protected by the Swedish Copyright Legislation (Act 1960:729) ISBN: 978-91-7601-283-3 Cover by Mikael Lundén. Ev. info om Omslag/sättning/omslagsbild: An electronic version available at: http://umu.diva-portal.org/ Printed by: Print & Media, Umeå University 2015 Umeå, Västerbotten 2015 Table of Contents Acknowledgements 3 Abstract 5 Keywords 6 Enkel sammanfattning på svenska 7 Introduction 11 Background 12 Close Reading 16 Basis for Analysis and Argument 19 Research Questions: Space, Interaction and Narrative 23 The Chapters 25 Contribution 30 Reading Interactive Spaces 32 Close Reading Space in the Digital Works 33 The Representation of Space in the Digital Works 40 Address and the Spatial in the Prefaces 41 The Representation of Space and Metalepsis 43 Representational Space 47 The Iconic and the Symbolic in the Digital Works 48 Monumentality 52 Perspective and Interaction 57 Focalization 61 Addressivity 65 Place 68 Audio and the Spatial 73 The Spatial Foundation for Interaction 76 An Interactive Literary Communication Based on the Spatial 80 Representation of Space 84 Form and Design 86 Signs and Addressivity 89 Space and Narrative 91 The Spatial in the Digital Preface 97 Space in the Prefaces 98 Space in the Prefaces to Egypt 103 Space in the Prefaces to Dreamaphage 111 Space in the Prefaces to Façade 118 Summary 126 Design and the Representation of Space 131 Design and Space in Dreamaphage 133 Designing Space in Egypt 141 1 Designing the Witness in Last Meal Requested 144 Design and Space in Façade 151 Summary 165 The Addressivity of the Spatial 169 Addressivity in Place 171 Addressivity and Place in Egypt 173 Addressivity in Last Meal Requested 183 Addressivity and Place in Dreamaphage 190 Gender and Spatial Addressivity in Façade 194 Addressivity and Place in Façade 196 Addressivity and Social Class in Façade 207 Summary 213 Conclusion 217 Works Cited 224 Index 246 2 Acknowledgements I would like to first express my gratitude to my mother and father, Roslyn Gordon and James Arthur Barrett who filled our home with books, music, creative people and the talk of travel. This was the ground that gave me everything I needed to work with languages. My arrival in Sweden from Australia marked a turning point in my life. I would like to thank Erika, who along with her family helped in so many ways. Most of all I have a deep appreciation for what Silas and Benyamin, our wonderful children, have contributed through the course of this dissertation. Their positive and supportive attitudes have kept me going through all the difficulties. This project was initiated by a generous grant from the Knut and Alice Wallenberg Foundation. This grant allowed me to take up a post at what was then the Department of Modern Languages at Umeå University. Professor Emeritus Raoul J. Granqvist led me through the history of English Literature, Post-Colonial and Translation studies. Everyone who worked in what soon became the Department of Language Studies showed me a warmth and generosity that made even the Umeå winters almost bearable. I would like to acknowledge the inspirational Pat and Nev Shrimpton, Elisabeth Mårald (who introduced me to the work of Mikhail Bakhtin), Maria Lindgren Leavenworth (who suggested I try for the Wallenberg), Mats Deutschmann, Lars Hubinette, Anders Steinvall, Hanna Outakoski (who taught me about Sápmi), Kirk Sullivan (who kept this project on track more than once), Görel Sandström (who led a great department), Johan Nordlander (who owns guitars) and Magnus Nordström (who kept the lights and screens on). I am grateful for the dialogue with my fellow PhD colleagues; Martin Shaw, Van Leavenworth, Niklas Hållén, Moa Mattis, Hilda Härgestam Strandberg, Therese Örnberg Berglund, Anette Svensson and Stephanie Hendrick. I would like to thank Professor Patrik Svensson and the crew from HUMlab. Cecilia Lindhé has been a continual source of advice and teaching throughout this project. I am grateful for the camaraderie of Jon Svensson, Fredrik Palm, Stefan Gelfgren, Coppélie Cocq, Ana Foka, Anna Johansson, Carl-Erik Engqvist, Elin Andersson, Emma Ewadotter, Jennie Olofsson, 3 Toby Reid, Jim Robertsson, Johan von Boer, Karin Jangert, Linda Lindgren, Emma Oloffson, and Magnus Oloffson. The HUMlab postdoctoral program was a source of great inspiration for me, and I am indebted from the contact with so many wonderful scholars that worked in the lab. The experience of graduate study and writing a dissertation would have been impossible for me without the wise counsel, patience and direction of my supervisors, Professor Heidi Hansson and Professor Astrid Ensslin. I would like to thank Katarina Gregersdotter for providing the Swedish summary of the main ideas of this study. Finally, I thank Dr. Jenna Ng, for the invaluable knowledge, inspiration and guidance. 4 Abstract This dissertation examines the role of the spatial in four works of digital interactive literature. These works are Dreamaphage by Jason Nelson (2003), Last Meal Requested by Sachiko Hayashi (2003), Façade by Michael Mateas and Andrew Stern (2005) and Egypt: The Book of Going Forth by Day by M. D. Coverley (2006). The study employs an original analytical method based on close reading and spatial analysis, which combines narrative, design and interaction theories. The resulting critique argues that the spatial components of the digital works define reader interaction and the narratives that result from it. This is one of very few in-depth studies grounded in the close reading of the spatial in digital interactive literature. Over five chapters, the dissertation analyzes the four digital works according to three common areas. Firstly, the prefaces, design and addressivity are present in each. Secondly, each of the works relies on the spatial for both interaction and the meanings that result. Thirdly, the anticipation of responses from a reader is evaluated within the interactive properties of each work. This anticipation is coordinated across the written text, moving and still images, representations of places, characters, audio and navigable spaces. The similar divisions of form, the role of the spatial and the anticipation of responses provide the basic structure for analysis. As a result, the analytical chapters open with an investigation of the prefaces, move on to the design and conclude with how the spaces of the digital works can be addressive or anticipate responses. In each chapter representations of space and representational space are described in relation to the influence they have upon the potentials for reader interaction as spatial practice. This interaction includes interpretation, as well as those elements 5 associated with the ergodic, or the effort that defines the reception of the digital interactive texts. The opening chapter sets out the relevant theory related to space, interaction and narrative in digital literature. Chapter two presents the methodology for close reading the spatial components of the digital texts in relation to their role in interaction and narrative development. Chapter three assesses the prefaces as paratextual thresholds to the digital works and how they set up the spaces for reader engagement. The next chapter takes up the design of the digital works and its part in the formation of space and how this controls interaction. The fifth chapter looks at the addressivity of the spatial and how it contributes to the possibilities for interaction and narrative. The dissertation argues for the dominance of the spatial as a factor within the formation of narrative through interaction in digital literature, with implications across contemporary storytelling and narrative theory. Keywords Digital literature, narrative studies, interactive narrative, ergodic, cybertext, spatial, addressivity, interactive design, representational space, spatial practice. 6 Enkel sammanfattning på svenska Titel: Att återkomma till den ergodiska metoden: rumslighet som styrande princip i digital litteratur. Denna doktorsavhandling undersöker fyra digitala litterära verk: Façade (2005) av Michael Mateas och Andrew Stern, Dreamaphage (2003) av Jason Nelson, Egypt: The Book of Going Forth by Day (2006) av MD Coverley (2006) och Last Meal Requested (2003) av Sachiko Hayashi (dessa refereras till som "de digitala verken" nedan). Studien undersöker hur de rumsliga komponenterna i varje verk påverkar läsarens interaktion med verken, och föreslår en rumslig strategi för att förklara hur digitala interaktiva litterära verk kopplar samman läsarens bidrag med de egna textstrukturerna som sedan resulterar i ett vidare, utvidgat berättande. Dessa rumsliga arrangemang analyseras enligt en tredelad modell som lanserats av Henri Lefebvre. Modellen utgörs av representation av rumslighet, representation av rummet, och rumslig praktik (1972). Med Lefebvre-modellen som verktyg ägnas särskild uppmärksamhet åt de ergodiska komponenter, också kallade "arbetsvägar”, som definierar interaktion med digitala verk (Aarseth, Cybertext 1). Dessa arbetsvägar blir rumsliga genom navigering, haptik och språkliga bidrag till de digitala texterna, eller
Load more

Recommended publications
  • Further, Reading
    Further, Reading This is the last column in the Platform 2 series. I’m grateful to Vagant for providing me with the opportunity to share some insights into the world of electronic literature over the past two years. I hope the columns have directed readers to some intriguing reading experience made for digital media and perhaps inspired a few writers to consider ways that they might want to play in the vast sandbox offered us by the computer, the network, mobile devices, and other emerging technologies. In parting I offer some suggestions for further reading about electronic literature. There is a rich and growing body of critical writing about electronic literature. While electronic literature is primarily a network- based digital phenomenon, the establishment of electronic literature as an academic field has been built to a greater extent on printed books that take time to step back and process the digital turn as it is unfolds. Foundations Before the Web, in the early 1990s, two books in particular had an important impact in establishing hypertext fiction and digital textuality more generally as objects of study within literature programs. Writing Space: The Computer, Hypertext, and the History of Writing, published by Jay David Bolter in 1991, offered the first serious and detailed investigation of the computer’s “writing space” considering the potential effects of its malleability in comparison to the history of the printed book, and the differences between the conceptual space of electronic writing, characterized by fluidity and interactivity between the writer, the reader, and mediating systems. At the same time as Bolter was writing that study, he was also part of the group developing Storyspace, the first hypertext system developed specifically for the creation of literary texts, and the book provides a good basis for understanding the conceptual milieu of early hypertext fictions such as Michael Joyce’s afternoon, a story.
    [Show full text]
  • Narrative and Digital Media
    1 Narrative and Digital Media by Scott Rettberg and Jill Walker Rettberg A New Cultural Paradigm We live in an age of ubiquitous digital textuality. We are teaching the first generation of digital-native students, who are more accustomed to writing and reading email than they are to writing and reading letters, more inclined to send an instant message to a classmate than to pass a note, and more likely to read their news online than they are to pick up a newspaper. Yet almost all these students come to our classes having had no specifically literary experience on their computer screens, and they are not accustomed to considering electronic environments as spaces for narrative literature. A great deal of the work involved in teaching digital narrative is encouraging students to rethink their cultural assumptions about the nature of literary forms on the one hand and the nature of computer programs and network writing on the other. In a course that surveys contemporary digital narrative, we keep several objectives in mind. We need to teach our students to understand digital narratives in formal ways, as text- machines, what Espen Aarseth describes as “cybertexts,” but once they have a handle on that, we need to return them to the interpretative mode, to encourage them to read these works in social, ideological, and historical contexts. Digital narratives are both formally innovative literary forms, which necessitate effort on the part of the reader simply to “operate,” and literary forms intended to reflect and comment on human 2 experience in the same manner as other kinds of literature.
    [Show full text]
  • Narrative As Virtual Reality : Immersion and Interactivity in Literature and Electronic Media / Marie-Laure Ryan
    Narrative as Virtual Reality PARALLAX: RE-VISIONS OF CULTURE AND SOCIETY Stephen G. Nichols, Gerald Prince, and Wendy Steiner SERIES EDITORS PARALLAX Narrative as Virtual Reality Immersion and Interactivity in Literature and Electronic Media Marie-Laure Ryan THE JOHNS HOPKINS UNIVERSITY PRESS | BALTIMORE AND LONDON 2001 THE JOHNS HOPKINS UNIVERSITY PRESS All rights reserved. Published 2001 Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper 987654321 The Johns Hopkins University Press 2715 North Charles Street Baltimore, Maryland 21218-4363 www.press.jhu.edu Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data will be found at the end of this book. A catalog record for this book is available from the British Library. isbn 0-8018-6487-9 To the genius loci that dwells between the waterfalls of Cascadilla and Fall Creeks, and to the one that haunts the Devil’s Gulch CONTENTS List of Figures and Tables ix Acknowledgments xi Introduction 1 PART I | VIRTUALITY ONE The Two (and Thousand) Faces of the Virtual 25 TWO Virtual Reality as Dream and as Technology 48 INTERLUDE: Virtual Realities of the Mind: Baudelaire, Huysmans, Coover 75 PART II | THE POETICS OF IMMERSION THREE The Text as World: Theories of Immersion 89 INTERLUDE: The Discipline of Immersion: Ignatius of Loyola 115 FOUR Presence of the Textual World: Spatial Immersion 120 FIVE Immersive Paradoxes: Temporal and Emotional Immersion 140 INTERLUDE: Virtual Narration as Allegory of Immersion 163 PART III | THE POETICS OF INTERACTIVITY SIX From Immersion to Interactivity: The Text
    [Show full text]
  • Electronic Poetry: How to Approach It? Giovanna Di Rosario
    Texto ! vol. XVII, n° 1 et 2 (2012) Electronic Poetry: How to Approach It? Giovanna di Rosario “Most literary theories take their object medium as given, in spite of the blatant historical differences between, for instance, oral and written literature. The written, or rather the printed, text has been the privileged form […]”. E. Aarseth1 In this article I will first summarize and analyse the methodology used to study electronic poetry, recounting the most important theories concerning electronic writings, then I will put forward a typology that I use to categorize electronic poetry, and then I will describe a possible approach to analyse electronic literature. This article is an extract of my PhD thesis on electronic poetry where I offer a critical analysis of several electronic poems. Here, I discuss the conceptual foundations and implications of the approach I decided to use in order to study electronic poetry, I establish the terminology applied in the analytic chapters and I propose a phenomenology of e-poetry. Poetry has always been interested in experimenting with new ways of writing. However, the (computer and internet) media make the experiments with language itself a basic question. The new textual technology arrived with the invention and development of digital computing in the middle of the 20th century, which brought to literature's doorstep potent media giving it flexibility and more power than any preceding ones. New poetic texts have emerged with digital computing and automation. These texts – due to the peculiarities of their medium – require a different approach and reading practice in order to be understood, and they open up interesting questions such as the idea of poetry in the new millennium, the role of the reader – and consequently of the author –, and the relationship between medium and message.
    [Show full text]
  • "Hypertext Fiction Ever After." Electronic Literature As Digital Humanities: Contexts, Forms, & Practices
    Moulthrop, Stuart. "Hypertext Fiction Ever After." Electronic Literature as Digital Humanities: Contexts, Forms, & Practices. By James O’Sullivan. New York,: Bloomsbury Academic, 2021. 150–162. Bloomsbury Collections. Web. 1 Oct. 2021. <http:// dx.doi.org/10.5040/9781501363474.ch-013>. Downloaded from Bloomsbury Collections, www.bloomsburycollections.com, 1 October 2021, 22:58 UTC. Copyright © Volume Editor’s Part of the Work © Dene Grigar and James O’Sullivan and Each chapter © of Contributors 2021. You may share this work for non-commercial purposes only, provided you give attribution to the copyright holder and the publisher, and provide a link to the Creative Commons licence. 13 Hypertext Fiction Ever After Stuart Moulthrop There are at least two ways to sketch the genealogy of hypertext fiction. From the perspective of literary theory, most influentially in Aarseth’s Cybertext (1997), hypertext fiction counts as one among many instances of ergodic expression. This broad-minded approach allows us to associate the form with a number of distinct but similar ventures, such as Malloy’s query- based “narrabase” stories, John McDaid’s “modally appropriate” artefictual fiction, various attempts at text generation, from the ELIZA script of the late 1960s to Daniel Stern and Michael Mateas’ Façade—and perhaps most significantly, the long tradition of text-based computer gaming, beginning with Colossal Cave Adventure in the mid-1970s and continuing today. Electronic literature and digital art contain many forms and practices besides hypertext fiction. If we want to consider both tree and forest, we need to see this genre as a machinic inflection of the general project of experimental writing.
    [Show full text]
  • Interactional Metalepsis and Unnatural Narratology Alice Bell
    View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk brought to you by CORE provided by Sheffield Hallam University Research Archive Interactional Metalepsis and Unnatural Narratology Alice Bell Bionote: Dr. Alice Bell is Reader in English Language and Literature at Sheffield Hallam University, UK. She is author of The Possible Worlds of Hypertext Fiction (Palgrave-Macmillan, 2010) and co- editor of Analyzing Digital Fiction (Routledge, 2014) and has published on digital fiction, narratology, and stylistics in Storyworlds, Narrative, Journal of Narrative Theory, Style, Contemporary Stylistics (2007), New Narratives (2011), A Poetics of Unnatural Narrative (2013), and World Building (2015). She can be reached at [email protected]. Abstract: This article argues that interactional metalepsis is a device that is inherently built into ergodic digital fiction and thus that ergodic digital fiction is necessarily unnatural. Offering a definition and associated typology of interactional metalepsis as it occurs in digital fiction, it explores the ways in which these media-specific and unnatural forms of metalepsis manifest in that medium. It defines interactional metalepsis as a form of metalepsis which takes place across the actual to storyworld boundary and that exploits the interactive nature of digital technology via the hardware through which the reader accesses the text, such as the mouse, keyboard, or other navigational devices, and/or via media-specific interactive modes of expression such as hyperlinks or avatars. It argues that because interactional metalepses are inherently unnatural both in terms of physically and logical impossibility and also because interactional metalepsis is a device that is intrinsically built into ergodic digital fiction, digital fictions are inherently unnatural.
    [Show full text]
  • 1 Markku Eskelinen: Electronic Literature Without a Map Abstract
    Markku Eskelinen: Electronic literature without a map Abstract The paper discusses several problems that seem to define and determine the field of electronic literature in theory and practice, and suggests several strategies to remedy the situation in the spirit that is both analytical and polemical. Electronic literature has been around at least for fifty years, and many of its typical ergodic ingredients share a cultural (pre)history that reaches back to classical antiquity and beyond (I Ching). Still, the cultural, economical, educational and even literary status and visibility of electronic literature is low and obscure at best, despite occasional canonisations of hypertext fiction and poetry (the works of Michael Joyce and Jim Rosenberg), literary groups such as the OuLiPo that from very early on extended their orientation beyond print literature, and the efforts of an international or semi- international organisation (ELO) to promote and preserve electronic literature - not to mention multiple and more or less influential and comprehensive theories of electronic and ergodic literature. The days of hype and claims of novelty are or at least seem to be things of the past, and there are no longer great expectations for whatever happens to emerge from the ghetto or cloister of electronic literature. 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. This paper argues for the acceptance of the elitist- experimentalist-marginal status of electronic literature, with the twist of choosing its academic, institutional and post- industrial allies and enemies accordingly.
    [Show full text]