Digital Text and Physical Experience: French Digital Literatures Between Work and Text Susan Joan Cronin King’s College, Cambridge September 2018 This dissertation is submitted for the degree of: Doctor of Philosophy Abstract Digital Text and Physical Experience: French Digital Literatures Between Work and Text Susan Joan Cronin This thesis takes into consideration the presence of computers and electronic equipment in French literary and multimedia discussions, beginning in the first chapter with the foundation of the Oulipo group in 1960 and taking as a starting point the group's conceptions of the computer in relation to literature. It proceeds in the second chapter to explore the materialities and physical factors that have informed the evolution of ideas related to the composition and reading of digital texts, so as to illuminate some of the differences that may be purported to exist between e-literatures and traditional print works. Drawing on Roland Barthes' 'Between Work and Text,' the chapters gradually progress into an exploration of spatiality in digital and interactive literatures, taking into account the role of exhibitions in accommodating and diffusing these forms in France, notably the 1985 exhibition 'Les Immatériaux,' to whose writing installations the third chapter is dedicated. The first three chapters thus focus on computer assisted reading and writing prior to 1985. The chapters that form the second half of the thesis deal with more recent years, exploring online and mobile application works, reading these as engendering their own distinct physical spaces that extend beyond the 'site' of the work - both the website or display and the tactile materials on which the work is operated - creating in relation to the reading what Roberto Simanowski terms a 'semiotic body'. The fourth chapter takes into consideration the role of the reader's body in Annie Abrahams' 'Séparation' and Xavier Malbreil's 'Livre des Morts'. The fifth chapter explores gesture as a mode of reading and reinscription in the online, interactive works of Serge Bouchardon. Finally, the sixth chapter looks at mobile application narratives, spampoetry and email art, offering ways of reading the new spatialities these forms generate. The work as a whole aims to offer some perspectives for considering digital literatures as capable of creating complex spatial experiences between work and text. 2 Declaration This dissertation is my own work and includes nothing which is the outcome of work done in collaboration except as declared in the preface and specified in the text. It is not substantially the same as any that I have submitted, or, is being currently submitted for a degree or diploma or other qualification at the University of Cambridge or any other University or similar institution except as declared in the Preface and specified in the text. I further state that no substantial part of my dissertation has already been submitted, or, is currently being submitted for any such degree, diploma or other qualification at the University of Cambridge or any other University or similar institution as declared in the Preface and specified in the text. It does not exceed the prescribed word limit for the relevant Degree Committee. Acknowledgements This work is the result of the time, support, patience and generosity of many individuals. I would like to thank in particular my supervisor, Martin Crowley, for his continued support, patience and inspiration. My thanks also to Bill Burgwinkle, Claire Lesage, and Camille Bloomfield. The late Paul Braffort illuminated much regarding the early Oulipo and the group’s computing endeavours, offering his patience and many witty responses and anecdotes. My thanks are due in abundance to King’s College, the Jebb Fund, the French Department at Cambridge, and the Society for French Studies for the financial assistance that made this research possible, as well as to the Bibliothèque nationale de France and to Mark Pigott, whose bursary allowed me to spend the first year of my research as an invited researcher at the Bibliothèque de l’Arsenal. My thanks also to Paula Klein and Louisa Torres for their company in the Arsenal and our steady trail of thirty-centime espressos. My hearty thanks, finally, to the international digital literature community, including Philippe Bootz, Serge Bouchardon, Alexandra Saemmer, Odile Farge, Mark Marino, Rob Wittig, Jessica Pressman, Scott Rettberg, and many others, for their energy, ideas and many fruitful and ludic discussions. My thanks always to my wonderful family and friends. 3 Contents Introduction: Digital Text and Physical Experience: French Digital Literatures between Work and Text ………………………………………………………………5 Part One: A Materialist Reading of the Evolution of French Digital Texts Chapter 1: ‘Des machines qui travaillent pour nous’: Revisiting the Origins of French Digital Texts………………………………………………………………….32 Chapter 2: Reading French Digital Texts: Exhibitions and Editions, 1980- 2000…………………………………………………………………………………..63 Chapter 3: Les Immatériaux: Interactive Writing, ‘Épreuves d’écriture,’ and Literature as Soundtrack……………………………………………………………...91 Part Two: Physical and Material Considerations in French Texts post-2000 Chapter 4: Embodiment and Neomateriality in Annie Abrahams’ ‘Séparation’ and Xavier Malbreil’s ‘Livre des Morts’…………………………………......................120 Chapter 5: Literal Bodies: Gesture as Fuel and Feature in Readings of Digital Texts………………………………………………………………………………...149 Chapter 6: The Metapoetics of Mobile apps and Spam Literatures……………….177 Conclusion: Digital text and physical experience: An anticipatory redefinition of the literary?.......................................................................................................................199 4 Introduction Digital Text and Physical Experience: French Digital Literatures Between Work and Text The classical production of writings is aimed entirely at archives. To this way of thinking, the slightest ‘loss’ is considered a cultural tragedy. Any destroyed manuscript is a burning library, the obliteration of any draft scribbled on a tabletop seems a disaster. Against that museum art, that library-and-dust art, generative writing is an art of consummation that refuses to look back on its tracks, which it regards as nothing more than signs headed for something else.1 Introduction: The framing of this discussion This thesis shall deal with several questions and perspectives that arise from consideration of some of the material and physical facets of literary texts created with and for the computer, focusing on works and aesthetics from the French context, from the 1960’s to the present day. It is necessary, at the outset of such a variegated discussion, to account for some of the rough delineations traced in my treatment of topics that intersect to form the chapters of this thesis – topics roughly grouped together in the category of ‘French digital literatures.’ Imposing categorical delineations upon these works in some respects may be seen as contrary to the sprawling, international and multimedia context, the multifarious and dispersed nature of the field from which these works emerge. Perhaps the most dissonant element of a categorical formulation such as ‘French digital literatures’ is the suggestion that, at a time when electronic literatures are predominantly flourishing online, making these accessible, translatable and modifiable to reader/users anywhere, such works might still be ascribed to a national 1Jean Pierre Balpe, ‘Principles and Processes of Generative Literature’ in The Aesthetics of Net Literature, ed. by Peter Gendolla and Jörgen Schäfer (New Brunswick, USA; London UK: Transaction Publishers, 2015), p.316. 5 literary tradition or even a tradition anchored in writing in a particular language, bearing all of the cultural echoes that such choices and formulations insinuate.2 Digital literary studies and the works they take as subject are, however, rife with, and indeed often explicitly characterised by and engaged with, such ambivalences of belonging, including but not limited to the relationships of these electronic texts to literary traditions and language affiliations, which are never neatly detachable from these. One of the major, overarching themes and tasks of digital artworks and literatures, then, is addressing both the costs and potential gains of the connectivity that allows for their diffusion and, conversely, the links that are necessarily broken in favour thereof. It is not so much the case, however, that contemporary digital works represent the finalised results of dissolutions of literary, linguistic and disciplinary boundaries, but rather they at once constitute and document this ongoing and tentative process of dissolution and reconfiguration, finding in digital media a fertile ground for the selective disaffiliations often entailed in the creation of multimedia works to be productively interrogated and enacted. The international nature of online works and the eclectic environments in which these typically thrive, therefore, should not serve to invalidate these questions – those of correspondences in language and literature - but rather to render them all the more compelling. As Sandy Baldwin notes in the preface to Regards croisés: alternate perspectives on digital literature, ‘…electronic culture is neither reducible to nor separable from national cultures.’3 There are, accordingly, makers of digital literature, such as Philippe Bootz or Jean Pierre Balpe, who work with a