Word of the (every)day: Curiosity

 When I decided to write about Electronic Literature there was one thing that fascinated me the most: its still undefined nature, its boundaries still blurred and open to definition. There are no “sacred books” about it, yet, it is difficult to trace an indisputable time line of its development since its birth until now, for two reasons: first of all, it would be a dash more than a line, considering its relatively young age. Secondly, the choice of events and notable works to put in there would be absolutely arbitrary and subjective.

 

 However, the freedom of manipulating and analyzing this malleable material it is part of its nature: being born thanks to the potentialities of computer technology and of the Internet, Electronic Literature poses itself as a work of art which has been created taking advantage of the means through which it will be displayed and enjoyed. 

 Far from the constraints of paper, authorship and readership change completely their role in the writing and reading process: the former becomes a real creative power, a text designer more than just a writer, while the latter is a player that interact with texts, designing in some ways their direction. He/she takes part into the story, and each link is like a window through which one can spy inside the text’s intimacy. 

  

Is it really literature? 

  

Yes. No. Maybe. 

  

So what is literature? 

  

 This is the story of how a look into the future turns into a question about the roots of literature itself as a product of human fantasy and as a need of verbalizing thought and emotions so to share them with an audiency, being it a throng of affectionate readers or just ourselves observing our lives through the pages of a diary. 

 Literature is language. But language is not just a product of the different sounds of the alphabet. Many writers have tried to enrich their texts with other features, and it is not something so brand new as you may think: Apollinaire’s “Calligrams” are just the most famous examples of a long tradition that descends from Callimachus and others. 

 A very dear prefix to Electronic Literature is “hyper”: hypertexts, hyperreality, hypermedia, and I would add hyperlanguage. Out of printed words, much more beyond the third dimension…images, sounds, links like leaps over the wall of time and space. 

  

 This is the chapter zero of my exploration, as Ted Nelson, the inventor of the word “hypertext”, would have called it. Curiosity is the word which is my companion during this voyage in the immense ocean of Electronic Literature, and I hope it will be yours as well.