Citation : Moulthrop, Stuart. Arguably even more than the literature of books and pages β itself an eminently complicated subject β electronic writing presents an existential challenge.
As Johanna Drucker points out, the most pressing question for this enterprise may well be ontological: what is? See Drucker, What can we mean when we think about electronic literature? This question applies not just generally but also in specific cases and practices. For works characterized by intensive, extensive, or otherwise flagrant variation, what can we mean by the text , or any primary subject of aesthetic and critical engagement? What fragments will we shore against ruins of our book-bound past, and which will we discard?
One entirely plausible answer is to say that whatever we do it is not reading, because the vast expanse of electronic writing is that which cannot be read Baldwin , While this attitude invites frank engagement with our cultural moment and promises further insights, it also raises an uncomfortable implication, namely that the term electronic literature may be at odds with itself, fundamentally ironic. As if we could still talk about letters, in the particular or the cultural sense, when really all we have are flickering signifiers, inconstant and multiplying representations of signs.
As a quintessentially two-faced trope, irony is never necessarily terminal, but at least potentially a way to rekindle discourse. For those of us who love procedurality, one twist of logic or rhetoric tends inevitably to invite another, raising the possibility of recursive or nested ironies: as if as ifβ¦.
Anything you can do, I can do meta: as if we could still come at a subject like electronic literature without an intent to read. All we need is a certain perversity or denial.
