Wiki edit of Notable People and Works
There are a number of notable authors, critics, and works associated with electronic literature. Michael Joyce’s Afternoon, a story is known as the first hypertext fiction, although this has been disputed,[11] and Stuart Moulthrop’s Victory Garden is another notable work of electronic literature.
Other particularly interesting and noteworthy pieces of digital literature are Nightingale’s Playground by Andy Campbell and Judi Alston. This interactive fiction is a link between the original concept of text based interactive fiction and gaming as we know it now.
Furthermore Shelley Jackon’s Patchwork Girl is described as “an electronic fiction that manages to be at once highly original and intensely parasitic on its print predecessors.”[12] Based off Frankenstein’s Monster by Mary Shelley, it gives the story a feminine twist with both the protagonist and Frankenstein’s monster now being female. Throughout the hypertext, Jackson weaves together fragments of nodes in resemblance to the stitching together of frankenstein’s monster’s limbs.
My addition:
Another good example is the app Pry written by Danny Cannizzaro and Samantha Gorman. Pry follows the story of the main character James and his struggles with PTSD after being in the war. According to David Jhave, “The electronic book desperately needs conventions; after the printing press the novel emerged and along with it narrative techniques for how to handle first-person narration; film adopted montage, but on the commercial multi-touch screen…Kindle, Nook, and other ebooks are literally only books; the paradigm of flipping pages prevails. One of the values of Pry is the alternative expanded hybrid media page it proposes; these are not pages or texts, these are tavits (text-audio-video-interactives).’ The basic definition of digital literature lies right in Jhave’s review. Digital literature, according to Google Define, is “a literary genre consisting of works of literature that originate within digital environments and require digital computation to be read,’ Jhave states that electronic books are digital, they rely on a phone, computer, or tablet to be read or explored.
What I want to add:
The Difference Between Digital Literature and Literature
According to Scott McCloud, the main concept that have to be present in literature are “Idea [or] purpose, form, idiom, structure, craft, [and] surface.’ In order for something to be considered literature, it should hold all six of these traits.
In David Golumbia’s article Games Without Play, games like Call of Duty or Half-Life can’t actually be considered ‘play’ because they only have one path to follow. The player can only shoot the enemies, there isn’t an option to mine or work. Unlike in World of Warcraft where ‘play’ is present because there are many paths a player can take.
To mirror the two, Golumbia clearly states what it takes to be considered ‘play’ while McCloud states what it takes to make something literature. Taking both articles and setting them a digital literature context, it can be gathered that, unless something holds the six traits and has a path or two to follow, it can be considered digital literature.
Reflection:
I wasn’t entirely sure what to do when I sat down to start this, but once I started actually reading through the Wiki page, I realized how much was actually missing.When it came to my revision of the Notable Works section, I realized how sparse it was. There were a couple references, but no explanations or anything of the sort. This also led into the making of the difference between e-lit and regular lit. It’s amazing how a digital encyclopedia has very little information when it comes to digital literature.
References:
https://drive.google.com/a/alaska.edu/file/d/0B0vJbDerm4MdMlFyMk1LRExJdjA/view McCloud
https://diglit.community.uaf.edu/wp-content/uploads/sites/511/2015/01/Games_without_Play.pdf Golumbia
https://lareviewofbooks.org/review/prying-jhave-on-tender-claws-new-app Pry Review
https://prynovella.com/ Pry info
