Electronic Literary Text: Erased and Vanishing

Abstract

The new media, technologies, and cultural movements influence the writing, reading, and organization of texts and their dissemination. This raises a series of problems concerning cultural innovations, the perception and reading of digital material, and the conflict between abstract and globalized information on the one hand and the “down-to-earth” stories that stimulate rich experience on the other. The author bases his views on the information/story pair on the critique of information presented in Walter Benjamin’s essay “The Storyteller”, and continues by touching on Benjamin’s distinction between the first and second technology. He expands this distinction to also include a difference between the first and second experience. In this, the second experience reveals itself as playful and embodied, and suitable for experiencing and perceiving electronic literature as an area that is extremely challenging for theory because it raises the series of issues mentioned above (cultural innovations, the use of new media and technologies in literature, and the story/information problem). This article presents a critical view on e-literature, which has proven to be successful and innovative in the application of the expanded poetic language that one can already encounter in modern poetry and the concrete and visual poetry of the neo-avant-garde. This is a language that, in addition to verbal signifiers, also uses crossed-out letters and white space, positions textual units according to the spatial and temporal syntax, and uses conditionally readable and elusive text that software allows to be entered and erased, and to appear and disappear quickly.