The (Problematic) Issue to Evaluate Literariness: Digital Literature Between Legitimation and Canonization

The first experiments in digital literary forms started as early as the 1960s. From then, up to the mid-90’s, was a period that, according to Chris Funkhouser (2007), can be considered as a ‘laboratory’ phase. The rise of the Internet has resulted in the proliferation of creative proposals. The first involves indexing creative works in the form of databases, sometimes giving access to hundreds of works without any hierarchical order. Since 2000, digital literature has been experiencing a new phase, marked by the creation of anthologies. Over the years, the evaluation and selection criteria have proved to be as problematic as they are necessary for these projects. The main issue of this paper is to provide a critical discussion of these criteria.

I will first compare the corpus of two founding initiatives, i.e. collections 1 and 2 edited by the Electronic Literature Association (ELO)1 and the ‘improved sheets’ published online by the Canadian nt2 laboratory2, in order to bring out a list of works commonly considered as ‘worthy’ by these communities. I will then put the positions of four important players of this field into perspective: Bertrand Gervais (director of the nt2 lab), Scott Rettberg (co-editor of the first ELO collection and leader of the European ELMCIP project devoted to digital literature3), Laura Borràs (co-editor of the second ELO collection and director of the Hermeneia research group4) and Brian Kim Stefans (co -editor of the second ELO collection, and author of various works presented in the ELO collections and nt2 ‘improved sheets’). In spring 2011, I questioned them about their initiatives and their selection criteria. In the ‘crossed corpus’ of ELO and nt2 works, I will finally identify these selection criteria through a semiopragmatic methodology.

Source: author's introduction to article