Towards Minor Literary Forms: Digital Literature and the Art of Failure

This essay was presented as the keynote talk at the 2014 Electronic Literature Organization conference in Milwaukee, WI. In this keynote, Illya Szilak highlights the power of “minor forms” in digital literature. Through a wide-ranging survey of works, Szilak identifies the tendency for “failure” in electronic literature as its most powerful feature: its capacity to deterritorialize the parameters of discourse and expand the potential of subjectivity in the process.