Electronic literature

Electronic literature or digital literature is a genre of literature where digital capabilities such as interactivity, multimodality or algorithmic text generation are used aesthetically. Works of electronic literature are usually intended to be read on digital devices, such as computers, tablets, and mobile phones. They cannot be easily printed, or cannot be printed at all, because elements crucial to the work cannot be carried over onto a printed version.

The first literary works for computers, created in the 1950s, were computer programs that generated poems or stories, now called generative literature. In the 1960s experimental poets began to explore the new digital medium, and the first early text-based games were created. Interactive fiction became a popular genre in the late 1970s and 1980s, with a thriving online community in the 2000s. In the 1980s and 1990s hypertext fiction begun to be published, first on floppy disks and later on the web. Hypertext fictions are stories where the reader moves from page to page by selecting links. In the 2000s digital poetry became popular, often including animated text, images and interactivity. In the 2010s and 2020s, electronic literature uses social media platforms, with new genres like Instapoetry or Twitterature as well as literary practices like netprov. Although web-based genres like creepypasta and fan fiction are not always thought of as electronic literature (because they usually manifest as linear texts that could be printed out and read on paper), other scholars argue that these are born digital genres that depend on online communities and thus should be included in the field.

There is an extensive body of scholarship on electronic literature. In 1999 the Electronic Literature Organization was established, which through annual conferences and other events supports both the publishing and study of electronic literature. One focus of academic study has been the preservation and archiving of works of electronic literature. This is challenging because works become impossible to access or read when the software or hardware they are designed for becomes obsolete. In addition, works of electronic literature are not part of the established publishing industry and so do not have ISBN numbers and are not findable in library catalogues. This has led to the establishment of a number of archives and documentation projects.

The literary critic and professor N. Katherine Hayles defines electronic literature as "'digital born' (..) and (usually) meant to be read on a computer", clarifying that this does not include e-books and digitised print literature.

A definition offered by the Electronic Literature Organization (ELO) states that electronic literature "refers to works with an important literary aspect that takes advantage of the capabilities and contexts provided by the stand-alone or networked computer". This can include hypertext fiction, animated poetry (often called kinetic poetry) and other forms of digital poetry, literary chatbots, computer-generated narratives or poetry, art installations with significant literary aspects, interactive fiction and literary uses of social media.

For example, a hypertext fiction is a story where the reader chooses a path through the story by clicking on links that connect fragments of text, often called lexias. In digital poetry the words in the poem may move across the screen or may involve game-like interactivity. In generative literature a single work can generate many different poems or stories. Until the early 2000s electronic literature works tended to be published on floppy disk, CD-ROM, in online literary journals or on dedicated websites. However, since around 2010 literary genres on social media platforms - such as Instapoetry, Twitterature or netprov - have come to be seen as electronic literature. The literary critic Leonardo Flores called these third generation electronic literature, following the first generation of pre-web works and the second generation of web-based works. Flores uses an inclusive definition of electronic literature, which can include social media posts with literary qualities even if the authors do not themselves think of it as literature. Fan fiction and creepypasta have also been analysed as electronic literature.

The definition of electronic literature is controversial within the field, with strict definitions being criticised for excluding valuable works, and looser definitions being so murky as to be useless. A work of electronic literature can be defined as "a construction whose literary aesthetics emerge from computation", "work that could only exist in the space for which it was developed/written/coded—the digital space". In his book Electronic Literature, the author and scholar Scott Rettberg argues that an advantage of a wide definition is its flexibility, which allows it to include new genres as new platforms and modes of literature emerge. Screenwriter and author Carolyn Handler Miller characterizes works of electronic literature as nonlinear and non chronological where the user experiences and co-creates the story, and where contradictory events and different outcomes are possible.

Scholars have discussed a range of pre-digital precursors to electronic literature, from the ancient Chinese book the I Ching, to inventor John Clark's mechanical Latin Verse Machine (1830-1843) to the Dadaist movement's cut-up technique. Print novels that were designed to be read non-linearly, such as Julio Cortázar's Hopscotch (1963) and Vladimir Nabokov's Pale Fire (1962), are cited as "print antecedents" of electronic literature.