Abstract
Looking specifically at the genre ofadaptive narrative, this article explores thefuture of literature created for and withcomputer technology, focusing primarily on thetrope of mutability as it is played out withnew media. Some of the questions askedare: What can the medium of a work ofliterature, that is its material aspect, tellus about the text? About character? What canit possibly matter if narrative is recounted onpapyrus, retold on parchment and rag, and thenremediated in pixels? Isn't it the messagecarried by the medium we are most concernedwith, stable or unstable throughout the processof inscription, reinscription, encoding anddecoding, translation and remediation? Thispaper speculates about possibilities ratherthan attempts to answer these questions, butthe structuring and mean-making componentsconsidered here stand as examples of some wemay want to think about when developing futuretheories about literature – and all types ofwriting – generated by and for electronicenvironments.
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Grigar, D. Mutability, Medium, and Character. Computers and the Humanities 36, 359–378 (2002). https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1016170031420
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1016170031420