Digital Materiality and the Politics of the Screen

Abstract

Literature is never static, it is experienced in different ways, but the structure of the medium through which the literary is presented can order our sense of what is being communicated. In this respect, the medium is not the message, but the metaphor, to the point where we have a new cultural paradigm in which language and medium can be analogous, a paradigm in which the medium itself can be literary. This is a significant shift in the cultural capital of form, as it demands consideration of more technical components like design and procedure. That is not to say that the material is privileged over content; there are discrete levels upon which the literary operates. Electronic literature exploits the tension between these levels, so that technical processes create meaning in relation to cultural forms, and cultural forms add to the significance of the former in reciprocity. Analysing the friction that emerges from the correspondence between these layers is where we can start understanding how a work is doing something specifically literary with its medium of choice.