Abstract
This Introduction starts with a discussion of the advent of digital technologies and their impact upon cultural and literary norms and formats. It then scrutinises the relationship between digital culture studies and cultural studies, and advocates for a critical digital culture studies, which involves a potential recuperation of the leftist underpinnings of cultural studies. In so doing, the introduction posits a three-fold approach, combining aesthetics, technologics, and ethics, understanding digital literature as, simultaneously, making use of technological affordances without being determined by them; as building on prior literary traditions without being bound by them; and as providing a critical stance on contemporary socio-economic conditions, all the while being aware of its own imbrication in them. The Introduction then examines the use of intertextual and metatextual references in the selected authors, and their critique of the material conditions that underpin the technologies they employ.
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Notes
- 1.
Landow’s book first came out in 1992, entitled Hypertext: The Convergence of Contemporary Critical Theory and Technology; it was subsequently updated in a second edition in 1997, with the slightly revised title of Hypertext 2.0: The Convergence of Critical Theory and Technology, and again in a third edition in 2006, this time with the title Hypertext 3.0: Critical Theory and New Media in an Era of Globalization. Where I mention his early work, I cite from the original 1992 edition.
- 2.
Bolter’s monograph was first published in 1991, with the title Writing Space: The Computer, Hypertext, and The History of Writing (Hillsdale: Lawrence Erlbaum, 1991); an updated second edition came out in 2001, with the amended title of Writing Space: Computers, Hypertext, and the Remediation of Print. Where I make reference to Bolter’s early work, I cite from the 1991 edition.
- 3.
Bolter’s title makes implicit reference to poststructuralist debates which encouraged the dismantling of the author as authority figure, with echoes of Barthes’s notion of the ‘Author-God’. Barthes, in his famous 1967 essay ‘The Death of the Author’, argued that ‘we know that a text does not consist of a line of words, releasing a single “theological” meaning (the “message” of the Author-God)’ (Barthes 1977, p. 416). The figure of the author as representing the authority of the text, and as being ultimately in control of its single theological meaning, is closely tied to Bolter’s argument about the monumentalisation of the literary text here.
- 4.
Landow saw his defence of technology as necessary to counter those whom he saw as Luddites, who take pride in not engaging with technology, and includes Fredric Jameson and like-minded Marxist critical theorists within this, criticising what he sees as Jameson’s ‘need to exclude technology and its history from Marxist analysis’ (Landow 1992, p. 166). Landow situates his critique of Jameson within a wider argument which, for him, is that ‘discussions of the politics of the hypertext have to mention its power, at least at the present time, to make many critical theorists, particularly Marxists, uncomfortable’ (Landow 1992, p. 164). I do not agree that this purported lack of attention by Marxist theorists to technology is necessarily the case, and indeed, as we shall see below, a significant body of Marxist-informed scholarship has produced detailed, historicising analyses of the contemporary regime of digital technologies.
- 5.
There have been multiple studies which have warned about the increasing inequality and disempowerment caused by the unevenness of access to digital technologies, and which have highlighted how these are structured along Global North-Global South divides. Pippa Norris, writing in the early 2000s, cautioned that, with differential investment and take-up of digital technologies across the globe, many poorer nations, particularly those of sub-Saharan Africa, Latin America, and South-East Asia are lagging behind, with the concomitant risk that ‘the emerging Internet age may reinforce disparities between postindustrial economies at the core of the network and developing societies at the peripheries’ (Norris 2001, p. 5). More recently, Ivo Ritzer has again drawn our attention to the fact that digital media are ‘still widely unequally distributed around the earth, with a decisive lack in the Global South, above all in Africa where global contradictions often are sharpest’ (Ritzer 2015, p. 452); crucially, Ritzer links this unequal distribution to geopolitics, since, for him, the digital divide is ‘based on colonial legacies, failed post-independence reforms and unfair trade policies’ (Ritzer 2015, p. 452).
- 6.
See, for instance, Bell’s lengthy 2010 study, which aimed to set out the interpretative parameters for those hypertext fictions created using the Storyspace software; or Ciccorico’s 2007 book, which distinguishes overtly between earlier works using Storyspace, and later works developed for the world wide web. In both of these cases, as in many others, these scholars pay attention to the specific features afforded by the software or platform, without assuming that these technologies determine the content in themselves.
- 7.
Aarseth’s chapter, entitled ‘Nonlinearity and Literary Theory’, was first published in 1994 in George Landow, ed., Hyper/Text/Theory (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press), 51–84, and subsequently reproduced in Wardrip-Fruin and Montfort’s The New Media Reader in 2003.
- 8.
I am here implicitly proposing an updating of the more commonly understood duality of aesthetics and ethics, by bringing technologics into play as a third term. I am not proposing this term as in opposition to the other two, and instead am proposing that it has relevance for both aesthetics and ethics, but is not pre-determined, nor it itself is deterministic, of either.
- 9.
An overview of readers and companion volumes in the field of digital culture reveals how they often include digital literature within their purview, even if this is not their primary focus; for example, David Trend’s reader, Reading Digital Culture (2001) anthologises a number of key publications, including several that deal with new textualities, such as Vannevar Bush and Sadie Plant’s contributions to the volume; Lev Manovich’s The Language of New Media (2001), whilst focussing mostly on the histories of montage in cinema and new media, also includes textualities and print forms; Charlie Gere’s Digital Culture includes how various fields respond to the digital, including literature, alongside art, music, design, and film (Gere 2008); Chaney, Ruggill, and McAllister’s The Computer Culture Reader (2009) includes literary formats such as blogs alongside anime, hacking, web design, and others.
- 10.
This is not to say that Garnham assumes an economistic model that sees culture as superstructure and as solely the expression of the economic base; Garnham does acknowledge that ‘people can and often do reinterpret and use for their own purposes the cultural material, the texts, that the system of cultural production and distribution offers them’; rather, he argues that this interpretation is not random, and that the pleasure that consumers can experience can be manipulated (Garnham 1995, p. 65).
- 11.
There have also been some studies which have undertaken the opposite dynamic: that is, works which trace a particular literary genre or feature, and include digital works as one manifestation of this feature. This is the case, for instance, with Eduardo Ledesma’s recent book, Radical Poetry (2016), in which he sets out the trajectory of poetry in Spain and Latin America from the twentieth century to the present day, and in which he proposes digital poetry as the third of the three manifestations of the avant-garde (with the historical avant-garde of 1900–1930s, and the neo-avant-garde of the 1950s–1970s being the first two).
- 12.
Numerous studies on the Latin American post-Boom have identified as one of its notable features the integration of, and often exaltation of, popular cultural formats, such as soap operas, B movies, popular music, youth culture, and many more, and examine how the post-Boom authors attempted to undo the dualism of high and low culture (see, for instance, Swanson 1995; Shaw 1998).
- 13.
Indeed, similar criticisms to those levelled against ‘celebratory’ cultural studies have been levelled against the Latin American post-Boom, with scholars pointing out the inherent contradictions in, and limitations of, the endeavour to integrate mass media narratives into the novel. Calling this ‘playing with the popular’, Swanson asks, rhetorically: ‘is the liberation of the popular really a triumphant blow against fixed bourgeois traditional models? Is the dissolution of the boundary between the serious and the useful, on the one hand, and the popular and the playful, on the other, really an effective attack on the utilitarian ethic of productivity which underlies western and capitalist thought?’ (Swanson 1995, p. 11).
- 14.
I am here using the term ‘common sense’ in the Gramscian sense of the term to mean ‘a conception which [is] in conformity with the social and cultural position of those masses whose philosophy it is’ (Gramsci 1971, p. 419); in other words, to refer to the norms of the hegemonic class which uphold the status quo, and that become so reified that they are usually not even questioned.
- 15.
Some of these ideas are developed further in Harvey’s subsequent books, in particular his recent work, The Enigma of Capital (2011), although again the focus is not strictly on technology, but on late capitalism in general.
- 16.
Although Betancourt does not go into the issue of production in detail, it is worth noting a range of scholars who have undertaken a sustained analysis of the material conditions required to sustain digital technologies. See for instance, Sean Cubitt, who has provided an extensive critique of what he terms ‘the myth of immateriality’ from an ecocritical perspective (Cubitt 2017, p. 14). Bringing to our attention a range of phenomena, including the huge energy requirements to maintain digital resources and server farms, the toxicity of technological waste, the devastating environmental destruction associated with lithium extraction needed to form batteries, amongst many other such examples, Cubitt reveals the environmental footprint of purportedly ‘immaterial’ digital technologies, and warns us that ‘indigenous people have borne the brunt of the digital boom, and gained least from it. The global poor suffer far more from pollution and environmental loss than the global rich’ (Cubitt 2017, p. 14).
- 17.
My translation. The title in the original Spanish is Pentagonal: incluidos tú y yo.
- 18.
My translation. The title in the original Spanish is Eveline, fragmentos de una respuesta.
- 19.
My translation. The title in the original Spanish is Golpe de gracia.
- 20.
The title in Spanish is Minotaur Hotel. This work is available in three languages, these being Spanish, English, and French.
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Taylor, C. (2019). From Text to Hypertext: Electronic Literature in Latin America. In: Electronic Literature in Latin America. New Directions in Latino American Cultures. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-30988-6_1
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