Wherefore Genre? Categorizing Contemporary New Media Writing
In contrast to the first decade of literary production in the electronic media, when most critical attention was focused on link and node hypertext fiction and its relationship to postmodern theory, in recent years the field of new media studies has embraced a wider definition of Nelsonian "hypertext" to include a variety of forms of literary expression that branch or perform on request. A field once dominated by Storyspace fiction now includes in its purview a wide variety of approaches to literary expression made for the computer and the network, including kinetic poetry, interactive fiction, combinatory writing, story and poetry generation, and network-mediated memoir. During the talk I will present examples of recent work in electronic literature submitted to the forthcoming Electronic Literature Collection [of which MITH is a co-sponsor] in the context of genre.
Speakers
Scott Rettberg is an Assistant Professor of New Media Studies in the Literature Program at Richard Stockton College of New Jersey. He is a co-founder and past president of the Electronic Literature Organization and a contributing blogger at GrandTextAuto. A writer and practicioner as well as critic and scholar of new media, Scott is the author or co-author of the classic hypertext novel The Unknown, the email novel Kind of Blue, and the sticker novel Implementation.
