While Reading "A Bibliographic Overview of Electronic Literature"

During my reading of Amanda Starling's "A Bibliographic Overview of Electronic Literature", I took away many points and quotes which I've listed below: 

"Electronic literature is born-digital literary art" This made me wonder when was e-lit born? What was it's root? How did it develop?

Her article was a survey of different books and texts that explored Electronic Literature. Of one of the texts she says, "The sixteen essays here work toward an aesthetic of electronic literature by contemplating the question of the new literary quality that emerges when a work is born digital" When something is born digital it creates a new quality, a unique aesthetic that is added to our idea of literature in general.

"Bootz offers a procedure for studying a digital literary work that separately examines the levels of a work―its surface level, communicative level, and meta-level―that together provide an entry point for understanding its meaning, its creative (and creating) aesthetic, and the relations it enacts between writer, reader, and sign." There are many ways one can approach a work of electronic literature, and to fully understand these works we must explore them from different angles and at different levels. On the surface, many of these electronic works may seem simplistic, but in reality they are very complex and in order to understand them they require deep probing.

"By dismissing the premise that electronic literature is literature electrified, he points toward a method of analysis that rejects the separation of the electronic medium from the work’s literariness and instead appreciates that the literary is indeed inseparable from the mediated, performative (inter)face of the unified work." It is easy to see electronic literature simply as 'literature electrified'. In fact, that was definitely what I thought of before I took this class. When I heard the term 'electronic litearature' I imagined e-books, fan fiction, and blogs. Never did I think it would be a whole other world, a new art form, to explore.  

“What might constitute a paradigmatic method for analyzing digital artworks?” In order to analyze digital artworks we have to come at them with a whole new mind set. If we limit ourselves to our old understand of 'art' or 'literature' we will not be able to appreciate nor understand them.

"Simanowski proposes an e-lit reading model that begins from the premise that “the first purpose that a digital work serves is as an act of creative expression”" If we think of these works more as acts of creative expression than we can be less judgmental of them. If we approach them the way we would approach a piece at the MoMA, we might not understand them, but at least we can appreciate them for what they are. 

"He believes a digital work is “fundamentally different from and more complex than a material or printed work” and that it “deserves a broad, extratextual reading of its creative context” à la New Criticism that effects a close reading extending beyond the text and its screen(s)" Again, a new mind set is required in order to read these digital works. 

"If we are too tightly or too tidily contained within a particular theoretical discourse, we chance ignoring significant or critical elements of what should be a hybrid episteme for the study and teaching of e-lit." We must be open-minded in order to realize the important aspects of this new genre. We cannot ignore it because if we do we ignore the enormous impact it could have.

"How do we move beyond the question of the literary to include interdisciplinary approaches, like those of semiotics, linguistics, neuroscience, computer science, performance/actor theories, in our search for a theory of e-lit works?" One of my favorite parts of electronic literature is the fact that it involves so much more than just words. It is interactive, it involves technology, art, creativity, etc etc. There is so much potential for interdisciplinary approaches, which makes it very exciting.  

"We must teach our students, and ourselves, not only to read digital literature critically but also to read literature digitally." We have to keep up with the times as the times keep rolling. 

"It is important that we learn―and teach―new ways of reading that break (into) these habits and facilitate digital literary reading skills that appreciate the literary systems and structures created when literatures become modernly transmediated" Studying electronic literature is all about re-learning how to read, analyze, criticize, and appreciate a work of literary art.