“A visible presence for some two decades, electronic literature has already produced many works that deserve the rigorous scrutiny critics have long practiced with print literature. Only now, however, with Electronic Literature: New Horizons for the Literary by N. Katherine Hayles, do we have the first systematic survey of the field and an analysis of its importance, breadth, and wide-ranging implications for literary study.”
“The web-based literary journal Alire was created in January 1989 by the Parisian groupL.A.I.R.E. (Lecture, Art, Innovation, Recherche, Écriture) -which included Philippe Bootz, Frédéric Develay, Jean-Marie Dutey, Claude Maillard and Tibor Papp. Alire is known as the oldest multimedia journal in Europe, and certainly one of the oldest in the West. Before the arrival of CD-ROMs, before the Internet explosion, the journal was already publishing poetry written for and intended to be read through computers.”
“…literature is too multi-faceted, rambunctious, and iconoclastic to fit the limits of any definition… Literary theory does continue to be a central part of the practice of many postlanguage poets, yet they tend to undertake it with an ambivalent and often wearied eye.…Thus, while narrative, lyric, spirituality, and a poetics of the everyday appear often as elements that language poets think should be rejected, postlanguage poets such as Juliana Spahr, Susan Smith Nash, Jefferson Hansen, Liz Willis, Peter Gizzi, Chris Stroffolino, Jennifer Moxley, Joe Ross, Lisa Jarnot, myself and many others have been consciously using one or several of these elements in their work, without returning to the sort of naive justifications of those elements that continue to be a feature of more mainstream American poetry.”
textetc : literary theory: an evaluation:
“Theory does not deal with absolutes but with possibilities, speculations, elusive chains of thought…Is there now a generally correct theory of literature? No. Is there a body of thought that is broadly accepted? Far from it: the scene is a battlefield of opinions and assertions, with little supporting thought or experiment.”
