Net lit - a new genre? Contemporary digital poetry in the German speaking countries - a survey Ernest W.B. Hess-Lüttich 1 Preliminary Remarks One particular subject in discourse studies (which encompasses textual analysis, communication sciences and media studies) has become increasingly significant of late, even though the media itself has considered it a worthy topic for some time: the changing uses of language induced by changes in the media. In other words: our daily habits of communicative behaviour have changed partly as a result of this transformation of the media and the expansion of the ‘media system’ with its increasing internal differentiation. As such, it is the central topic of the collection of essays, Media, Texts and Machines (Hess-Lüttich ed. 2001 a), which attempts to sketch the first outlines of the developing field of applied media semiotics. The breadth of scope of this emerging field is, of course, not merely concerned with evaluating various theoretical approaches, appraising the newfound terminology and the whole range of methodological possibilities represented by media semiotics. Neither is it solely preoccupied with observing the consequences of technical innovations created to deal with the everyday information resources, nor is it limited to analysing new forms of polycoded texts and their functions within education and the sciences. Similarly, it is not exclusively concerned with tracing the genealogical development of the traditional media, such as the history of the press or advertising in the transition from the industrial age to the information era. Media semiotics does not confine itself to illustrating the linguistic content articulated in other codes and the discovery of research transfer perspectives through computerised visual images, nor to the production of meaning through the modern maschines of communication. Of the many concerns of media semiotics, an important one undoubtedly remains reflecting on the aesthetic dimension of the change in signs and language, as influenced by the typological expansion and technological innovation of the media system (cf. Hess-Lüttich 2000). The role of authors has been challenged by the new forms of literature production on a PC’ s screen; the computerised apparatus now determines the texture of their work which they collectively create through an alliance of online networks; habits of perception have changed the audio visions circulating in the competitive space between literature, film, television, video and hypertext. That is the reason why a second volume followed the abovementioned collection, in which the contributors argue for a continuation of a project dealing with media aesthetics (as K O D I K A S / C O D E Ars Semeiotica Volume 29 (2006) No. 4 Gunter Narr Verlag Tübingen Ernest W.B. Hess-Lüttich 322 proposed, e.g., by Schnell 2000). They wish to see this subject consider the new challenges emerging from a yet to be developed ‘tele-semiotics’ of audiovisual media and digital art (Hess-Lüttich ed. 2001 b). The so-called ‘new genres’ can then become the object of typological examination: net literature, hyperfiction, computer animation in film, screen aesthetics on television, interface and text design as well as the E-book novel. All these text types necessitate new models of reading, which require systematic, textual research and style analysis in order to construct a theoretical basis for them. Such research needs to consider the diverse and interactively stimulating forms of artistic expression in all media and should leave cultural boundaries behind (cf. Knoblauch & Kotthoff eds. 2001). 1 2 Print or pixel? About writers, readers and wreaders For a self-confessed reader like the author Elke Heidenreich (2001: 3), the priorities are clear: “First of all, there is speech, then there is reading, after that you have everything electronic - without reading there is no internet,” she writes in her polemical defence of the beautiful, old medium of the book. The famous German journal for contemporary culture, Das Kursbuch, (No. 133 September 1998) devoted a whole issue to this topic. Heidenreich was probably thinking primarily of the literary book, whose continuance as a form of mass medium is being doubted by many critics, in an age of perpetually tight time budgets. It has to compete, in its traditional ‘culinary’ reading form, with other texts as part of the daily media consumption which takes place in a speedily expanding and self-differentiating media system. The statistics of the publishing industry (which in Germany alone currently puts more than two hundred books a day on the shelves, with all indicators showing a rise in production) make these concerns seem premature for the time being (S PIEGEL Special 10/ 1999). And it appears that being able to read an e-book and its literary texts on a screen has not truly won over even those experimenters who are favourably inclined towards it, like Peter Glotz (1999) or Uwe Timm (1999). 2 Yet more and more authors are ‘putting’ their literature ‘on the net’. Since 1996, when the Hamburg weekly newspaper, D IE Z EIT , staged its first internet literary competition for German-speakers, increasing numbers of writers have been pushing to get into the new medium, so that they can present the product of their creative labours to readers in ‘real time’ (Stöbener 1999). The Austrian web writer, Marlene Streeruwitz teaches the new art online; established book authors like Joseph von Westphalen, Matthias Politycki or Ilija Trojanow participated in the “novel in progress” project held in 1998, which was called into life by the editors of a cultural programme, Aspekte, televised on the German channel, ZDF. Rainald Goetz allowed his readers to participate in his life, when he put his electronic diary entitled, “Garbage for Everyone. My Daily Textual Prayer”, on the net. Unfortunately, once it was published in book form (by Suhrkamp in 1999), it came across as somewhat banal. Nonetheless, the text seems fresh and lively on the net, argues Christiane Heibach in her dissertation on the subject - published conventionally as a book. According to her, it “revolves in motion and interacts together with other semiotic systems”, whose electronically transmitted links lead to “co-operative literature projects, that are distinguished by their openness and their habit of using transformation to constitute forms of existence” (Heibach 2000: 7). In such collective projects like the Forum der Dreizehn (of the Thirteen) or Am Pool or N ULL , young authors like Christian Kracht, Elke Naters, Georg M. Oswald, Moritz von Uslar or Alban Nikolai Herbst met online and filled their internet pages daily with serial Net lit - a new genre? 323 texts. These texts referred to one another, sometimes often, at other times less frequently (the latter was usually the case). 3 When readers hacked the access code to Am Pool, and then contributed to texts under the authors’ names, no-one would have noticed, if it hadn’t been for the fact the authors themselves considered this action to be most “uncool” and so they quickly deleted the hackers’ infiltrating texts. On the other hand, one of the authors thought this reaction was rather petty - Alban Nikolai Herbst, who can be found on the net under 15 different names and identities. It is exactly this permeability, which is aesthetically the most interesting thing about the writer-reader roles and net literature. The transitory nature of the medium is naturally opposed to the self-affirming demands of individual authorship: a tricky dilemma. Not only the role of the author is changing, but also that of the reader. The network structure of the electronic text, so the experts tell us (cf. Rieger 1994; Suter 2000; Simanowski 2002), permits the reader, when immersed in the texts, to either follow the author’s instructions on how to proceed or not, since they form part of the reading material. Similarly, these connecting commands can turn the reader into an author, by producing new connections or by manipulating vital points of the data basis and expanding or creating them anew. These links or referential commands can operate on many levels and lead to an associative reading process, which might be compared to readers flicking through an encyclopaedia and being led far from the original text they opened at. At each referential level, the readers can decide for themselves about their reading strategy, according to their interests and priorities. So for example, on the web site of the renowned DuMont press, a reader can click on the N ULL Project run by the young author and Robert Walser prize winner, Thomas Hettche. Then they can choose from among the authors like John von Düffel, Burkhard Spinnen, Dagmar Leupold, Thomas Meinecke, Judith Kuckart or Helmut Krausser, whose texts and written fragments - often in letter form - are “connected online”, although they hardly ever (intertextually) refer to one another. In doing so, the author becomes “something of a travel guide in artificial, interactive environments, who gives navigational instructions in thematic spaces and offers orientation when visiting a tableau of experiential possibilities”, explains Wolfgang Neuhaus in Telepolis, (www.heise.de/ tp), a “Magazine of the Net Culture” (Zopfi 2001: 1). In the meantime, there are so many writer-readers participating in virtual writing workshops, for instance, in the German “Webring” (www.bla2.de), that since 1999, Oliver Gassner has collated more than 4 000 entries or links to authors listed from ‘Amman’ to ‘Zopfi’, in a type of literary travel guide over 800 pages long. Today, a collection named “Carpe” is the biggest directory of German-speaking literature on the internet, the S PIEGEL magazine announced in a special issue on the subject (cf. Stillich 1999: 41). And the community of “online literary figures” is growing. Reader-writers are experimenting with new forms of chatting and textual building blocks, with quotations and connecting elements, collages of textual pictures and built-in video animation. A number of electronic literary magazines provide for an intensively-used forum for the new, aesthetic forms. 4 The 23 rd Swiss “Days of Literature [Literaturtage]” in Solothurn in May, 2001, even had net literature as its main theme. In the same year, the Deutsche Taschenbuch Verlag (dtv; German Paperback Press) established a literary prize called “Literature.digital”, which has been awarded yearly since then. It remains to be seen whether from all this, net literature will develop its own prize tradition on the margins of the literature scenes. The “disempowering of the author” and the “birth of the reader as co-author” does not always promote a desire to read. Few of those hypertext novels freed from the “compulsion Ernest W.B. Hess-Lüttich 324 of a linear narrative” (like Autopol by Ilija Trojanow) have enjoyed continuing success. Moreover, literature on the net is not the same as net literature: the experts distinguish fastidiously between texts that can be read on the screen just as well as a book, and those that have been conceived and structured specifically for the media of the web. “Writing on the net,” elucidated Simanowski (2002: 13), “does not illustrate the displacement of the usual production processes in a new medium of presentation; it represents instead a process that is drafting up the specific, aesthetic possibilities of digital media.” “Net literature” in a narrower sense is not printable, it is “fleeting like the pixel on the screen”, explains the Swiss writer and computer programmer, Emil Zopfi (2001: 1). It is more of an offer to the reader, instead of being a finished product; an invitation when “surfing to construct a story yourself through a structure of linked words, textual chunks, pictures and sounds” (ibid.). Sometimes it is also a challenge to co-write, as presented at the site “Association Blaster” (www.assoziations-blaster.de) by Alvar Freude and Dragan Espenschied (1999). Whoever wishes to alter a text, can at anytime contribute to the further growth of the original text. No author or editor will try to intervene in a controlling way. A “connection maker” automatically creates the links between the entries and so joins together a textual net with neither beginning nor end, nor with predetermined consequences for the act of reading. Naturally, with such “collaborative writing projects” like that of the Berlin net author Claudia Klinger (“Human Voices”, “Missing Link”), the readers are mostly the co-writing authors themselves, as the Swiss net author Regula Erni openly admits (www.star-net.ch/ schreib- Net lit - a new genre? 325 stuben). There is still plenty of space to collaborate with Guido Grigat and his project, “23: 40”, which has steadily grown since its inception in 1997 (www.dreiundzwanzig vierzig.de). It has 1440 minutes a day, which visitors to the site can fill with memories - the project creates a web site for every minute. This personal home page then disappears after a minute to make way for the next one. Of course, the author of the minute text cannot count on becoming famous through this. Only the time appears instead of his or her name. Nevertheless, some 850 web pages had already been filled to date [July 2004]. People seem to have an urge to express themselves creatively. As is commonly understood, this development did not happen overnight. One could say it had been on the horizon for some time. For instance, the stories of the old Egyptian Pharaohs were woven into an ornamental volume in the hieroglyphic frescos. In the fold-out books of the Aztecs, chronicles were told in the form of comic strips. The writerly monks in the European Middle Ages decorated their copy with artistic letters, art in the margins and colourful portraits. After the discovery of the printing press - for the purposes of spreading the bible - it didn’t take long for tracts, leaflets and dramas to be printed. After the development of radio in order to spread the news, literary authors started writing radio plays for the new medium. If you have a particular longing to hear professionally recited poetry, you can call a special number as part of the telephone services of the post office. Poems are not only to be found in anthologies, they can also be seen on posters in the London Underground. And at the start of the new millenium, competitions were being held to reward the best literary text shown on the display of a cell phone, which only takes up the space of up to 160 letters. Ernest W.B. Hess-Lüttich 326 What I am trying to say is that media has always been aesthetically used too, apart from all its other uses (cf. Hiebel et al. 1999; specific to the history of writing: Haarmann 1998). In the 21 st century, literary texts have been exposed to increasing competition from the new media. For art to become goods or products, they have to generate a strong pressure to conform. Examples of this are the economic rather than the aesthetic criterion of how books lend themselves to being filmed or, vice versa, the popular book-as-film projects of many publishers; or the multimedia multiplication of value of literary material which has been produced as a book, film, CD-Rom, Hypertext - and conversely, for instance when characters from computer games become heroes of film like Lara Croft in The Tomb Raider, 2001. In such cases, the classical boundaries between the media begin to blur - the hybridisation of cinema and computers is striding ahead. Computer-generated cinema heroes fulfill the public’s dream of the new digital worlds of literature which computer games have made familiar to them. Traditional films rely more often on the tricks of “computer-generated imagery” (CGI) that not only revive the world of dinosaurs (“Jurassic Park”) or stir up artificial waves (“The Tempest”) and simulate historic bombings (“Pearl Harbour”), but at the same time elevate the fraud to become an accepted standard. Synthetic actors, the so-called “synthespians” (synthetic thespians), have easily replaced expensive armies of extras in big productions like the “Titanic” (1997) or “Gladiator” (2000), or else they are the centre of attention as cyborg stars in fantasy and science fiction films (“Shrek”, “Final Fantasy”, “A.I.” etc.). These productions are rarely concerned with discovering new worlds that have never been seen before. Often the familiarity created by the “old media” is simply given a technological overhaul. Generally, the narrative pattern of the new media tenaciously follows the methods of familiar reading routines. But not infrequently, the explorations of the authors working with the new media of machines, react to the old, narrative features of the book. A certain set of tasks and functions are evolving for critical media aesthetics, which aims to provide a more exact analysis of the intermedial, changing effects found between literature and film, television and video, computer and the internet (cf. Hess-Lüttich ed. 1987, id. ed. 1990, id. ed. 1991; Müller 1996; Helbig ed. 1998; Schnell 2000; Rajewski 2002). Semiotically and aesthetically, the new forms of communication have constantly been taken as the point of reference for net literature, since authors have been assessing and organising their writing strategies according to the codes and operational modes according to the new media. The montage forms of the modern, metropolitan novel provide a useful example. The developments in new aesthetic forms in the literature of the last thirty years have been conditioned by the media. This is, by the way, the subject of a study called “Media Simulation as a Writing Strategy”, in which a young Germanist from Göttingen, Philipp Löser (1999), examines the relationships between film, orality and the hypertext in postmodern literature of the past generation. Löser’s project has as a premise that literary responses are historically conditioned, not only by differences in media semiosis, but also as a result of them being embedded in a larger sphere of connections and interest groups. He argues that the relation between different media cannot be reduced to subjective, psychological or semiotic differences. He thus traces the different conceptualisation of other media in literature and shows how the attempts to imitate or “simulate” by this media have, to a certain extent, largely influenced the writing strategies of postmodern authors. But what does it mean to subject the medium of writing to the principle of linearity? Taking texts by Michael Joyce, Julio Cortazar, George Perec, Andreas Okopenko as exam- Net lit - a new genre? 327 ples, it becomes possible to weigh up critically the divergent aspects of the mimetic representation of world chaos and the programming of its experience, the suspension of linearity and the installment of new regulatory systems. The question common to these theoretical concerns seems to be whether technological progress can address the imperfection of the human spirit and point to new, integral forms of perception. Conversely: are modern technologies equal to the possibilities of writing as well as to human consciousness? It is quite possible that the answer could be a negative one. Therefore, speculation about the revolutionary power of literary hypertexts has become dubious, even though it was promulgated by the community of internet writers in a first flush of excitement. In general, such speculation made reference to theories about the new genre of ‘hyperfiction’, which emanated first from the USA and were soon adopted in ‘Old Europe’ in sometimes a rather carefree manner (Hess-Lüttich 1999 a; Mazenauer 2001). 3 net art: Hypertext - Hyperfiction - Hypermedia Ever since the publication of Theodor Holm Nelson’s opus magnum, Literary Machines (1987), proponents of a literary theoretical basis for concepts of hypertextuality have become more influential (e.g., Bolter 1991; Delany & Landow eds. 1991; Landow 1992). Wellknown greats of the literary theory scene in North America - which is not only interested in but also very aware of the media - include Michael Joyce, Jay D. Bolter, Stuart Mouthrop and George P. Landow, among others. They have championed, harmoniously in kakophony, the concept that hypertext is largely a literary genre in the tradition of the avantgard tendency to write non-linear narratives. They argue hypertext can logically be genealogically linked to the intensified efforts of many authors during the 20th century to break free from the semiotic limitations of the book and to involve the reader as an active partner in their writing (cf. Heibach 2000: 215). The concept of the hypertext creates the technical prerequisites for such literary strivings. The differences between the text-as-book in its traditional form and the hypertext - with its basic components of the knots or connecting points (texts, graphics, tables etc.) and links (the electronic connecting of binary knots or multilinear networks) - can be crudely summarised and reduced to the schema shown below (cf. for the textual theoretical implications on an individual level, see Hess-Lüttich 1999 a): Book Hypertext linear, hierarchical reading from page to page, in a sequence determined by the author At every point there are links branching off to other texts information ‘further back’ builds on knowledge ‘earlier on’ contents of a ‘knot’ does not necessitate a pre-existing connection or knot/ link The new concept was quickly greeted with loud fanfare. Initially, in the vein of American impartiality, the most heterogeneous elements were brought under on roof. Whether Roland Barthes - in the good old times of the computer-free sixties - understood much about PCs or not, he did anticipate them in any event, when he saw texts stretching out as far as the eye can see (Barthes 1974: 11; cf. Bolter 1991: 161; Landow 1992: 3). Ernest W.B. Hess-Lüttich 328 He must have felt that he was standing on the cusp of the second intellectual, media revolution in history, after the invention of writing, one that would throw out all the traditional expectations of culture, literature or society. Rather audaciously, genealogies were drawn from the Jewish Mishnah to the literary Avantgarde (Landow 1992), from the ars poetica of Horatio to an ars combinatoria of the hypertext, from the myths of antiquity to the machines of modernity (cf. Bolter 1991: 35ff.). Where possible, hypertext was proven to be an “essentially literary concept” (Slatin 1988: 112) and historic precedents were named and parallels were found, if not invented. Take it a little slower, one might comment, from an ‘old European’ perspective. Landow has examined the Poetica of Aristotle - and behold, hypertext proved it wrong. Nothing left of a “fixed sequence, definite with its beginning and ending, a story’s ‘certain, definite magnitude’, and the conception of unity or wholeness” (Landow 1992: 102). Well, in modernity, the rules of Aristotelian Poetica has been more frequently ignored, even by those authors who were still using quills. They belong to a quickly expanding group of “precedents” to the hypertext. Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy is often named because of its art of digression, or James Joyce’s Ulysses and especially Finnegan’s Wake because of its encyclopaedic, tangential associative chains and subtle, referential nets (cf. Eco 1987: 72; id. 1990: 138) as well as Alain Robbe-Grillet, Jorge Luis Borges and Vladimir Nabokov. Their work is cited as proof of the attempt of authors “to divorce themselves from imposing a particular reading of their texts on their readers, attempting to eliminate linearity of texts” (Ledgerwood 1997: 550). This was exactly the literary aesthetic programme of French authors like George Perec or Raymond Queneau and others who founded the group O ULIPO (ouvroir de la litterature potentielle). They created texts whose meaning readers could first establish when they themselves melted the non-linear text segments into a coherent whole. Queneau’s Cent mille milliards de poèmes requires an active reader who ends up realising he or she is a co-author (cf. Fendt 2001: 107). Admittedly: books in the common sense of the word have a beginning and an end, but does that force us in each and every case to read in a linear fashion? Wasn’t it the reputable writing of ancient cultures that released us from this compulsion? The work of Lao Tse, the Qumran Scrolls, the Talmud, the Christian Bible? Didn’t we establish long ago graphic “user surfaces” in the Middle Ages (Clausberg 1994; Coy 1994)? If one examines a tract from the Talmud, one can find pages artistically laid out with headings and footnotes. The text of the Hebrew Mishnah is placed in the middle of the page, framed by commentary taken from the Aramaeic Gemara and elaborated by the story collection of the Halacha and the Haggadah. Parables have been associatively added to the prose, while you can also find mnemo-technical key-words, even a play on words as well as cross-references to other points in the text, to the Bible or medieval writing. A Talmudic tract might also contain insertions, marginalia, corrections, and commentary compiled over centuries. This is how during the course of time, a “wickerwork of texts about texts” came to be created, “which contain innumerable references and presentations of evidence. It represents an eternal challenge to constantly arrive at new interpretations, especially because of the different ways of reading that are possible, as illustrated by the many commentaries” (Fendt 1995: 93; cf. id. 2001: 106f.). If we turn to the handwritten tracts of the medieval cloister, we can see over the centuries that the informed treatment of these manuscripts led to a counteraction of their critical usage Net lit - a new genre? 329 by adding interlinear comments and marginal notes. Yet these manuscripts from the Middle Ages also show the plurality of an anonymous authorship which contributed to the steady growth of the text. In principle, it is not so different to when the user of the hypertext opens window after window to see what the authors - dispersed and at different times - have collectively created at one particular point on the web. That is how ‘textual memory’ continues to be written and expanded into the immeasurable and, perhaps, the unfathomable. It is only limited by the space of its hardware memory. Whoever still gets lost in the maze of texts, can console themselves by recalling the generic tradition of textual labyrinths stemming from antiquity and reaching its peak in the 17 th century. In these labyrinthine stories, the Ariadne threads of the linear narrative do not always promise safe-conduct (cf. Ernst 1988). Poly-linearity, reader-activity, intertextuality, plurality of reading styles, and openness of the ways of reading - for every one of these characteristic features of the hypertext, one can easily find literary precursors, concludes Fendt (1995: 108; id. 2001: 107). He comments on texts by authors who “in their experimentation have used literary aesthetic patterns and raised them to the level of a programme, applying it to their texts along with an amazing range of criteria that are also applicable to hypertexts”. On the other hand, the boys of postmodern ‘literary theory’ in their exuberance are often guilty of metaphorical inaccuracies, for instance, when they swear by Derrida or Bataille to the “unlimited semiosis in the semiotic web”. The chunks and links in the systems of hypertext can be decoded; the number of possible connections is halted by the physical limitations of the computer’s capacity (and cognitive boundaries of perception, because someone has to establish the connections between the defined and selected textual units within the scope of the programme; the units (texts, links, chunks) must contain meaningful (not necessarily intended as such by the initial author) contact points for further connections; to speak of the text as a semantic, functional unit loses meaning as the number of links grows. However, not all the connections are of equal plausibility, unless you feel forced to agree with the view of many intertextuality theorists who make the hard to dispute claim that everything has something to do with everything, leaving you to overhear the polyphony of voices in the “chambre d’echos” of Roland Barthes’ “bibliothèque générale”. If all these links were equally valid, then they would be indifferent to the demands to justify their existence. In defiance of this arbitrariness, Umberto Eco (1990) presented The Limits of Interpretation, which is also in opposition to Jacques Derrida and Georges Bataille, given Eco’s requirements of plausibility theory. Following Charles Sanders Peirce, he reminds us that even if one theorises the unlimited nature of potential links, when the interpreters of complex signs are considered, the number of actually selected links is final and limited. Not all metatexts about texts are of equal worth: some of them last, others are justifiably rejected, some connections make more sense than others, some of them lead to a dead end. This fact should also be considered when discussing the further development of literary theory, as well as the means of aesthetic evaluation in the era of electronic media competition. Instead of “hyperfiction”, Simanowski (2002: 18ff.) speaks of “interfiction”, combining the features of inter-activity, of inter-mediality, of the Internet, and those of aesthetically engineered fiction, which encompasses all media. But the new terms refer to the most differing forms of text. Take the collaborative (co-)writing workshops (like “At the Baker” or in the “Fractal Novel”) for example, to which linearly conceived textual building blocks Ernest W.B. Hess-Lüttich 330 are contributed by writer-readers (writer & reader are often combined to the catchy “wreader”). These workshops are often placed in the same category as the multilateral dialogue or role-plays of the so-called Chats or MUDs (Multi User Dungeons). When chatting on the net, a common text evolves from the quickly written discussion, which can be read as a linear text, if you have the necessary patience (cf. Beißwenger ed. 2001). It would be more sensible, however, to describe these chats as text or dialogue type in its own right (Hess-Lüttich 2002). By contrast, the co-writing projects create a subgenre of net literature, that already allows itself to be differentiated into subcategories. For instance, those where the authors successively add to the crafting of a story told in a linear fashion (e.g., Claudia Klinger’s “At the Baker”); or those where they work on a multilinear story with different branches (e.g., Roger Nelkes “The Pillars of Llacaan”); and those where they put down their thoughts about a pre-given keyword, most of which are then automatically brought together in a loose connection by the software programme (as with the “Association Blaster”, see above). By contrast, one can only speak of “hyperfiction” in a stricter, narrower sense if the constitutive media-specific rules of the hypertextual text production are followed. This entails the systematic use of all the possibilities of the new medium; its ways of connecting the textual segments through the relevant, designated, digital hyperlinks. They are the constitutive links of hyperfiction through which the narrative threads are drawn in the “jungle of the corpus” contained in the computer’s memory. These threads can form an intricate network that constantly demands of the reader decisions about navigation, apart from simply reading the text. Almost paralysing their reading manoevres, they can lead readers down one-way streets or even to dead ends, which force them to return to the beginning and start all over again. The reading effort could fail, making the readers ask in exasperation: where am I, how do I get back, what are the names of those other links, where is this going, how long or big is this text anyway, am I ever going to reach the end of it? These are new “reading risks” which the psychologists are already dealing with as a condition named “cognitive overload” (Gerdes 2000). The author tries to interweave these threads to create texture and if he or she is lucky, they can still maintain an overall view. The reader connects the threads anew, thus assembling a text according to individual desire. The montage remains, of course, within the framework of the programme as defined by the author. The description and evaluation of this authordefined framework has become the responsibility of a new “narratology of wholistic textuality” (cf. Hess-Lüttich 1999 a). It is, at the same time, one of the deciding criteria for the assessment of a literary genre, whose quality can no longer be vouched for by language and style. In addition to this, are the criteria of the attractive design of the text (Bucher 1996; Hess-Lüttich b; Lobin ed. 1999) and the consistent integration of polycoded textual elements (Hess-Lüttich 1994), like graphics and tables, sounds, noises, musical sequences, photos, pictures, videos, multimedia animation. The specifics of the new genre, if it one, and a more complex scale for its evaluation can first be arrived at once the whole sum of these criteria is considered. At the same time, it surely transgresses literary boundaries. Roberto Simanowski, who is editor of the online magazine for digital poetry (www.dichtung-digital.de), has rightly called for more debate about the aesthetic tools used on the web (qtd. by Mazenauer 2001: 2; cf. Simanowski 1996; id. 2002: 146f.): The aesthetics of digital literature is largely an aesthetics of technology, since artistic ideas must be transferred to the materiality of a power source [eg. electricity], before they can appear on a Net lit - a new genre? 331 level which allows them to be appreciated by the senses. This requires of the author a qualification that was uncalled for before. Next to an aesthetic one - and here I mean a multimedia aesthetics - a technical qualification has become necessary. Is polycoded hypermedia still literature? Is the aesthetic pleasure derived from art in a linguistic form somewhat overshadowed, if not overwhelmed by the sophistication of the textual surface? The “surface nature” of digital literature is not just by chance the object of much criticism by experts who have been schooled in the traditions of the literary canon and use this as a basis for analysis. “Net art”, is for that reason perhaps the more harmless receptacle for multimedia “works” like that of Jenny Holzer or Barbara Kruger in which language, image and sound are combined coherently, as in Lance Shield’s work. His “TelePhony” combines telephone, radio and computer in a digital tableau that critically appraises the media. (However, some links lead to the homepage of real estate agents, or even to porn sites.) This is all work that probes a terrain where we can observe the success of new art forms beyond the tried and tested protective barriers, which help divide traditional fields and create the disciplinary demands of a subject. The initial euphoria of the evolving theories on art and technology in this new literary milieu seems to have been replaced by a more sober approach. Beat Suter (2001) considers hyperfiction to be less a new text type and more of a new art of (“performative”) reading. Jürgen Fauth (1995) maintains that the “work” remains “hybrid” because it relies on all types of forms to create its “actual one”. Marie-Laure Ryan (2001) asks whether the telling of a story can be reconciled with free choice. Uwe Wirth (1997) fears for the inner coherence of a text which completely entrusts itself to the decisions of readers and, at the very least, celebrates its structural organisation alone. And even Simanowski (2002: 82f.) makes the point that creating something dynamic can also lead to its unbecoming: “deconstruction of meaning by the generation of chunks of text at random can only possess a limited aesthetic attraction”. This assertion led Jürgen Daiber (1999) to an even more critical judgement, that a “supposedly avantgardist literature” is concealing its “lack of will to create form behind a radical theory” (qtd. by Simanowski 2002: 81). The pleasure of reading books, however, seems not endangered for the time being. Technology does not automatically guarantee aesthetic quality, which is demanded by creative power as well as an orderly touch. The Hamburg publisher of D IE Z EIT (and former state minister for culture in Berlin), Michael Naumann casually commented on this, during an interview for the S PIEGEL with Stephan Burgdorff and Johannes Saltzwedel (S PIEGEL Special 10/ 1999: 30-34). He claims the electronic means of styling belonging to the hypertext was an attempt to “clear out the brain of the reader and to fill it with all the associative chains imaginable, even absurdities. It is a useless attempt to replace fantasy with technology - in the end it is a loss of freedom in the name of diversity.” Naumann then dismissed the notion that the author is no longer important as “naïve”, and compared the hyperfiction apologists’ belief to “the Renaissance ideal that everyone can be his own author”. Furthermore, the co-deciding of readers how a plot’s elements can be carried out already existed in Charles Dicken’s early novels which were published as a series in newspapers. Incidentally, it seems that not only the reader can easily get lost in the labyrinth of the net (“lost in cyberspace”), but also the author: Harold Brodkey wrote around 36 000 pages of his novel in progress, The Runaway Soul, which were unable to be sorted into manuscript form. According to Naumann, Brodkey “lost his way in his computer, just as Robert Musil did in Ernest W.B. Hess-Lüttich 332 his Mann ohne Eigenschaften [A Man without Qualities] when he got lost in an abundance of notes.” Established literary criticism remains appropriately reserved with respect to the “works” presented up until now. For instance, Susanne Berkenheger, an internet author presenting at the above-mentioned meeting in Solothurn, announced her “Hypertext for Four Throats” with the title “HILFE! (H ELP ! ]”, which was certain to draw attention. A well-known critic in Switzerland, Charles Linsmayer, (in D ER B UND 152.122 from 27.5.2001: 5) gave it a harsh review: “despite all the interactive collage possibilities, the content and style did not surpass the (low) level of a secondary school essay”. The rest of the presentations of digital literature at the Solothurn literary festival (“readings” is probably no longer applicable for the genre and it is difficult to settle on names for it) also failed to convince Linsmayer, just as the theoretical reflections on experimental poetry by the experts failed to do during a panel discussion. The critic didn’t mince his words: “if anything at all was worthy of reporting about the hopeless confusion surrounding hyperfiction, then it is the fact that hyperfiction requires a certain type of reading; but this cannot even be considered competition for written literature; and you can’t turn a badly written text into a well-written one just by transposing it into hyperfiction” (ibid.). This all makes the response of literary criticism even more urgent. But up until now, it has been noticeably silent. “Why aren’t literary scholars interested in the internet? ” the net author, Dirk Schröder, asks. “Their job is to track down literature wherever it goes” (Stillich 1999: 42). The majority of them, however, seem to be presently at a loss. The secretary general of the Swiss Association of Writers, Peter A. Schmid, thinks a discussion is urgently needed so as to address the new aesthetic forms of net literature, of digital poetry and of hyperfiction or cyberfiction. So far, there aren’t any regulations to determine whether online writers should even be classified as an author, in order to join PEN or another writers’ organisation. Not surprisingly, none of the net authors have “bothered to join as yet” (qtd. by Zopfi 2001: 2). 4 Concluding Remarks Net literature - a new genre? Yes and no. It is generally not a matter of whether net literature can be considered literature in the first place. It is more to about being in the middle of a debate on the changes in the concept of literature, as Helmut Kreuzer noted almost 30 years ago, as he discussed the expanding media system (Kreuzer 1975: Veränderungen des Literaturbegriffs). With respect to digital media, it seems to me the more interesting question is that of the expansion of the concept. By this I mean, what sort of literary qualities can be found in net art and its many different, multimedia forms, either from the point of view of the net artists themselves or from a literary critical perspective? Apart from that, the eternal question remains: how much of it is any good? Which leads us again to the yardstick of aesthetic value. And who is entitled to determine that yardstick - and for whom? Literature, put online, is public. But until now it has only been available to a minority. Net literature is only noticed by a small circle of the initiated, mostly those who co-author texts. The keenest customers are the search engines. And they usually pick up on a writing project, when a clued-in author puts the letters s-e-x in his text or at least in the meta-text of the source code. That increases even the German writers’ chances of getting the largest possible Net lit - a new genre? 333 audience. They might put aesthetically ambitious texts online under the headings of such explosive issues as “StaatSEXamen” or “PrüfungSEXemplare” or “GaSEXplosion”. The web scouting software of my own university tends to reliably fixate on such code words. One day, a colleague was complaining because his work on the English poet and dramatist, John Gay (1685-1732), that he had carefully placed on the net, had gone missing. The word “gay” had alerted the censoring device of the university web to something that seemed dangerous to youth, and my colleague’s pages were deleted. But which literature, asks Marlene Streeruwitz, net author and director of an internet class at the Viennese School of Poetry - and a trace of doubt can be detected in the question - which literature actually wants to be read mainly by search engines? (2000: 35). “Literature on the Internet: that is global playing within a perfect marginalisation” (ibid.), a “mass solidarity of hermits”, of the lonely writer-reader in front of the screen, who is trying to forget his or her own existence by being a writer. That always places their texts in the realm of the personal, that is, the unpolitical, indeed the unliterary (Streeruwitz 2000: 35): The literary Internet text needs to go beyond solipsism and be crafted in the same way as the literary texts that have gone before. It requires the ordering of the material, the proper placing of content, formal guarantees. Moreover, all of this will continue to solve the question, whether a text is to be called literary or not, or nevertheless. This will remain the case for as long as the old, eternal stories are told on the Internet - and I don’t think that is going to change. And more significantly, it is a matter of how these stories are told. The new genre, if it can already said to be one or is to become one in the future, explains the history of humans in a new form under altered circumstances, concludes Christiane Heibach (2001: 196) in her “Theses on the nature of net literature”: “The expanded range of possibilities leads to a reality that is developing new, meaningful spheres created by technology. We are only at the beginning of its realisation.” On verra. 5 References Barrett, Edward (ed.) 1988: Text, ConText, and Hypertext. Writing with and for the Computer, Cambridge/ Mass.: MIT Press. Barthes; Roland 1974: s/ z, New York: Hill & Wang. Beißwenger, Michael (ed.) 2001: Chat-Kommunikation. Sprache, Interaktion, Sozialität & Identität in synchroner computervermittelter Kommunikation. 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Oder: wen kümmert’s, wer liest? ”, Münker & Rösler (eds.) 1997: 319-337. Zopfi, Emil 2001: “Spiel mit Sprache und Software”, in: D ER KLEINE B UND 152.121 v. 26.5.2001: 1-2. Notes 1 At this point, I would like to specially thank Friedrich Block and Karin Wenz (Kassel) for their critical appraisal of my work and much appreciated references. This chapter is based on lectures I gave in Beijing, Windhoek, Sao Paulo and New York from 2002 to 2004. It retains the lecturing style of the papers, rather than developing more Ernest W.B. Hess-Lüttich 336 exact theses based on textual theoretical, textual typological, systematic conceptual and generic poetological approaches. This reflects the current, transitory character of the still relatively new material (For a more rigorous, theoretical analysis, please refer to my other work in Hess-Lüttich 1994, id. 1999a, id. 2000, id. 2001). First draft of translation into English by Dr. Tania Peitzker (Sydney/ Lucerne). 2 Actual links on the subject of the e-book (2003): www.rocket-ebook.de, www.softbook.com, www.verybook. net, www.librius.com, www.openebook.org, www.eink.com, www.ebooknet.com. 3 In the meantime, a selection has been published in book form: Sven Lager and Elke Naters (eds.) 2001: Das Buch: Leben am Pool (The Book: Life at the Pool), Köln: Kiepenheuer & Witsch. 4 Other internet forums include the one run by Roberto Simanowski, as part of his online-magazine for digital aesthetics (www.dichtung-digital.de); the annotated database for hyperfiction projects (www. cyberfiction.ch); or the current guide to the range of literature on the web, which has become increasingly hard to keep abreast of (www.netz-literatur.ch) or others (www.carpe.com, www.claudia-klinger.de, www.hyper-fiction.de, www.netzliteratur.de, www.bla2.de). Cf. for this discussion, see also the CD-Rom pegasus 1998 with its contributions to the internet competition run by D IE Z EIT , ARD, IBM and Radio Bremen 1996-98, or the CD-Rom archive of the issues of dichtung-digital from June 1999 to November 2000, as well as the project by Johannes Auer and Reinhard Döhl, 2000: “kill the poem”. Digital Visual Concrete Poetry and Poem Art, Zurich: update. Additional references include Suter & Böhler (eds.) 1999 and Suter 2000.