Joseph Tabbi’s Toward A Semantic Literary Web: Setting a Direction for the Electronic Literature Organization’s Directory
Tabbi offers an alternative definition of electronic literature. While he also argues that critics have no agreed upon definition (4), I agree, in Tabbi’s terms, electronic literature is not a “thing” or a “medium.” (2) It is not poetry, fiction, hypertext, etc…it is an “emerging cultural form” and a “collective creation of new terms and keywords.” (2) Members of the Electronic Literature Organization are taking part in a literary movement (2). The members of ELO, “we” are not primarily concerned with books in print, “that much is clear.” (4)
Tabbi continues by offering a very interesting passage about interdisciplinarity:
“The moment a professor or a writer stops regarding the computer as an enhanced typewriter, ceases to treat “techies” as service personnel uninterested in literature, and seriously seeks to locate literary concerns and create works in the new media environment, that potential e-lit author no longer enjoys the implicit support of a discipline. Authors working in electronic environments soon find themselves subject to stringencies of corporate and commercial enterprises that have their own, not always compatible, social structures and values set on knowledge production, description, and location. In the academy, lip service has long been paid to interdisciplinarity: those who work seriously and well between disciplines will be, in the worst case, tolerated as mavericks who are working on ‘cutting edge’ theories. In the best case, trans-disciplinary researchers are respected for adding something ‘new,’ a value again wholly consistent with the world-economy’s commitment not simply to innovate, but to require that innovation should be endless. (24)
…and then some solutions to try to bring electronic literature to others by showing what we have in common with them:
Rather than attempt to create a literary movement along what are now entirely conventional avant-garde lines, producing ever new, ever more specialized knowledges, the ELO Directors can better advance the cause of electronic literature through acts of discernment — specifically, by discerning what our work shares in common with established forms of knowledge production worldwide to identify affiliated projects in the arts and computer sciences, and to express this commonality with reference to the unique mix of technologists, authors, librarians, program directors, and humanities professors who would not otherwise be in communication with one another. (24)
