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E-Lit – D.O.A.?

Hey, don’t shoot me, I’m just the blogger, but in his Guardian Unlimited article (8/24/08), “Is e-literature just one big anti-climax?” – Andrew Gallix takes on the rhetorical question with a resounding yes. But not for fault of F-style online reading, or further laments of lack of reading overall; rather, for e-lit’s own delivery: “Technology – the very stuff e-lit is made of – has also turned out to be its Achilles heel. The slow switch to broadband limits its potential audience, e-readers are only adapted to conventional texts – and when was the last time you curled up in bed with a hypertext?”

He doesn’t, however, throw out the computer with the bathwater. Instead, he poses what might be a kind of “skipped generation” of e-lit: “In spite of all this, Amerika may well be on to something when [Chris Meade, director of the thinktank if:book] claims that we are witnessing the emergence of a ‘digitally-processed intermedia art’ in which literature and all the other arts are being ‘remixed into yet other forms still not fully developed’. My feeling is that these ‘other forms’ will have less and less to do with literature. Perhaps e-lit is already dead?”

For full effect, read the rest on Guardian.uk.

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