In this text the author explores digital literature and its genres. Instead
of insisting on the uniqueness of electronic writing the author situates these
literary forms within the tradition of "ergodic" literature with which the
reader must perform specific actions to generate a literary sequence.Can computer games be treated as literature? Do the rapidly evolving and
culturally expanding genres of digital literature mean that the narrative mode
of discourse - novels, films, television series - is losing its dominant
position in our culture? Is it necessary to define a new aesthetics of cyborg
textuality? In this book, the author explores the aesthetics and textual
dynamics of digital literature and its diverse genres, including hypertext
fiction, computer games, computer-generated poetry and prose, and collaborative
Internet texts such as MUDs. Instead of insisting on the uniqueness and newness
of electronic writing and interactive fiction, however, the author situates
these literary forms within the tradition of "ergodic" literature - a term
borrowed from physics to describe open, dynamic texts such as the "I Ching" or
Apollinaire's calligrams with which the reader must perform specific actions to
generate a literary sequence.; Constructing a theoretical model that describes how new electronic forms
build on this tradition, the author bridges the divide between paper texts and
electronic texts. He then uses the perspective of ergodic aesthetics to
re-examine literary theories of narrative, semiotics, and rhetoric and to
explore the implications of applying these theories to materials for which they
were not intended.
