Cybertext

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.