Author: Communication

The Electronic Literature Organization 2013 Conference

Hosted by the Laboratoire Paragraphe and the EnsAD (Ecole nationale supérieure des Arts Décoratifs)
Paris, France, September 24-27, 2013
Deadline for Abstracts: December 31, 2012.

Keywords: e-literature, electronic literature, e-lit, digital literature, literature, world literature, literary semantic web, literariness, new materialisms, new media, locative media, archiving, language, actor-network theory, cognitive capitalism

The Electronic Literature Organization (http://eliterature.org), the leading organization devoted to electronic literature, announces its 2013 conference to be held in Paris, France, September 24-27, 2013. The conference is hosted by the Laboratoire Paragraphe and the EnsAD (Ecole nationale supérieure des Arts Décoratifs). Along with the conference organizers and hosts, other partners include: Université Paris 8, Laboratoire Transferts critiques et dynamiques des savoirs, Bibliothèque Nationale de France (BNF), and Le Cube. The official languages of the conference will be French and English.

Proposals are welcome on topics within electronic literature, including but not limited to:

• Digital culture
• Code and software studies
• Digital art
• Remediation
• Translation of electronic literature
• E-literature and the body
• Digital poetics
• Digital storytelling
• Mobile/locative media
• Preservation and digital cultural heritage

The conference title is “Chercher le Texte: Locating the Text in Electronic Literature.” Electronic literature is explicitly defined as literature. Yet there is great confusion about the concept of text at work in it. What defines the textuality of games, visual works, and works without any evident language? The ELO 2013 conference in Paris will confront such issues: to seek out the text and attempt to define the literariness of electronic literature.

Over the past two decades, while numerous creative and critical movements have taken hold within and without academia, creators have been newly conceiving, and scholars resituating, literary works in new media. Early warnings that we might all get “lost in hyperspace” were overcome fairly easily – perhaps too easily when one considers that our first, most challenging conceptions of electronic writing have never quite been realized. Is there a way to mark the multiplicity of new writing in new media? Can commonalities and distinctions among emerging literary practices be noted? Are there new possibilities for language-based forms in programmable media? Can scholarly discussions surrounding works be carried on over time and among various groups, in the media where the works are generated?

ELO 2013 seeks to open the discussion beyond the remediation of literary writing from print to screens, by looking at ways that literary works, and “literariness” generally, circulates through a world system that has itself altered dramatically in the years since the first works of e-lit were produced. New media, from this perspective, are just the most visible instance of emerging economic, social systems, remediations, and subjectivities that impact literary production (as they impact our lives) from every side. New media are now being described, and re-imagined, in terms of new materialisms; discourse networks find new and different alignments within and without institutions, and both human agency and authorial presence have taken on new and sometimes strange forms.

The Electronic Literature Organization and Université Paris 8 invite individual paper proposals, panel proposals, and proposals for alternative formats. Submit abstracts of 200-500 words to Easychair at https://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=elo2013. Send questions to Joseph Tabbi <jtabbi at gmail.com> or Philippe Bootz <philippe.bootz at univ-paris8.fr>. A separate call for creative works will be issued shortly.