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-Jesper Olsson in Svenska Dagbladet "Clearly the best study of
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-Jesper Olsson in Svenska Dagbladet "Clearly the best study of
electronic texts I have yet read." | |
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These and other questions about the future of literature are given wide and interdisciplinary atttention in what is the first book-length critical study on the poetics of cybermedia and computer games.
Cybertext explores the aesthetics and the textual dynamics of digital literature and its many diverse genres such as hypertext fiction, computer games, computer generated poetry and prose, and collaborative Internet texts such as MUDs. However, instead of insisting on the uniqueness and newness of "electronic writing" or "interactive fiction" (phrases which mean very little) the author situates these new literary forms within the larger and much older field of "ergodic" literature, from the ancient Chinese I Ching to the literary experiments of the OuLiPo. These are open, dynamic texts where the reader must perform specific actions to generate a literary sequence, which may vary for every reading.
Aarseth constructs a theoretical model that describes how these literary forms are different from each other, and demonstrates how the widely assumed divide between paper texts and electronic texts breaks down under careful analysis. He then confronts literary theories of narrative, semiotics and rhetoric with the new empirical field of ergodic literature, and examines the problems and potential usefulness of applying these theories on material for which they were not intended.
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