MLA Talks

Lori Emerson’s abstract for the next MLA begins:

It is remarkable that in just ten years, since the publication of the first book on electronic literature (Loss Glazier’s Digital Poetics in 2001)...

This overlooks Jay David Bolter’s Writing Machines, George P. Landow’s Hypertext, Michael Joyce’s Of Two Minds, Silvio Gaggi’s From Text To Hypertext, Jane Yellowlees Douglas’s The End of Books, and I shudder to think what I’m forgetting.

In other fields, it’s the Professors of English and the Librarians who play the role of dusty pedants. Sigh.

Updates: I was right to shudder. Titles I forgot include Richard Lanham’s The Electronic Word, Michael Heim’s Electric Language, perhaps Ted Nelson’s Literary Machines, and assuredly Espen Aarseth’s Cybertext. Lori Emerson responds, though not very responsively, by trying to argue that none of the early work really counted until the ELO’s branding effort. Publishers fixing MLA citations, English professors lecturing me about branding – what a country!