Read/Write
Every year, we have a few conferences that concern literary hypertext, electronic literature, hypertext narrative, or what you will.
At conferences like these, one finds two kinds of papers. We have papers intended to be presented, justifying the author’s travel costs, tenure, and grants, and we occasionally have papers intended to be read, papers that call attention to work the author admires or detests, papers that try to move current practice or change current taste.
I’m not talking only about papers intended for a broad audience. The second type of paper might be written, for example, for a very small audience of technological experts. But these papers are meant to be read, and perhaps discussed and argued about; the other sort are meant to be admired.
My desk is now awash in monographs and papers: Mason’s “On Games and Links,” the new(ish) Janet Murray monograph that nobody (literally) mentioned to me, Harmut Koenitz’s collection on Interactive Digital Literature. What have I have missed? And where are the arguments over it?