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new trends in electronic literature II
I've been trying to decide how to classify this Storyland website, and I've decided that it falls neatly at the intersection of two different categories of electronic literature.
It is part computer-generated narrative, of the sort assembled by programs like James Meehan's Tale-Spin. But its frivolousness aligns it with sites like They Have Blogs!, or the Random Bar Joke Generator. I think of these sorts of sites language toys: they're entertaining enough, but they don't, to my mind, produce anything that takes on the status of literature. (The possible exception being the sites that are dedicated to the William Burroughs' cut-up technique, a technique which arguably possesses both a cultural critique and an occult potency.)
Forerunners of computer-generated narrative: Vladimir Propp's Morphology of the Folktale, Georges Polti's The 36 Dramatic Situations, S. Klein's plot generating software (1973).
Forerunners of language toys: Mad Libs, random number generators, Raymond Queneau's 100,000,000,000,000 Sonnets, Tristan Tzara's Dada cut-ups, surrealist games. Labels: electronic_literature |
Monday, May 20, 2002
11:11 PM
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