Recent innovations
in digital environments may suggest that the
possibility to manipulate the literal movement of
the text could be one of the essential variables
separating digital literature from printed
literature. This bipolar distinction between
digital and print media hides, however, a complex
historical background. A fuller comprehension of
movement as a variable in literature calls for the
clarification of the historical development from
the "analogies of movement" in printed literature
to the innovations in video art, experimental film
and multimedia poetry.
In classifying
types of textual movement at least the following
questions are relevant: What can be kinetic in the
poetic text? How does the movement take place?
Where does it take place? What is the result of the
movement? And finally, what (or who) makes the text
move? The article develops conceptual divisions
that make answering these questions possible and
thus helps to make the question of the specificity
of digitally manipulated movement more
precise.