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by Roberto Simanowski 1. Necessity of evaluation Regarding digital literature
there are four groups to distinguish: I admit to belong to the
last group. I am not sure, if authors prefer scholars of
literature, who belong to the group of ignorants, rather
than the ones who are reviewers. I also understand, there
might be some reasons that make a meeting of authors and
critics tricky. The sense of innovation, the creative genius
doesn't quite fit with the eagerness to comment and
criticize – especially when old standards for new
phenomena are used. Nevertheless, we need to discuss digital
literature from an academic perspective. At least if there
are public competitions of digital literature, as there have
been in Germany for three years now (organized by the
newspaper DIE ZEIT and IBM), and if a jury has to evaluate
and to justify their judgement, we need certain criteria to
look at digital literature. We need an aesthetics of
digital literature – not as much an aesthetics, which
is about art and truth, perception, social impact, mimesis
and catharsis, but an aesthetics, which is about the right
use of poetical or technical means. The more the literary
field of digital literature is being established – and
it is about to be established considering the number of
conferences, awards, magazines, marketing companies and a
growing digital-literature-author-society – the less it
can tolerate the lack of a professional review. Now, what are the criteria
to evaluate digital literature? This is probably one of the
most exciting and difficult questions concerning digital
literature, and there is simply no yellow brick road to
follow. This is not about usability, this is not about
ability to design. This is about aesthetical values of
technical devices. Those devices are so different from
program to program that one may object to constructing
general theories about hyperliterature at all.
(1)
On the other hand, there are certain aspects one will find
in most of digital literature: navigation, linkage,
multimediality. Maybe we can find some
criteria to evaluate digital literature by listing the
typical characteristics of it and raising the inherent
questions. I see the following main issues: The jury of the German
digital literature-competition claimed
in 1996, among the digital literatures evaluated there was
little sentimentality and kitsch but more joy of playing
with the new technology. The addition
was that sometimes this desire to play seemed to have
displaced the search to articulate one's own experience.
This leads to a main question of any aesthetics: what is
kitsch and what is it supposed to be in terms of digital
literature. The question of kitsch opens
a big can of worms, for here we might be well advised just
to refer to a common definition of kitsch, which is based on
aspects of encountering and using the aesthetical material.
In this definition kitsch is understood as 1) the
unreflected desire, without distance for contemplation, and
2) the oversimplified signification of an aesthetical means.
(2) Considering point 1 in terms
of digital literature we have to admit that we find
technophilia without distance of contemplation in many
examples of digital literature. I mean the use of technical
devices without real meaning, e.g., a link which is just a
link, but doesn't transfer any specific meaning, or a
sophisticated animation effect which does not represent more
than itself. Here the engineer has beaten the poet. We might
call this the celebration of technology; it fits with what
in terms of kitsch is called the unreflected
desire. It is reminiscent of the
ornamentation, which kitsch has been doing to simple,
functional goods since the late 19th century. Here, kitsch
with a huge aesthetical effort pretends a special meaning
where there is actually no special meaning. One can find
this excessive use of aesthetical means of attraction in
digital literature. Well, digital literature can be
campy. Considering point 2, we know
that we can find a lot of oversimplified semantization of
aesthetical or technical means. A link from the word
emptiness to an empty white page might be one
example. There are two ways to
produce kitsch in digital literature: either giving the
aesthetical / technical mean no obvious meaning, or giving
it a meaning which is too obvious. I will give two examples
of an appropriate use of digital literature
technology. A This meaning of the link and
the programmed time-effect complements, or to say more
exactly, modifys the meaning of the letters. However, there
is even more: browsing the black screen, the reader will
encounter many hidden links. The occurrence of these links
modifys the meaning once more and makes the technical device
the major element of meaning. B These are some thoughts in
approaching an aesthetics of digital literature from an
academic perspective. The further discussion in this journal
has, besides other questions, to ask:
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