Zork and E-Lit

“You are standing in an open field west of a white house, with a boarded front door. There is a small mailbox here.” Thus begins Zork, a 1980s computer game and one of the earliest examples of a genre that the New York Times Book Review described in 1983 as “games, which have been called participatory novels, interactive fiction and participa-stories.”

Interactive fiction outgrew the gaming world and joined a larger set of hypertext narratives known collectively as electronic literature or e-lit. E-lit has come a long way since Zork. The Electronic Literature Organization (ELO) recently announced two new additions to its series of publications. N. Katherine Hayles's primer, Electronic Literature: What Is It? and Joseph Tabbi's Setting a Direction for the Directory: Toward a Semantic Literary Web.

Hayles's primer (which is the introductory chapter of her book, “Electronic Literature: Playing, Interpreting, and Teaching,” due in fall 2007 from Notre Dame Press ) establishes a foundation for understanding e-lit in its various forms and differentiates creative e-lit from other types of digital materials while pointing out its significant overlap with the print tradition. Tabbi's work analyzes the critical issues and metadata solutions relating to the description and classification of e-lit.

Electronic literature is far from canonical. You're more likely to find e-lit in an art, communications, or film program than in a literature or creative writing program. However, literary studies may be the best place in which to locate e-lit, because it offers a sophisticated set of critical practices that places works within the cultural context in which they are produced. At some point in the near future, as Katherine Hayles has noted, literature/English departments will need to decide whether they truly are literature departments or exclusively print literature departments.