Grand Text Auto

Prepress version of article originally published in Norwegian in Vagant 4/2010 as “Flukten fra språkfengselet”

The first Electronic Literature Collection was published in 2006. Including 60 works of electronic literature of diverse form and content, all published under one cover online and on a CD-ROM, the collection offered readers and educators a valuable resource, a set of works distributed freely under a Creative Commons license. The ELC provided teachers with a place where they could send students interested in exploring e-lit, and critics with a set of archived works around which they could gather their discourse – a set of common touchstones that served to help develop and refine a shared critical language about the emergent forms of literary practice.

The Electronic Literature Collection Volume 2 is now out! Congratulations to editors Talan Memmott, Brian Kim Stefans, Rita Raley, and Brian Kim Stefans on bringing this project to fruition. The collection includes 63 works in 6 languages from 12 countries, and includes a wide variety of work, ranging from the classic web hypertext The Unknown, to the amazing narrative database / textual performance work The Last Performance, the minimalist poetry generator stylings of Nick Montfort’s PPG256, to Alan Bigelow’s philsophocomical “comic strips for the Web” Brainstrips, to Allison Cliffords visually stunning interactive treatment of the poetry of ee cummings The Sweet Old Etc.