Escaping the Prison House of Language: New Media Essays in the Electronic Literature Collection, Volume 2
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.