A New Form of Literature

Katherine Hayles makes an argument directed towards the emergence of electronic media and materiality in her book  Writing Machines. According to Hayles, "Materiality thus emerges from interactions between physical properties and a work's artistic strategies...[it] depends on how the work mobilizes its resources as a physical artifact as well as on the user's interactions with the work and the interpretive strategies she develops" (33). This essentially means that there is a connection between the outside, physical world and the human intelligence that created the work in order to give it meaning.

Young-Hae Chang Heavy Industries is a group that thrives in Postmodern Mulitculturalism America. Each of their works is accessible online, and they remind me of the hypertextuality and materiality that Hayles discusses in Writing Machines. When someone visits their homepage, it is merely a list of hyperlinks that takes him/her to each of their works. This may perhaps be the only instance, and a superficial one at that, of hypertextuality related to Young-Hae. However, other concepts and ideas that Hayles outlines in her book apply as well. Considering her definition, I would consider some of the electronic poems or works that are listed to be technotexts. Hayles states that technotexts are "literary works that strengthen, foreground, and thematize the connections between themselves as material artifacts and the imaginative realm of verbal/semiotic signifiers they instantiate [and] open a window on the larger connections that unite literature as a verbal art to its material forms" (25). They, in other words, are material-based, yet these works also play on that particular idea, allowing it to emerge to the surface, whether directly or otherwise, thus creating an overall connection between literature (redefined) to its possible form of materiality. One of the works listed on Yooung-Hae's home page of hypertextual links seems to create this connection, allowing itself to explicitely become a technotext. Entitled Artist's Statement No. 45,730,944: The Perfect Artistic Web Site, the work does not allow the viewer to become engulfed in the story completely because it draws attention to the idea of a website, which is where the text is being viewed.

The computer screen and the software and html and/or css used to create the work (and entire site, in this case) gives the literature materiality, that connection to the physical world, just as ink, paper, and the binding of a book give such a text materiality as well. Yet, one question that Hayles lingers on and addresses in Writing Machines that is imperative, at least to today's every growing technological society, is whether or not reading a text from a computer screen constitutes it as literature, or rather, does literature always have to be presented in the form of a physical, tangible book? This was something I slightly wondered and struggled with a few years back. Hayles, I believe, makes a valid point in her reply: "So what if you read it on a computer? Isn't it far more important what  the language is like, the linking structure, the plot, the characters?...electronic literature operated in fundamentally different ways than print and required new critical frameworks to assess its reading and writing practices" (36-37). Considering this reply, the computer screen or other form of electronic, physical, or material medium does not matter. It does not have to be in the form of a printed book to be considered literature. A new form of literature has emerged, and this one necessitates the materiality and hypertextuality that Hayles discusses in Writing Machines.