Written by Robert Kendall for Poets and Writers Magazine in late 1995, this article provides writers with a description of the "new electronic literature," some background, and some specific examples of what different authors were doing with what Kendall calls a new "genre," as well as how publishers were responding to the new experiments. (There's a 1998 Kendall piece called The World Wide Web: Publishing's Awakening Giant from Poets and Writers that provides an up-to-date look at electronic publishing..) It’s a good introduction for poets and fiction writers because it describes some of the experimentation going on with literary forms as multimedia expanded possibilities for artistic expression.
Even though a lot has developed in creative hypertext in the last three years, this article is still a good introduction, especially for skeptics and resistant readers. But I disagree with Kendall that hypertext is a genre; rather, I think it’s a new medium. I also want to remind folks that hypertext literature is a very small segment of hypertext writing that is going on today. EJC (reviewed 9/15/1998)
From the ERIC database
Electronic Literacies in the Workplace: Technologies of Writing. Advances in
Computers and Composition Studies Series.
Sullivan, Patricia, Ed.; Dautermann, Jennie, Ed. 1996. ERIC Document Reproduction Service
No ED398586.
Abstract: Contending that technology, especially when it networks writers to other
writers, is more than a mere scribal tool,
this book presents 14 essays designed to ignite interest in technology as one of the
material conditions of workplace writing
contexts. After an introduction ("Issues of Written Literacy and Electronic Literacy
in Workplace Settings" by Jennie
Dautermann and Patricia Sullivan), essays in the book are (1) "Writing with
Electronic Tools in Midwestern Businesses" (Jennie
Dautermann); (2) "Specialized Language as a Barrier to Automated Information
Technologies" (Susan B. Jones); (3)
"Electronic Mail in Two Corporate Workplaces" (Brenda R. Sims); (4)
"Writing Technologies at White Sands" (Powell G.
Henderson); (5) "Writing and Database Technology: Extending the Definition of Writing
in the Workplace" (Barbara Mirel); (6)
"After Automation: Hypertext and Corporate Structures" (Johndan Johnson-Eilola
and Stuart A. Selber); (7) "Automating the
Writing Process: Two Case Studies" (Douglas R. Wieringa and others); (8) "Online
Editing, Mark-Up Models, and the
Workplace Lives of Editors and Writers" (David K. Farkas and Steven E. Poltrock); (9)
"Who 'Owns' Electronic Texts?"
(Tharon W. Howard); (10) "Networking Technology in the Classroom: Whose Interests Are
We Serving?" (Craig J. Hansen);
(11) "Gaining Electronic Literacy: Workplace Simulations in the Classroom"
(Nancy Allen); (12) "Tales from the Crossing:
Professional Communication Internships in the Electronic Workplace" (Robert R.
Johnson); (13) "Theorizing E-mail for the
Practice, Instruction, and Study of Literacy" (Cynthia L. Selfe); and (14)
"Working across Methodological Interfaces: The
Study of Computers and Writing in the Workplace" (James E. Porter and Patricia
Sullivan). (RS)