Towards Minor Literary Forms: Digital Literature and the Art of Failure
This essay was presented as the keynote talk at the 2014 Electronic Literature Organization conference in Milwaukee, WI. In this keynote, Illya Szilak highlights the power of “minor forms” in digital literature. Through a wide-ranging survey of works, Szilak identifies the tendency for “failure” in electronic literature as its most powerful feature: its capacity to deterritorialize the parameters of discourse and expand the potential of subjectivity in the process.
As a poet friend of mine pointed out: literature, in so far as it is relates to the digits, the fingers, the act of writing, has always been digital. Moreover, all writing, conventional or electronic, begins with digitalizing analog experience. To ask what digital literature is then is to ask how this process changes when the means by which we read and write change. If we can answer that, we can understand how digital literature differs from and is similar to conventional literature, and, why, hopefully, it is doomed to failure.