Absolutely the most crucial heritage of the digital age. As everything gets digitized, textual representations become just an arbitrary interpretations of the software used at one particular moment

I would say rather that narrative is being re-invented. People are story-telling creatures, and as mentioned in this course they are made to interpret the chronological lapse of sequences as causal, which means adding a story-telling quality to them. In the world of hypertext, the one who does the ergon, or work of pursuing the links, writes their own individual narrative, but the point is that it is always an in-the-moment, unrepeatable experience, therefore extremely procedural

Although the statement seems to be too strong, I tend to agree with Landow, in the sense that with the advent of technology our culturalk practices have changed their focus from timeless meaning making to in-the-moment processes

The role of hypertext here is nicely defined and summarized. As mentioned earlier in the text, there have been tendencies of wide range of the authors even in traditional literature to get the reader more involved and more responsible for the final form of the literary work. Even with Barthes the notion of the author becomes fluid and moves in the background of the meaning production process. Still, only with the advent of the digital technology was it really possible to bring this process really to life. One of the crucial questions, according to my opinion, the hypertexts brings forward, is the question of the author, or the disappearance of one, and the ergodic investment of the reader in creating literary experiences out of the hyperlinked, seemingly unconnected fragments. So, who is the real author here?

This is the dimension of the electronic literature that was not present in the traditional notion of literature. I am interested to see how this discussion will develop further, but clearly the point is that, like with many other art forms, electronic literature democratizes the process of creation allowing people with different set of skills to express themselves as literary authors by applying those very skills which do not necessarily need to be related to the language and lexical mastery, as it traditionally used to be the case

This is the point I also underlined earlier in this course when analyzing the Love letters generator itself. Even though the output itself is not impressive, what makes Strachey's project so noteworthy is the questions he is raising with it, the tools he is using to raise them and the innovation of the creation process. In that this piece of art is very close to the conceptual art paradigms

One of the most crucial questions when trying to define the body of the electronic literature. Electronic literature does not take all the elements of the traditional understanding of literature with it, and also it introduces some completely new attributes so where then is the limit and how we know what we can call a digital literature work?

I appreciate how Noah Wardrip revisits the term literature, as this term has been with us for such a long time that the theory has started taking it for granted. Especially in the context of digital culture the boundaries of this need to be challenged and inspected, and I believe that here the very essence of the literary, which is able to survive in the digital context, is encapsulated,

Very useful tool to underline the essence of the e-literary artifact and its forms of expression

I like the fact that this definition comes at the very end because it finally tackles electronic literature for what it is - work of art. It is also interesting that it opens to door to giving credit to artists who do not necessarily need to be good 'traditional' writers to be good electronic literature artists. In that electronic literature is significantly different from the traditional literature as the art of word and storytelling.

The point Ms. Rettbers is trying to make is that there is no common agreement regarding what electronic literature stands for. Other terms are equally used to describe the same practice, as defined by ELO, whereas the term electronic literature itself gets used to denote other practices (e.g. digitized print books). The danger also sits in almost arbitrary usage of genres/terminologies which all fall under the core electronic literature practice (hyper text fiction, digital poetry). This also means that numerous works of e-lit art are in danger of not being recognized as such due to the fact they do not get picked up in the 'tagging' process and might fall between the cracks

Interesting to differentiate electronic literature as a literary from the meta language of the electronic literature as an academic field

It seems like this definition is more focused to the experience of the electronic literature, whereas the previous one was more based around the production. I like the notion that the experience is tightly connected to a literary device. In this regards important are the notions of literariness and the literary art. As even in e/lit there can be something which is a literary work and a literary work of art. It would be interesting to see if the differentiation between the two gets the same kind of notoriety as in 'traditional' literature

In general I think it would be good to define a bit more precisely what is understood here under the term 'computer' in order to avoid confusion. I think a computing device would be more appropriate as it would allow more comprehensive elaboration.