Wherefore Genre? Categorizing Contemporary New Media Writing

In contrast to the first decade of literary production in the electronic media, when most critical attention was focused on link and node hypertext fiction and its relationship to postmodern theory, in recent years the field of new media studies has embraced a wider definition of Nelsonian “hypertext” to include a variety of forms of literary expression that branch or perform on request. A field once dominated by Storyspace fiction now includes in its purview a wide variety of approaches to literary expression made for the computer and the network, including kinetic poetry, interactive fiction, combinatory writing, story and poetry generation, and network-mediated memoir. During the talk I will present examples of recent work in electronic literature submitted to the forthcoming Electronic Literature Collection [of which MITH is a co-sponsor] in the context of genre.