ABSTRACT
"The Romantic Sublime was an attempt to revise the meaning of transcendence precisely when the traditional apparatus of sublimation– spiritual, ontological, and psychological and even perceptional–was failing to be exercised or understood". The traditional continuity between the authority of antiquity and the prophetic gestures of current authors is fundamentally "disturbed" in the era of technological innovation, as the contemporary critic Davin Heckman says in reference to his own archival work on the Electronic Literature Directory. Electronic literature is contemporary, more so than past literatures, in part because it is 'new' media. The continuing transformation of the lived environment by, but also within, current media of inscription, certainly helps to upend the vertical progression of past knowledge regimes. Presumably one found in sites various texts, digital photographs, sound recordings, and other electronically stored objects created by or for the deceased while they were living.
