ABSTRACT
Our unflinching fascination with newness, with what Michael Joyce (2000) has called the allure of “nextness” characteristic of today’s upgrade culture, threatens to reduce any act of literary innovation to mere experimentalism. 1 Digital fiction is not only vulnerable to the same threat, but is, ironically, also susceptible to becoming culturally passé or technically obsolete before it can coalesce into recognizable forms or genres. But once we look beyond “nextness”, so to speak, it becomes clear that there is much to be gained from analyzing digital fiction. Most immediately, perhaps, are insights revealed through distinctly digital aesthetics. Newness often goes hand in hand with reflexivity, as novelty—either uncomfortably and self-consciously, or deliberately and audaciously—draws attention to itself. In this sense it still holds that any narrative written in digital environments is also always in some way a narrative about digital environments. Analyses of digital fictions, then, promise to yield a significant commentary and critique on the present cultural and media-historical moment. Outside of aesthetics, pedagogical justifications arise: Rettberg (2009), for one, argues that digital fiction marks a potential convergence of the “configurative desires and cognitive behaviors of Generation M” on the one hand, and the “contemplative and interpretive demands” of literary reading practices on the other. Referring to Hayles’s (2007) distinction between “hyper” and “deep” attention, which contrasts the growing exposure to and desire for dynamic participatory media with the sustained, concentrated attention associated with more traditional media such as novels in print, Rettberg writes, “I can think of no literary medium more suited to straddling the divide between hyper attention and deep attention than electronic literature” (16). 2
