Aspects of Literariness in New Media Writing
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.18485/bells.2025.17.9Keywords:
electronic literature, New Media Writing Prize, literariness, defamiliarization, self-referentiality, dialogismAbstract
Electronic literature has been established as a new, technologically enabled way of writing, through anthologies and awards such as the New Media Writing Prize. This paper analyses the four latest NMWP winners – Florence Walker’s I Dreamt of Something Lost, Everest Pipkin’s Anonymous Animal, Joannes Truyens’s Neurocracy, and Dan Hett’s c ya laterrrr – focusing on their literary qualities. Defamiliarization, self-referentiality, and dialogism are taken as the most prominent aspects of literariness, and the analysis aims to describe whether they are mediated electronically (through digital technologies) or literarily (through imagery and language). As the analysis shows, literariness persists as a defining feature of electronically produced works and can be used as a criterion for estimating their value and establishing linearity in electronic literary production.
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