Step into a realm where love letters are crafted by computers, where an online poem stretches across two hundred trillion stanzas, and where a mysterious novel takes the form of a wiki. Immerse yourself in the captivating tale of Inanimate Alice, unfolded through videos and instant messages. Witness an ocean buoy remixing Moby Dick and tweeting its renditions. Welcome to the peculiar world of electronic literature, a digital domain where poetic, narrative, and aesthetic works are consumed on computers, tablets, and phones. Experimental, evocative, and occasionally perplexing, electronic literature dares to challenge our fundamental assumptions about reading, writing, authorship, and meaning.

However, e-lit, as it is commonly known, has also exerted a profound influence on mainstream culture. Literature, film, comics, apps, and video games have all gleaned valuable insights from electronic literature. This course aims to trace the emergence of electronic literature, exploring both historical and contemporary works of e-lit. We will embark on a journey that starts with e-lit’s origins in avant-garde art and Cold War technology, and follows its evolution from the advent of personal computers to the age of the Internet and smartphones. Along the way, we will pay particular attention to the expressive potential of new media, how digital platforms enable and shape diverse forms of creative and cultural expression.