Multiliteracies in ELA Classrooms

“A Girls’ Day Out” And Everyone’s invited:

E-Literature = Interactive or Directive?

There is an old aphorism declaring “Laws, like sausages, cease to inspire respect in proportion as we know how they are made.” This piece of conventional wisdom presents a useful foil around which to discuss Kerry Lawrynovicz’s interactive e-literature poem “Girls’ Day Out” (2004) – a prominent goal of which is precisely to foreground the process of production. I want to suggest that her poem as well as similar forms of e-literature attempt to undermine the stereotypical attributes of autonomy, individuality, and elitism accorded the literary text as a fetishized object and to the cult of the writer as an artistic genius through an emphasis on process/concept over product/author. To stretch the aphoristic analogy, then, we might say that modes of conceptual interactive e-literature like that displayed in “Girls’ Day Out” critique the institutional nature of literature as a practice: a motley assortment of unappetizing scraps of language are ground together, stuffed into a virtually transparent casing that ensures a recognizably intelligible form, and is then presented as a hypostasized product that effaces the unseemly labour of literary production.
Lawrynovicz’s poem, in contrast to conventional literature, accentuates self-referentiality, reflexivity (i.e., writing about writing), intertextuality, the procedural generation of language, and/or the strict adherence to a governing principle or controlling conceptual system. Yet perhaps the most controversial technique of her poem is the “repurposing or detournement” of “found language” wherein “previously written language comes to be seen and understood in a new light” (Dworkin xliv). Here, the initial prose poem describing the idyllic horseback adventure of two young girls is laid bare with the click of a mouse, literally exposing a buried narrative of serial murder with phrases appropriated from a newspaper article that chronicles the real-life events and deaths with which the shifting text engages. According to Kenneth Goldsmith, this literary practice of appropriation operates along the same lines as Marcel Duchamp’s notorious reframing of gallery space, a critique directed against the sacrosanct status of the art object and the rarefied notion of the process of artistic production. Thus, works like Lawrynovicz’s stress the aspects of recycling and selection inherent to literary production and to the significance that context plays in the conveyance of meaning: if you change the context of reception or audience, you change the meaning. Consequently, Goldsmith envisions the role of the conceptual writer as that of a cultural “arbiter”, a filter of “taste” (xix).

In my opinion, however, Lawrynovicz’s “Girls Day Out” provides a more nuanced and critical representation of conceptual writing in general and of the interactive e-literature writing movement in particular, in contrast to the laudatory advocacy of conceptual writing by Goldsmith and others. In many ways, Lawrynovicz’s text is a self-criticism of conceptual writing and interactive e-literature as institutionalized practices in and of themselves. In fact, I read her text as an interactive conceptual critique of interactive conceptual writing. That is to say, a critique deeply implicated in what it is criticizing; at once critical and perplexed, simultaneously ironic and sincere. For instance, the unsettling imagery of sheltered complicity riding unwittingly over the bodies of the murdered suggests on some level that such a protected and privileged existence is predicated on the exploitation and vulnerability of others. In addition, the interactive and suspenseful quality of the piece invites the reader to explore another variety of complicity: the gruesome unfolding of the narratives in the poem mirror a sensationalized account in the media where an audience’s interest is a contradictory mixture of revulsion, horror, and macabre fascination. Finally, just as a story in the media can take on a life of its own and obscure the original issue at stake, so too does the sheer intricacy of the formal design of Lawrynovicz’s poem deliberately begin to overshadow the murdered women and transform a dedication into an aesthetic, interactive, and conceptual experience. The blending of social critique, suspenseful narrative gimmicks, and “interactive” (or complicit) audience participation ambiguously conflates these often mutually exclusive practices and suggests we critically engage with the representational and aesthetic methods of e-literature and submit them to the same questions that we would political platforms, to the issues of class, gender, ethnicity, or agency, for instance.

Works Cited

Dworkin, Craig. “The Fate of Echo” in Against Expression: An Anthology of Conceptual    

Writing. Ed. Craig Dworkin and Kenneth Goldsmith. Evanston: Northwestern University Press,

2011. Print.

Goldsmith, Kenneth. “Why Conceptual Writing? Why Now?” in Against Expression: An

Anthology of Conceptual Writing. Ed. Craig Dworkin and Kenneth Goldsmith. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2011. Print.