If a literary interface exists, then what identifies it as distinct from other sites? To what extent does it serve a function in the workings of literature understood as the staging and presentation of literary activity within a networked environment? The answer to these questions requires several theoretical frameworks that describe the performative staging of literary work within a scene of production and reception that is continuous from analogue to networked environments All of these participate in a ‘medial ideology’ that tends to efface the circumstances of enunciation in order to produce an experience of immediacy and apparency. I will elaborate on these issues with a particular emphasis on the contrast between works that are self-identified as literary and those that are either emphatically outside that tradition and domain or blur its boundaries.
This paper sprang initially from a fascination with the interface of early ‘e-literature’ created in a…