The Fight Back Of The Contemporary Novel In The Age Of Digital Technology

Steven Hall’s Raw Shark Texts and Jonathan Safran Foer’s Tree of Codes as examples of two contemporary literary responses to the influence of new digital technologies.

 

The influence of new digital technologies on literary texts is transforming the relationship between reader and author. There is a growing mutation between the two as boundaries are blurred. More choice and decision making is being given to the reader and as a consequence the reader is taking on the role of detective. This is especially true if we approach texts such as Steven Hall’s The Raw Shark Texts (2007) and Jonathan Safran Foer’s Tree of Codes (2011) as sculptural objects. Through their physicality we interact with these texts in a similar manner to how we engage with an art installation. For example, each new reader of The Raw Shark Texts has the opportunity to add to the book’s conversation through the Red Cabinet Forums set up by the author and by also actively searching and potentially discovering missing sections scattered throughout the world. Tree of Codes hands responsibility to the reader. There are no set rules in how many layers to read at once, and consequently, each decision changes the meaning of the imagery.

Computer programmes and applications have appropriated the visuality and material traditionally related to books through their use of cut and paste, scrolls, paper clips and page turning. At the same time, contemporary writers like Mark Danielwski are imitating the complexities of electronic hypertexts through inventive typography as seen by his novel House of Leaves (2000). The London Artist Book scene in its many shapes of Zines, pamphlets and objects openly appropriate new digital technologies through their use of collage, montage and mash ups. They emulate a radical magpie spirit, transforming the condition of ‘bookness’ that can be found in the shelves of Independent Bookshops like Luminous Books and BookWorks, showcasing a medium at ease and in pace with the innovation of any electronic development. This all embracing, mutable medium is creating a scene that is leading the way in showing what the contemporary book is capable of.

In S/Z (1970) Roland Barthes makes the distinction between ‘readerly’ (lisible) and ‘writerly’ (scriptable) texts. Where a ‘readerly’ text is made to be read and consumed, the ‘writerly’ text ‘turns the reader into a producer.’[1] Barthes states the ambition of literary work is ‘to make the reader no longer a consumer but a producer of the text.’[2] This is also happening in reality TV shows such as Big Brother or Britain’s Got Talent or video games such as Grand Theft Auto or The Stanley Parables where we as the reader/viewer choose and determine the route of the narrative through the numbers we dial or the buttons we press. Barthes description of the reader ‘manhandling the text, interrupting it’[3] resonates with how the reader-viewer-consumer-player-gambler of 2014 engages and interacts with electronic texts (newspapers, blogs, facebook) through constant comments, re-tweeting and interventions.

In Jessica Pressman’s essay ‘The Aesthetic of Bookishness in Twenty-First-Century Literature’ she uses The Raw Shark Texts as an example of ‘why bookishness becomes a necessary aesthetic now’ and why this bookish aesthetic is different from bookish aesthetics of the past.[4] From the past we understand experimental literature[5] such as B.S Johnson’s The Unfortunates (1969) or Marc Saporta’s Composition No.1 (1961). Both these novels used unbound and unnumbered loose pages thereby creating an open ended ‘electronic’ approach for the reader to access the story. In Writing Space Jay Bolter describes how computer typography is all about the window and how the moving back and forth of the window is ‘like shuffling papers in a notebook.’[6] Writing in 1991 he describes a process familiar to how we read and navigate electronic texts, one that is similar to the way in which experimental literature like The Unfortunates is read, through the shared actions of stacking and vanishing screens of text.

The cyber theorist Katherine Hayles states in Writing Machines that due to the influence of new digital technologies, literary criticism can no longer ignore the material basis of literary production.[7] She explains the materiality of the artifact ‘must be central, for without it we have little hope of forging a robust and nuanced account of how literature is changing under the impact of information technologies.’[8]

This blog will use Steven Hall’s Raw Shark Texts and Jonathan Safran Foer’s Tree of Codes as examples of two contemporary literary responses to the influence of new digital technologies. It will show that by embracing and responding to new digital technologies they are helping to transform the contemporary codex book into a sculptural painterly object and thereby positioning contemporary literature at the forefront of emerging cultural forms and trends. The blog will use three sections headed: Physical Book, Storage Book and Fight Back Book as a means to compare the contrasting approaches the two writers adopt.

Physical Book

In Steven Hall’s The Raw Sharks Text and Jonathan Safran Foer’s Tree of Codes there is a physical interaction to the page, rewarding the reader’s creativity. In handling the approaching menace of the conceptual memory-eating Ludovician Shark, The Raw Shark Texts invites the reader to turn the novel into a flipbook. In contrast Tree of Codes is best read in an imaginative manner with the eye scanning and sweeping the text, linking words and phrases to make poetry whilst using your hands and body to twist and turn the pages and thereby digging out the sculpted narrative. The cut out paper windows frame the word imagery like blocks of Tetris and even the backs of the texts create physical shapes similar to the shapes of space invaders played on an old Atari. It can also be read like a Jewish Torah with pages going from right to left. In the same way computer pages have adopted ancient Egyptian and Greek modes of reading, such as scrolls and the papyrus, in their visual applications, so too have Hall and Safran Foer used a creative approach in re-assessing the capabilities of the printed page.  Both texts use the imagery of castaways to describe their heroes, of being submerged, of being ‘up to his armpits against the current.’[9] It is no coincidence. This is the language that the swell and terror of new digital technology creates in us, a fear of being swallowed up by the crashing electronic waves and infinite dark mass of technological data. The authors are re-thinking what the page can do, re-imagining its fragile quality as sandbags against the flood.

The concrete poetry of the Ludovician Shark in The Raw Shark Texts operates not merely as illustrations of a shark getting fatter through the memories he’s gobbled up but as visual elements equal to the text in narrating the story. [10] The section of blank pages towards the end of the book appear as the action escalates with the shark getting closer and as the book turns into a flip book it invites the reader to ‘ride along’. The action of flipping these pages is similar to the way we as readers shift through and manipulate the layers of frames that make up Tree of Codes. This sense of something ‘graphic, cinematic, visual and tangible’[11] elevates both books to the status of physical object, as mediums ‘through which action happens, a place wherein things live’. [12]

Both texts use ordinary materials to create something new and different. In The Raw Shark Texts The Orpheus is a shark catching boat made up of boxes, old computers, barrels, coat hangers, an office chair, stepladders and paper. It is an example of ordinary everyday materials used to create something special and unique. Like a brilliant car boot collage The Orpheus relates to the ordinary materiality of a book, simply made up of binding, paper and letters but through the power of imagination has the capability of transforming into something else.

As Dr.Trey Fidorous explains:

‘Its just stuff, just beautiful ordinary things. But the idea these things embody, the meaning we’ve assigned to them in putting them together like this, that’s what’s important.’[13]

Other examples of using ordinary materials to create a transformation can be seen in Eric drinking a glass of water made up of shreds of paper or writing a story in the air with a paintbrush. This use of ordinary everyday materials driven with the spirit of D.I.Y to tell a story can also be found in contemporary Artist Books and Zines. Texts like The Raw Shark Texts and Tree of Codes are similar to Artist Books as they are using a low-key everyday materiality as a direct physical response to the shiny, white, clean aesthetic of digital technologies (Apple products in particular). These books are inviting us to get our hands dirty, to manually turn and twist their form compared to the shallow touch and trace of digital surfaces. The materiality of new digital technologies, from the click of a mouse, to the thin peel of a protective ipad cover to the buzz of a mobile on silence, are making contemporary writers and readers self-conscious about the physical aesthetic of the book –form.

In Jessica Pressman’s analysis of the Ludovician as Information Age predator[14] she explains the shark ‘turns the flat page into an opaque reading surface’ thus creating a sense of depth in both the physical book and the story itself.[15]

‘These depths are hidden reserves that shelter the shark and remind us that there remain as –yet-unexplored spaces in the book-bound, print novel and the aesthetic of bookishness.’[16]

There is a physical depth to the Tree of Codes created by the author’s act of die –cut and there is also an emotional depth through the washes of fragmented imagery recalling not only the loss of a father but of a vanished world. Reading the text is a two-pronged attack on the senses as the reader’s eye is drawn to the deep cuts, to the phrases chiseled out and the words left behind.

‘memories
scatter        a face
the borders
the tortures
that ghost of a’[17]

The physical depth of the text allows imagery to be repeated layer after layer. For example, the phrase ‘I heard the window shake’ is open for the reader to absorb for sixteen consequent pages. [18] It also relates to the continual use of depth in The Raw Shark Texts through the looming presence of the Ludovician lurking underneath the surface. However, there is also Eric’s living room immersion, his dunking overboard Orpheus and the lake inside his head. There is also the requirement to immerse himself in books, old technology and literary information in order to survive. It as an effective metaphor as water destroys new digital technologies and also turns paper into pulp. Finally, a trip to the tattoo section at the Red Cabinet Forum, where readers post images of Raw Shark inspired text spiraling across their chests portraying a mark making that shows off a depth to the readers passion/obsession and another example of the imaginative capability of print as a sculptural object, the smiley engraved big toes an excellent example.

Ultimately The Raw Shark Texts and Tree of Codes are books about loss. In The Raw Shark Texts this is shown through Eric Sanderson’s loss of memory, the loss of his girlfriend Clio (and at one stage his relationship with Scout) and his own sense of being lost in life. In Tree of Codes the original text is lost by the erasure of the cut out and it also narrates the loss of a father. In The Raw Shark Texts Dr. Randle diagnoses Eric’s repeated memory loss as a dissociative disorder which ‘occur in response to severe psychological trauma, blocking out memories which are too painful or difficult for the mind to deal with.’[19] Tree of Codes honours the dead. By using Bruno Schulz’s The Street of Crocodiles which tells the story of a father’s descent into madness as his source for cut out, Safran Foer is creating a physical dissociative disorder, one that both hints at the testimony of Holocaust survivors and has specific resonance to Bruno Schulz’s story. Schulz was shot dead by a Gestapo Officer in 1942. His paintings, drawings and stories vanished with his death. This knowledge grants Tree of Codes a found object status. By cutting up a story from the past Safran Foer is elevating the discarded object (The Street of Crocodiles) and the memory of Bruno Schulz by creating from it a new work based on physicality, form and image.

Both texts listen to voices from the dead. Eric believes he communicates with his dead girlfriend via the telephone (historically an apparatus believed to communicate the dead with the living).[20] This concept of transmitting to another world is especially effective through the concept of negatives in The Raw Shark Texts as they offer an alternative parallel existence. Their reflection is similar to the layer of secondary commentary Twitter creates, a chatter running alongside big news and sport events. The negatives appear in different editions throughout the world and can be found under a section titled Undexes on The Red Cabinet Internet Forum.

‘For each chapter in The Raw Shark Texts there is, or will be, an un-chapter, a negative.’[21]

They help us to understand strange connections within the story, for example the sense of intuition and déjà vu of Clio and Scout, Eric and the other Erics, Ian and Gavin. An example of a found Negative is in the Canadian Edition. Labeled as pages -21 to -6 it appears as an extra page titled ‘Negative 1, The Aquarium Fragment; a limited edition lost document from The Raw Sharks Text by Steven Hall’. This playful use of text engineers hype and creates a cult following for the book as ‘players’ try to make sense or decode this parallel narrative. They are connecting the printed text to digital technologies and thus drawing ‘attention to the book as a multimedia format’.[22] It’s also exaggerating a sense of the book being rare, unique, ‘a limited lost edition’. Negative 11 was found in the Israeli edition, a single sheet of black paper suggesting Clio and Eric in conversation. Negative 13 has been rumoured to be the story of Mr. Nobody and was left under a bench in Glossop but since removed. It is mixing the connectivity of the Internet with the unique physical quality and creative potential of the book to cult effect. Operating as a source code into the past.

This method works because negatives are associated with old technology, a world of Muybridge image sequences, printouts and dusty slide projectors, a medium made redundant by the advent of digital photography. Negatives are physical. You cut them up like you would a roll of film, frame as slide sheets and present as slide shows. This discarded technology is now appropriated by computer design packages such as Photoshop and Final Cut Pro.

Tree of Codes also plays with the concept of a negative for within the shell of an object are two stories for the player to decode. Bruno Schultz’s negative, which has been erased and cut out, and Safran Foer’s positive, which are the remnants of the negative. Consequently both novels can be read as cybertexts.

‘The different ways in which the reader is invited to ‘complete’ a text – and the texts’ various self-manipulating devices are what the concept of cybertext is about.’[23]

Storage Book

Our ever increasing reliance on storage systems such as icloud as a means to record information in a virtual rather than physical form and the rise of our data being traded and stolen as commodities highlight what a crucial contemporary and cultural issue data storage is. Cyber theorists such as Espen Aarseth and Katherine Hayles both stress the role of databases as being the key creative function of new digital technologies. However, the database is an invisible force for although we use information systems every day we never see inside their internal structures. The concept of investigating the internal structures of an unknown controlling world is explored in Hollywood films such as The Matrix and Inception and is fertile ground for contemporary writers to explore by ‘subverting the dominance of databases and re-asserting the priority of narrative fictions.’[24] This act of subversion against database dominance is, Hayles argues, achieved by The Raw Shark Texts.

‘The Raw Shark Texts creates an imaginative world that performs the power of written words and reveals the dangers of database structures.’[25]

The labyrinth secret world of un-space with its ‘winding corridors’ and its ‘pockets of no-name-places’[26] serves as a successful metaphor for the internal structures of databases. However, it is the disembodied figure of Mycroft Ward who expertly captures their danger. His character serves as a critique on the power we have handed over in data form to mega corporations such as Apple and Google and also a reminder that through our use of databases we are giving up on ‘writing in ink and on paper’.[27] A 19th Century scientist who wants to live forever, Mycroft Ward, also represents our contemporary fear of replication by ‘growing bigger and bigger and bigger’[28] inserting himself into the brains of other humans as an information strand and thereby transforming into some kind of ‘disembodied data’.[29]

‘Mycroft Ward is a gigantic collective self, a self which generates years of thoughts, plans and memories every single day.’[30]

In contrast the Tree of Codes addresses the fear of replication through the solitary figure of the father and his spiral into madness. Like a cut-up Mr. Nobody the imagery of the father dissolves further and further throughout the story and so this figure of replication is slowly eradicated, leaving just a faint memory.

‘My father’s face, when he said that, dissolved into
forever                began to back        aw’[31]

Throughout the text of Tree of Codes there is the sense of words hiding underneath other words, of meanings changing through replication. As the First Eric Sanderson writes we are faced with ‘fragments which seem to be increasingly incomplete and confusing to me now.’[32] Both texts approach human memory in the digital information age as something of value but also of something changing, vanishing and slipping out of our comprehension.

‘My father would walk along   he always      ‘My father would walk along
featherless   There is no dead’[33]                        featherless  like a gardener’[34]

Tree of Codes through its cut up creates the sense of memory disintegrating. Its narrator is a voice Eric Sanderson would understand, one struggling to form coherent memories and recollections. Its as if the Ludovician Shark has taken the shape of Safran Foer, flipped out of The Raw Shark Texts and into Tree of Codes and bitten up the text, leaving us with the fragments and remains. Both books, through their shared traces of stolen memories strongly allude to Alzheimer’s disease, a disease instantly linked to the concept of storage.

‘The fear of memory loss that the shark represents is also about the fear of data loss from informational storage machines.’[35]

A consequence of our everyday use of new digital technologies is our reliance on their function as memory operators. Through our iphones, tablets and memory sticks we are switching off our memory capabilities to such an extent that we don’t remember home phone numbers. As Scout confesses ‘a part of me got stolen’[36] by Mycroft Ward as she accessed the Internet. As the 1st Eric Sanderson’s delicate handwritten text left inside a block of Braille deep inside un-space demonstrates:

‘Fifty per cent of memory is devoted not to what has already happened but to what will happen next…we remember what we did and also what we will do.’[37]

When Alzheimer’s disease attacks it often leaves memories of the past intact but bites out huge chunks of the present leaving the victim confused and distressed in the everyday. As Scout explains her half completed Mycroft Ward replication to Eric:

‘The it is deactivated, a mass of information packets, like virus code but it’s there inside my head and there’s no way of getting it out’.[38]

In the Author’s Afterword Jonathan Safran Foer states:

‘I wanted to create a die-cut book by erasure, a book whose meaning was exhumed from another book.’[39]

By using the action of die-cut, by cutting out and excavating words, Safran Foer has created a sculptural object made up through layers of text describing absence and loss. He refers to it as ‘like making a gravestone rubbing’ or ‘transcribing a dream’.[40] Intriguingly when Eric desired to be invisible, his choice of the ‘almost perfect mask’[41] was the data analyst Mark Richardson. That way when people looked at him they would ‘never see the real me at all.’[42] Through the guise of an unknown someone who analyses and manages data for a living Eric had ‘ghost-projected the last whispers of himself into the future’.[43]

This ‘playing in masks’[44] is also used in the Tree of Codes. That is until:

‘the disease    caught up with them
and spread in a dark rash. Their faces disappeared.’[45]

Computers are often referred to in everyday society with a scientific sexual language, of viruses, bugs and infections, of hacking into systems like a surgeon would a dirty bone. And it is replication, and the capabilities new digital technologies have for infinite replication that most threaten the book form. When Eric Sanderson reads that ‘the lake in my head has become the lake in your head’[46] it is to be taken not as a game or a magical connection but something terrifying and dangerous. For if all our thoughts and memories are endlessly inter-connected and replicated creating a ‘splashdown’[47] of sameness we lose our individuality and difference, drowning our human dreams into rubbish heaps.

‘My father                    became
human dreams; rubbish
heaps                                                               .’[48]

Fight Back Book

In The Raw Shark Texts Eric uses old technology to protect himself from the Ludovician in the shape of Dictaphones, light boxes and typewriters. Radios, old servers and hard drives are all referenced as objects of safety. The medium of sound operated through four Dictaphones is an especially useful tool of protection. By surrounding and clarifying the person through sound they form ‘a stream circle, a flow of pure and singular association moving around the Dictaphones in order.’[49] This is the language of the Internet, of Burroughs and Castells, the electronic flows of static. Tree of Codes in contrast has a visual silence, a sparseness of the text interfered only by the rustle of the textured page.  It creates a sense that Steven Hall is warning us of the acceleration of new digital technologies, to be wary of their speed and potential, to return to something trusted and known. In fact Eric is told by the previous Eric Sanderson (who communicates only via letters) to avoid the Internet at all costs.

‘Remember that there is no safe procedure for electronic information.’[50]

There is an aesthetic to old technologies that is missing in new technologies that the author is referring to. It is the physicality, the sense of what you see is what you get, of an object with a past and purpose compared to the invisibility, transience and unknown quality that make up new digital technologies. And it is for this reason that he uses the book and its material make up to conquer the Ludovician and thus save Eric from the perils of disembodied, digital information.
In letter 4 the first Eric Sanderson recommends using other people’s post as an act of camouflage, a way of ‘muddying the conceptual flows of the world’.[51] It’s an interesting suggestion as it also plays upon the role of post and letters in contemporary society as outdated, using old public sector practices in times of privatization, relying on ‘snail mail’ compared to instant messaging and emails. It is no coincidence that Negative 6 was discovered in the UK Special Edition. Printed on a sheet of dated brown paper it discuses the stealing of post as protection against the memory eating shark. In un-space the entrance is found through the back of a bookstore and Dr.Trey Fidorus’ hideout is made out of books. Library books operate as shields not only because of their knowledge and complexity (for example An Encyclopedia of Unusual Fish) but also through their physicality and link to previous generations of readers. The recent images of U.C.L students demonstrating with paper shields designed as books as a source of protection against riot police determined to kettle is an interesting link. Paper in The Raw Shark Texts is portrayed as something with magical qualities to honour and preserve, to archive, for example, Eric’s ability to drink a glass of paper.

Tree of Codes can also be read as a form of poetry responding to the flickering imagery of the digital screen. There is oddness to the words, a poetic cack-handedness creating a sense of something not quite right, of something being left unsaid. For example:

‘Already for some time our town had been sinking

My eyes followed                                        the tortures’

that ghost of a
smile       .                             the breath
, so difficult to distinguish one from the other.’[52]

Other strange imagery thrown up is a ‘mother swollen with darkness’[53] or a ‘storm of sobs’.[54] Full stops and commas appear randomly. There are one –off sentences, creating shock in their clarity and then immediately vanishing.

‘My father was wilting before our eyes.’[55]

Or deep cut sections, which leave phrases intact for long sequences of the novel. For example, ‘the birds began to fall.’[56]

The text is asking us to interact with it, to read it as multiple pathways, with each turn and scan giving the same sentence a new meaning often in the same frame. For example,

‘His father kept a beautiful map of our city in his desk’ or ‘His father kept in his desk a lack of colour.’[57]

In The Raw Shark Texts Dr.Trey Fidorous states:

‘I construct language viruses so I might better understand real, naturally occurring ones.’[58]

Sweeping through the inter changeable poetry of the Tree of Codes with its continuous subtraction, addition, division and multiplication of words it is possible for the reader to imagine a sense of Dr. Fidorous’ language virus, as if the Streets of Crocodiles has become infected and therefore to survive bits must be hacked out. William Burroughs a leading user of the cut up technique who approached words as a substance to be sculpted and manhandled, cut up and re used also referred to word as a virus, as ‘an organism with no internal function other than to replicate itself.’[59] This idea of language as an unknown virus quality, repeating and out of control is useful to understanding the impact of new digital technologies on the literary text. It explains why writers such as Steven Hall and Safran Foer use old materials as a way of understanding new ones. As Lev Manovich states:

‘Many new media objects are converted from various forms of old media.’[60]

Their texts can also be read as excellent examples of Digimodernism especially the delicate framing of words in Tree of Codes off shot by the emptiness of gutter space created by the frames.

‘You follow, each time, a slightly different line, and the various strands lie virtually side by side as ghostly or actual lines taken.’[61]

Like a videogame it is multilinear. Like painting it is made up through layers.

‘Words are things, a raw substance that can be manipulated and shaped into an artwork just as paint is used by a painter.’[62]

In The Raw Shark Texts the raw substance of words operate on two levels, fiction and information. The Ludovician uses both as it has evolved from streams of information and it uses the scent of words to sniff out Eric.

‘It is a conceptual and literary manifestation of the ways in which data mutate across spaces, platforms and interfaces.’[63]

The previous Eric Sanderson advises Eric to build a small wall of books around himself and to use books of fiction and fact as ‘a labyrinth of glass and mirrors’[64] to shake off the Ludovician. However, writing in the guise of fiction is ‘used to disguise Eric’s trail and protect him’.[65] Material objects associated with writing such as letters, library books, Scout’s letter bomb and Eric’s notebooks are used as form of protection although with a double edge. It as if Steven Hall acknowledges that new digital technologies have as much to fear from books as books do from new digital technologies.

Conclusion

Both The Raw Shark Texts and Tree of Codes are examples of recent novels that re-invigorate the status of the book. Their approach is experimental and playful. By pushing the physical boundaries of the book they are redefining the potential of what can be achieved through the novel format.

Meanwhile Steven Hall’s highly anticipated second novel The End Of Endings  addresses the death of print and linear narrative. Chris Ware’s Building Stories (2012), Richard House’s The Kills (2013) and Leanne Shrapton’s Swimming Studies (2012) offer further examples of writers using the influence of new digital technologies to transform the book into sculptural-installation like objects. Nor is it just writers responding to this field. Duncan Jones’s Moon (2009) uses film to address concerns between new and old technologies. The Stanley Parables is a cult video game opening up new dialogues of choice and narration. Yet it is the freedom that exists in Artist Books that best explains a medium capable of energizing itself through the radical appropriation of other forms. Take an Artist Book off the shelves of Donlan Books in Broadway Market and you will be struck by the variety of influences, everything from painting, sculpture, Photoshop, printmaking to collage, video, textile and social media.

The physicality of the book is a fight back. Creating a physical object, a painterly sculptural form that is handled, touched and prodded, with ink and print slapped across the pages, of making something that doesn’t quite belong in this digital world of data and clouds and invisibility. It’s a brave act. One achieved not by rejecting new digital technologies but rather by doing the opposite. Artists such as Hall and Safran Foer fashion new technology to their own ends. They use it, take it, manipulate it and ultimately they recreate it. In doing so they create new forms of readership.

Bibliography

Espen J. Aarseth, Cybertext (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997)
Roland Barthes, S/Z (London: Jonathan Cape, 1975)
Jay Bolter, Writing Space (New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1991)
Ian Chang, Dramatizing The Effects of the Virtual Life, Frieze (London: No.160, January-February 2014)

Johanna Drucker, The Century of Artists’ Books (New York: Granary Books, 2007)
Jonathan Safran Foer, Tree of Codes (London: Visual Editions, 2010)
Steven Hall, The Raw Sharks Texts (Edinburgh: Canongate Books, 2007)
N. Katherine Hayles, Writing Machines (Cambridge, MA: MIT, 2002),
N. Katherine Hayles, Material Entanglements: Steven Hall’s The Raw Shark Texts as Slipstream Novel (Science Fiction Studies 113, Vol.38, March 2011)
N. Katherine Hayles, How We Became Posthuman, (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1999)
Alan Kirby, Digimodernism (New York: Continuum, 2009)
George p. Landow, Hypertext 2.0 (Baltimore: The John Hopkins University Press, 1997)
Lev Manovich, The Language of New Media (Cambridge, MA: MIT, 2001)
Janet H. Murray, Hamlet on the Holodeck ((Cambridge, MA: MIT, 1997)
Jessica Pressman, The Aesthetic of Bookishness in Twenty-First-Century Literature (Michigan Quarterly Review: Vol.48, No.4, 2009)
Daniel Punday, Word Dust: William Burrough’s Multimedia Aesthetic (Mosaic: University of Manitoba, Winnipeg: September 2007)
Eds.Raman Selden, Peter Widdowson, Peter Brooker, A Reader’s Guide to Contemporary Literary Theory (Harlow: Pearson Education Limited, 2005)

[1] Eds.Raman Selden, Peter Widdowson, Peter Brooker, A Reader’s Guide to Contemporary Literary Theory (Harlow: Pearson Education Limited, 2005), p.151
[2] Roland Barthes, S/Z (London: Jonathan Cape, 1975), p.4
[3] Ibid., p.15
[4] Jessica Pressman, The Aesthetic of Bookishness in Twenty-First-Century Literature (Michigan Quarterly Review: Vol.48, No.4, 2009), p.7
[5] The Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms (2008) definition of experimental literature is of works that have a ‘commitment to exploring new concepts and representations of the world through methods that go beyond the established conventions of literary tradition.
[6] Jay Bolter, Writing Space (New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1991), p.69
[7] N. Katherine Hayles, Writing Machines (Cambridge, MA: MIT, 2002), p.19
[8] Ibid., p.19

[9] Jonathan Safran Foer, Tree of Codes (London: Visual Editions, 2010), p.70
[10] Steven Hall, in his Granta Podcast (Ep.75), explains how he made the visual elements of the novel via Word rather than through design packages such as Photoshop as he wanted to avoid the sense of the text being illustrated. http://www.granta.com/New-Writing/Steven-Hall-The-Granta-Podcast-Ep.-75
[11] Jessica Pressman, The Aesthetic of Bookishness in Twenty-First-Century Literature (Michigan Quarterly Review, Vol.48, No.4, 2009), p.4
[12] Ibid., p.4
[13] Steven Hall, The Raw Shark Texts, (Edinburgh: Cannongate, 2007), p.302
[14]Jessica Pressman, The Aesthetic of Bookishness in Twenty-First-Century Literature (Michigan Quarterly Review, Vol.48, No.4, 2009), p.4
[15] Ibid., p.4
[16] Ibid., p.3

[17]Jonathan Safran Foer, Tree of Codes, (London: Visual Editions, 2011), p.17
[18] Ibid., pp.13-29

[19] Steven Hall, The Raw Shark Texts, (Edinburgh: Cannongate, 2007), p.12
[20] Steven Connor, Wires, a transcript from a talk on BBC Radio 4, January 16th 2000 as part of the Rough Magic Series. www.stevenconnor.com/magic/wires.htm
[21] Steven Hall, The Raw Shark Texts: http://forums.steven-hall.org
[22] Jessica Pressman, The Aesthetic of Bookishness in Twenty-First-Century Literature (Michigan Quarterly Review, Vol.48, No.4, 2009), p.1
[23] Espen J. Aarseth, Cybertext, (Baltimore: The John Hopkins University Press, 1997), p.20
[24] N. Katherine Hayles, Material Entanglements: Steven Hall’s The Raw Shark Texts as Slipstream Novel (Science Fiction Studies 113, Vol.38, March 2011), p.1
[25] Ibid., p.1
[26] Steven Hall, The Raw Shark Texts, (Edinburgh: Cannongate, 2007), p.80
[27] Jessica Pressman, The Aesthetic of Bookishness in Twenty-First-Century Literature (Michigan Quarterly Review, Vol.48, No.4, 2009), p.5
[28] Steven Hall, The Raw Shark Texts, (Edinburgh: Cannongate, 2007), p.206
[29] Jessica Pressman, The Aesthetic of Bookishness in Twenty-First-Century Literature (Michigan Quarterly Review, Vol.48, No.4, 2009), p.6
[30] Steven Hall, The Raw Shark Texts, (Edinburgh: Cannongate, 2007), p.248
[31] Jonathan Safran Foer, Tree of Codes, (London: Visual Editions, 2011), p.61
[32] Steven Hall, The Raw Shark Texts, (Edinburgh: Cannongate, 2007), P.63
[33] Jonathan Safran Foer, Tree of Codes, (London: Visual Editions, 2011), p.36
[34] Ibid., p.37
[35]Jessica Pressman, The Aesthetic of Bookishness in Twenty-First-Century Literature (Michigan Quarterly Review, Vol.48, No.4, 2009), p.4
[36] Steven Hall, The Raw Shark Texts (Edinburgh: Cannongate, 2007), p.199
[37] Ibid., p.262
[38] Ibid., p.199
[39] Jonathan Safran Foer, Tree of Codes (London: Visual Editions, 2011), p.138
[40] Ibid., p.138
[41] Steven Hall, The Raw Shark Texts (Edinburgh: Cannongate, 2007), p.87
[42] Ibid., p.86
[43] Steven Hall, The Raw Shark Texts (Edinburgh: Cannongate, 2007), p.87
[44] Jonathan Safran Foer, Tree of Codes (London: Visual Editions, 2011), p.113
[45] Ibid., p.113
[46] Steven Hall, The Raw Shark Texts (Edinburgh: Cannongate, 2007), p.55
[47] Ibid., p.59
[48] Jonathan Safran Foer, Tree of Codes (London: Visual Editions, 2011), p.59
[49] Steven Hall, The Raw Shark Texts (Edinburgh: Cannongate, 2007), p.66
[50] Ibid., p.81
[51] Ibid., p.68
[52] Jonathan Safran Foer, Tree of Codes (London: Visual Editions, 2011), p.20
[53] Ibid., p.29
[54] Ibid., p.22
[55] Ibid., p.30
[56] Jonathan Safran Foer, Tree of Codes (London: Visual Editions, 2011), pp.115 -120
[57] Ibid., p.87
[58] Steven Hall, The Raw Shark Texts, (Edinburgh: Cannongate, 2007), p.246
[59] Daniel Punday, Word Dust: William Burrough’s Multimedia Aesthetic (Mosaic: University of Manitoba, Winnipeg: September 2007), p.38
[60] Lev Manovich, The Language of New Media (Cambridge, MA: MIT, 2001), p.28
[61] Alan Kirby, Digimodernism (New York: Continuum, 2009), p.63
[62] Daniel Punday, Word Dust: William Burrough’s Multimedia Aesthetic (Mosaic: University of Manitoba, Winnipeg: September 2007), p.40
[63] Jessica Pressman, The Aesthetic of Bookishness in Twenty-First-Century Literature (Michigan Quarterly Review, Vol.48, No.4, 2009), p.4
[64] Steven Hall, The Raw Shark Texts (Edinburgh: Cannongate, 2007), p.68
[65] N. Katherine Hayles, Material Entanglements: Steven Hall’s The Raw Shark Texts as Slipstream Novel (Science Fiction Studies 113, Vol.38, March 2011), p.8