摘要：In her online essay "Electronic Literature: What is it?" N. Katherine Hayles, long-time advocate and interpreter of elit, mentions her colleagues’ frequent requests for recommendations for "the good stuff". The Electronic Literature Collection Volume 1 (ELC) that she co-edited with Nick Montfort, Scott Rettberg, and Stephanie Strickland presents a partial answer to that request, though the project was already underway when she joined the team. Rettberg, co-founder of the Electronic Literature Organization (ELO), was already developing the ELC with fellow ELO board members Montfort and Strickland. In addition to its release through the ELO website (http://www.eliterature.org/) and ELO-sponsored events, the ELC is also bundled with Hayles’ new book Electronic Literature: New Horizons for the Literary (Hayles 2008). Certainly her exegeses of the collection, presented in her texts and talks, will serve to raise the profile of this digital anthology. As in any artistic field, critical attention is the key to the long term circulation of these works in that winding path from journal article to syllabus and back. The collection thus begins its life with an influential retinue, as Hayles and ELO critics work in tandem with the work to promote an understanding of the forms of electronic literature as it has redefined itself since the days of literary hypertext in the late 1980s.
关键词：When the ELO decided to put the collection together, their organizing keyword was "variety". To interact with the sixty pieces is to experience their success in developing an enticing anthology particularly for course syllabi in electronic literature. The collection includes poetry, drama, and fiction rendered with sound, animation, and of course, that golden trait, "interactivity". The pieces use Shockwave, Flash, JavaScript, interactive programming languages (TADS and Inform) and HTML. The works are hyperlinked texts, animated poems, games, films, and new genres that have yet to be contained in any tidy taxonomy. The question "What is electronic literature?" quickly gives way to "What isn’t?" as these editors produce not so much a genre as a network of pieces whose greatest common factor is their delivery media, the CD-ROM or the Internet. However, while the collection includes a powerful cadre of those multi-talented dilettante artist-programmer-coders working alone or in collaboration, the variety of the works does not derive from a variety of producers, especially with respect to social economic status and racial characteristics. Perhaps the ELO’s efforts to freely disseminate the collection will provide a means of inspiring a wider variety of potential artists for the next volume.
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