The essay aims to explore the issues of embodiment in several e-literary works. Today, we are facing more complex and sophisticated hybrids between human and machine than ever. Such novel bodies, shaped by new technologies and software-supported, are explored also by several e-literary works that creatively apply new media specificities. The line coming from Shelley Jackson’s hyperfiction and textual body art to Serge Bouchardon’s recent researches of interface, can give us an interesting insight into the issues of embodiment in the digital world. By employing several concepts from phenomenology (especially those by Merleau-Ponty) we can shed light on less exposed aspects of the issues discussed.

Over the last decade or two we are witnessing the increasing interest in the issues of body and embodiment which has resulted in recognition of these topics as key issues for the understanding of many phenomena of contemporary society, culture, and art. Issues of the body have been already addressed at the beginning of the 20th century in philosophy by German and later by French phenomenologists (e.g. Max Scheler, Edmund Husserl, Gabriel Marcel, Maurice Merleau-Ponty) that called into question the key position represented in the extreme by Cartesianism dominating for the last three centuries. According to Cartesianism, the body was understood as objectified and mechanical, as being wholly separate from the mind and consequently as an inferior and less interesting part of the human being. In contrast to Cartesian aversion to issues of the body, the above-mentioned phenomenologists addressed the body as lived entity, emphasizing its motility and extremely changeable, protean nature (for instance, Husserl’s notion of body as flesh (Ger. Leib), in contrast to the notion of the objectified body (Ger. Körper)). Through ceaseless interaction with the environment, the phenomenological lived body has become an active and original tool for perceiving, learning, and living in the world, conceived even as the body-subject (term coined by early Merleau-Ponty, around 1945). Phenomenology was the first philosophical movement that has developed a consistent criticism of the Cartesian model of the body-as-object and has offered alternative models for thinking the body.

Rather than theoretical approaches, foregrounded in phenomenology, we are witnessing today socially oriented researches of the body. These researches are profoundly interdisciplinary and are embedded in British and American cultural studies, post-structuralism, social and critical theory, feminism and queer theory, etc., but less in phenomenology (however, if we do not legitimately seek for the phenomenological basis in some of these theoretical movements). In sociology, for instance, the increasing interest in issues of the body and embodiment has been recognized since 1984 when Bryan Turner’s agenda-setting work The Body and Society: Explorations in Social Theory was published in its first edition, renewing the attention to the body. An exponential growth of publications, body-oriented journals and undergraduate courses have fixed the theoretical focus of a novel discipline, the sociology of the body. The body is also a concern for a wide range of disciplines, including the sociology of health and illness, of the emotions, of sport, as well as social studies of science and technology. The turn to the body in social theory has been addressed by Bryan Turner as the rise of a “somatic society,” by which he means “a society within which our major political and moral problems are expressed through the conduit of the human body” (Fraser and Greco 2).

Post-colonial, postmodern and post-structuralist criticism have challenged the assumption that the body is one and unique, given for all time. According to recent theoretical contributions in today’s humanities, we can talk only about different bodies. The plural grammatical form is the only appropriate one here, since different forms and modes of corporeality and embodiment originate from the belief they are determined by society, race, gender, culture, etc. Furthermore, the body has become a significant agent in biopolitical theories that have focused on the notions of life and living (e.g. Giorgio Agamben, Antonio Negri), and even more, in contemporary theory and culture we are witnessing the turn from the paradigm of mind, language, text, and culture, to the paradigm of body, materiality, bare life, and biopolitics (additionally Donna Haraway, Eugene Thacker, Antonio Negri, Brian Massumi, etc.). 

From Disembodiment to Embodiment in Digital Worlds

The issues of body and materiality have been recently addressed anew in the digital culture as well. If we turn to the cyber-culture of the 1980s and the 1990s, it seems as it was focused only on issues of the mind and artificial life, supported by computer networks, and thus remained completely in the domain of “cyber” mind, meaning that the issue of embodiment was left behind. The ideal in cyberpunk texts was to leave the meat behind and become pure consciousness, which is not restrained by the boundaries of human body. “Suspended in computer space, the cybernaut leaves the prison of the body and emerges in a world of digital sensation” (Heim 64). This attitude was fueled by the theory of information that viewed information as disembodied (Shannon-Weaver theory) and was strengthened in the debates among members of the early cybernetics movement in the Macy conferences held from 1943 to 1954. It can also be found in the first cyberpunk novel Neuromancer (1984) where the author William Gibson defined cyberspace as “a consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions of legitimate operators,” and as “lines of light ranged in the nonspace of the mind, clusters and constellations of data” (69).

Over the last decade the corporeality has become the integrated part of the digital world in general. The mind/body duality, as well as matter/mind and real/virtual problems, inherited from Cartesian modes of thinking, that in fact privileged the domination of one part of duality and the subjugation of the other, normally the physical by the mental, have been overcome today. They tend to be reshaped and conceived in a different way: “The tension between embodiment/disembodiment can not be constructed as a choice of either/or but rather has to be understood as a reality of both/and” (Paul 170). Today both parts of the afore-mentioned dualities are present all the time, emerging and vanishing in sudden, novel combinations. The number of possible spaces and times has become limitless; they are opening up ad infinitum, so we can travel through them without problems. We are no longer confined by our bodies’ volume, weight, and gravity, we have become free to choose the extensions of ourselves and to playfully participate in endless motion and joyful travel. Rather than about the dualities and binary oppositions it has become more appropriate to talk about Deleuzian multiplicity: “So that we give up taxonomies of difference and celebrate in patterns, rhythms, multiplicities, vibrations, pivots, joints, points of contact, crossings and energies of this new way of bodying forth” (Brown 98). 

The issues of body and materiality being addressed in contemporary digital culture are primarily linked to the issues of receiver or user. The corporeal features of her experience in contemporary mixed and augmented reality, for instance its affective, proprioceptive, and tactile components, are emphasized now. The awareness that the body is an important agent in the constitution of space, even in the digital regime (cf. Hansen’s book New Philosophy for New Media, 2004), has emerged and spread in the last decade. Besides, Anna Munster believes that Cartesian aesthetics aligned the digital with the disembodied and the placeless; therefore, the digital culture has to be “materialized” (cf. Materializing New Media, 2006). According to this opinion, she examines the roles of the body and affect in their relations to the digital. 

The extensions of bodies and materiality in the digital world are challenging also for new media and inter-media art since many pieces, and most likely performances, address this issue. Different dimensions and aspects of such a novel, improved, upgraded, techno-modeled, virtually extended body(cyborgs, avatars) are investigated there, often emphasizing the processuality and the becoming of such a body. Some striking examples include the performances by Stelarc, Marcel-lí Antúnez Roca, Orlan, Carol Brown, performance art within the virtual platform of “Second Life” (Gazira Babeli, Second Front), videodance, cinedance, bioart, etc. 

E-Literature: Shelley Jackson and the Embodied Word

Since this paper is challenged by several recent e-literary pieces by Serge Bouchardon, the question arises in what way issues of the body have been addressed in electronic literature. Therefore we should briefly mention some earlier, even historical examples of electronic literature where certain aspects of body and materiality have been already emphasized but in quite different ways. Such earlier examples are the works of hypertext fiction Patchwork Girl (1995) by Shelley Jackson and, even more explicitly, her My Body – a Wunderkammer (1997). In the latter, the semi-autobiographical hypertext about traumatic episodes of the growing female body, the fragmentary structure of the work, which is enabled by HTML hypertext form, reflects the narrator’s experience of her own body that is fragmented, imperfect, and incomplete. Just like that is the reading experience of the piece since the reader does not have the access to the work in its wholeness and completeness, similarly as the narrator cannot access a complete and unambiguous experience of her own body.

In both works of electronic literature the body has been used also as the modernist metaphor for the text. Regarding this issue we need to mention Shelley Jackson’s claim about the embodiment and materiality in her own work: “I feel that language has a relationship to my body, and I want to make that relationship more literal. Spatializing text makes it more like a body, or an environment for my body, or both” (Jackson, Written 2).

The relationship between the text and the body becomes closer in her piece Skin Project (2003) where the word is embodied in a literal sense. More precisely, a story published exclusively in the form of tattoos on the skin of more than 2.000 volunteers from all over the world, one word at a time, has become a huge, lived body, unstable and uncatchable in its entirety and wholeness, similarly as the meanings and sense of the text itself are always elusive, fragmented, and never definitive. 

The Issues of Body in Contemporary Art: From Body Identities to the Connectivity of Techno-Bodies

In the works of Shelley Jackson from the 1990s, issues of the body are addressed quite differently than they are in the pieces of Serge Bouchardon, created over the last years. The latter should be understood as embedded into the broader context of contemporary new media and inter-media art. Techno-dispositive has begun to essentially define a quite large portion of contemporary art – its contents and its forms as well, and the issues of body in contemporary art in general are also framed by the techno-dispositive. Digital media have been increasingly incorporated into art; furthermore, art has also incorporated many procedures, methods, and practices, applied by science, particularly the sciences linked with technological development (i.e. computer science, biotechnology, medical research, neuroscience, nanotechnology, AI, space research, etc.).

Historically, body art in the 1960s and 1970s investigated primarily the body per se; contemporary artistic practices, however, focus rather on the possibilities of its extension. The interest of historical body art that was based in “performing the subject” (cf. Amelia Jones: Body Art/Performing the Subject, 1998) has changed today. More than the identity of a (single) body as in historical body art, the capability of the body to connect, to manipulate, to disseminate, to modify and be modified has become more relevant than ever. The body in such contemporary pieces is often transformed and equipped with high-tech devices; however, in the last decades of the 20th century it was conceived as cyborg body (Donna Haraway). Stelarc, the Australia-based performance artist exploring human-machine interfaces, claims: “What becomes important is not merely the body’s identity, but its connectivity – not its mobility or location, but its interface” (Stelarc). Related to this we can today even talk about interface culture as the key mode of contemporary techno-society (cf. Johnson: Interface Culture. How New Technology Transforms the Way We Create and Communicate, 1997) since the interfaces shape our perception, action, and thinking, therefore our way of being human. 

A significant part of contemporary art thus investigates contemporary techno-modeled bodies and their social and cultural implications. Such techno-bodies – strengthened, intensified, accelerated, software- and wetware-supported, open up to novel functions, extended by telepresence – have challenged humanities to search for new answers regarding the embodiment under the present conditions, and to redefine their views on traditional philosophical mind/body problem, real/virtual problem, to-be-in-the-world issue, and the traditional ideas of perception and thinking.

Connecting the Body: Reading Bouchardon’s Loss of Grasp

When we talk about the reception of many recent works of electronic literature, the interface, the capability to connect, and interactivity are foregrounded. The reader is expected to take a different attitude towards e-texts. Hoover and Gough proposed a simple way of reading by claiming that reading consists of two components, decoding and linguistic comprehension. The skill in both components is necessary for the successful reading (Hoover and Gough 150). But electronic literature demands from the reader to develop new approaches to the text. The skill in decoding and linguistic comprehension does not suffice any more to successfully “read” and understand e-literary works, especially not those that include new media elements or employ the possibilities of the digital medium. With new media technologies the reading has fundamentally altered from a quiet and relatively still activity. According to Janez Strehovec, the reader/user of e-literary works that are profoundly rooted in new media is less and less engaged in understanding the symbolic nature of works and in decoding of meaning: “Her interest becomes focused on a new series of rich sensory experiences by which she expects to be addressed as directly as possible. The reader-user demands from the e-literary text an attractive package of stimuli, an attractive platform that stimulates her perceptive and motor oriented behavior” (Strehovec, Algorithmic Culture 152). The reader/user’s bodily involvement or her immersive and tactile activity is demanded now; however, by e-text, available to the reader/user for various types of manipulation, “we encounter a subtle, interface-based presence of the reader/user in the text itself” (153). 

The activity of “not-just-reading” (Strehovec) suggests the involvement of the user’s body in the reception of certain e-texts. Such complex bodily reading activity is especially necessary to navigate through some recent pieces where such reading experience has become even central to them. In the following I will devote myself to Loss of Grasp (in French: Déprise, 2010) by Serge Bouchardon and Vincent Volckaert where the bodily reading experience is of key importance and where the narration is thoroughly shaped by the help of new media.

As written on the webpage (Bouchardon, Loss), this “interactive digital work” is a story about “a character who is losing grasp.” The reader/user is wandering through six scenes or stages, following the first-person narrator who is describing how this happened – from the beginning when everything was nice and perfect and it seemed to him that the whole universe belonged to him, through the scene when the wife suddenly left him, till the end of the story when he decided to take control again, to get a grip on his life again. The narration is shaped by the help of several elements – mostly by text and image, also by sound. 

The “reading” of Loss of Grasp exceeds the ordinary reading experience, since the piece is exploring how the reader/user creates both the narration and her reading experience by the means of her own physical activity – namely, by more or less successfully manipulating and handling the interfaces and thus navigating to the end of the story. The narration is created by the user in the process of her exploration of it in its bodily and physical dimension and wandering through it. In fact, together with the first-person narrator she experiences the title-theme of the work (namely, the loss of control). 

How does this activity look? Let me describe the beginning – the first scene.

At the beginning I, as the reader/user, enter the world that seems to be still entire and perfect. To trigger and run the story I should be active. Just to look at the screen waiting it happens is not sufficient; to start the narration I should press the key. A sentence then appears on the black screen but only one. The text on the screen goes further just because of my physical activity since the next sentence of the text emerges only when I gently slip on the actual by the mouse (so-called mouseover). Furthermore, by clicking I create the colorful suns that are emerging in front of me and are smearing on the screen in the continuation of this dramaturgically well-built artwork. The activity of I as the reader/user is of key importance for the narration of the story; without it it is impossible to reach the end of the story. I should work quite hard to figure out what I should do next. I am challenged to perform several different activities that include the manipulation of several different interfaces. Though, everything is not up to me – I just choose the rhythm as I would pass one end of a thread through the eye of a needle and the story runs further on its own, lesser dependent on me. It’s like I am losing the grasp, similarly as the narrator is losing it, until I finally, at the end of the story, lose it completely, just in the moment when it seems to me that I should have it most.

The nature of digital medium enables the text to be mobile, movable and unstable. The instability of the on-screen text can be experienced in Loss of Grasp, too: by clicking with the mouse on letters, words, and sentences the user navigates through the story. The image of the narrator’s wife that has appeared on the screen in Scene 2 is also such unstable entity, made of letters, the reader/user then paints into an image. What we know about her is primarily her mysterious image. The image doesn’t have the power to disclose her, even conversely, it hides her identity – her intentions, her wishes, her past. 

In the story about losing grasp the reader/user also experiences the loss of grasp. It is not only the reader/user who enters the narrator’s world and proceeds through the story by manipulating the interfaces, however, it is also the narrator who enters the reader/user’s world, even into her privacy. However, in Scene 5, the web camera of her computer suddenly switches on and the shot of herself appears on the screen, staring back at her. When trying to manipulate and eliminate the image, feeling uncomfortable with it, the image slips away, getting deformed, distorted. 

In navigating through another of Bouchardon’s works, The 12 Labors of the Internet User (Les 12 Travaux de l’Internaute, 2008), an online artistic game resembling the 12 labors of ancient hero Hercules, the user meets one labor which also corresponds to the issue of grasp. In the third labor, “The Ceryneian Hind,” the user is asked to catch a hind (a deer), eating grass in the wild. She should be skillful enough to get closer to the target with her hands moving to the screen, mimicking catching the animal. But the deer is very shy, in any moment it can raise its head from the grass, notices the stalker and runs away. The webcam on the computer perceives the moves of the user. With a lot of patience, she finally succeeds in stalking the deer, and can move on to another labor. 

The above-mentioned detail reveals an interesting, even ambiguous relationship to the issue of grasp which, as a final result, addresses also the reality vs. virtuality problem. Let me look at it in a phenomenological perspective. In his Phenomenology of Perception (1945) Merleau-Ponty discusses the case of neurological patient Schneider suffering from brain damage. When Schneider is asked to open the door, he has no problems in doing so; however, when he is asked just to show how to open the door, he just cannot do it. In ordinary life he has no difficulties to perform a habitual act, whereas in an experimental setting he could not do this in the normal immediate manner. The difference between pointing and grasping serves Merleau-Ponty to show how motor intentionality as an essentially bodily direction towards an object works. In his opinion, the motility always has its meaning and sense, and a particular gesture cannot be mathematically divided into equal parts. In fact, Schneider has problems with his imagination and reflection of movement, not with his motility, even less with his capability for grasping. He just cannot complete the gesture which does not have the meaning in his world, which does not change anything. Let me stop here; at this point, interesting issues arise, the issues that address the ontology of digital, the real/virtual problem, and the fundamental changes that new media technologies have brought to us, mediating and altering user’s physical activity.

Loss of Grasp: A Phenomenological Perspective

Since literature embedded in the world of new media is a very hybrid realm, it is more appropriate to approach it not only by the methodologies of literary criticism but also with the help of the theory of new media and visual studies. Particular notions from other disciplines that are not primarily rooted in the realm of literary criticism are also useful for the interpretation of Bouchardon’s work. Such are the notions of body image and body schema. The notion of body image consists of the representations of someone’s body/bodies in the consciousness; its variants have been formed in psychology and psychiatry (e.g. Paul Schilder), in social theory impacted by feminism and gender studies (e.g. Gail Weiss), and in neuroscience (e.g. V. S. Ramachandran). Body image consists of perceptions, attitudes, and beliefs concerning one’s body; it may involve a person’s conscious perception of her own physical appearance or picturing herself in her mind. On the contrary, the concept of body schema refers to sensory-motor capacities that control movement and posture, and it mainly remains outside of the consciousness. The concept entered into psychology (Henry Head and Gordon Holmes), philosophy (e.g. Maurice Merleau-Ponty), neuroscience (e.g. Shaun Gallagher), etc. In current psychological and phenomenological studies these two distinct concepts are often confused, due to terminological mess and different interpretations (cf. Gallagher, How the Body; Gallagher, Body Image). It is impossible to establish a clear conceptual distinction between them; on the behavioral level things are not always so unambiguous, since, for example, body image sometimes has an effect on the postural or motor performances of body schema, or conversely (Gallagher, How the Body 34–37). 

In Loss of Grasp, both conceptions can be applied: body image can help us to interpret the story as the story about the distorted, deformed body image of the narrator and his unstable, vague identity. The process of losing the grasp (control) of the narrator culminates in the loss of the grasp on his own face (“My own image seems to escape me,” is one of the sentences in Scene 5) which changes into the reader/user’s face by the activation of the webcam. 

On the contrary, the phenomenological notion of body schema, as developed by Merleau-Ponty, is more appropriate for describing the reading experience of this piece. In Phenomenology of Perception (1945) Merleau-Ponty defined body schema as the perception and internal experience of my moving body and its parts. More than the historical concepts of body schema the interesting issues today are its possible extensions that are linked to the skilful use and integration of different tools. The possibility of extensions of body schema was already conceived and described by Merleau-Ponty, too. One of his well-known examples of the extension of body schema is a typewriter integrated into the body schema of a typist. A skilful typist knows very well where the letters on a keyboard are, and she can adjust without special effort to another, different keyboard, either bigger or smaller, however different, than the one she has been used to. The adjustment is done somehow non-consciously, at least outside explicit consciousness; the body adjusts to a new situation by itself. It does so holistically, without any special, conscious reflection on the act of adjustment. Similarly, the blind man’s stick which he has learnt to use through acquiring the habit and integrating it into his body schema, has lost the status of an auxiliary object and has become a legitimate part of the blind man, in fact his sensible extension.

The issue of body schema has been gaining more and more importance in today’s culture in general that is changing into interface, algorithmic and software culture (cf. Johnson; Galloway, The Interface Effect; Strehovec). The possible extensions of the body schema lead into the integration of different tools and interfaces onto the user’s body. The integration of different techno-devices into the body schemas is not addressed only by several contemporary art practices (for instance, techno-performance, videodance, bioart, etc.), moreover, such a techno-extended mode of human being is present also in everyday life – for instance, in manipulation and operation of high-tech devices (tablet computers, game consoles, smartphones with touchscreen, etc.; cf. Strehovec, E-Literary Text). 

Relating to the extensions of body schema, the haptic sensations are very important, since touch is the sense that most directly enables the extension of the body into the space. Some theorists (e. g. Juhani Pallasmaa, Erin Manning) emphasize it as even more important than sight, arguing that touch is the only sense we can truly trust. Touch is often understood as the sense of proximity, in contrast to sight, the sense of distance, detachment, and even superiority. Today, touch has been explored from different points of view, in its spatial, architectural (Pallasmaa), as well as social dimensions (Manning). Attention to the issue of touch in recent theories can be explained with the aspiration to demystify the “nobility of vision,“ dominating for centuries (with certain exceptions, of course – cf. Martin Jay: Downcast Eyes. The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-Century French Thought, 1994), and to expose its dependence on the bodily sensory modalities. Touch is discussed and explored in the digital contexts, too: the expanded sensory dimension of the grasping hand is producing a new epistemology in digital contexts (Angel and Gibbs).

Even more directly than in Loss of Grasp, the sense of touch is being addressed in another Bouchardon’s e-literary piece – in Touch (in French: Toucher, 2009) where the reader/user explores and experiences several various modalities of touching. Here again, user’s manipulation of interfaces, namely, her gestures, plays a large role. As the authors Bouchardon and A. López-Varela Azcárate claim, “in an interactive work, gesture acquires a particular role, contributing to the construction of meaning” (Bouchardon and López-Varela Azcárate 2). The purpose of gesture here is not just turning a page as it is in classical reading where turning a page doesn’t suppose any particular interpretation of the text. Such a gesture is only a technical one. On the contrary, in an interactive work a gesture profoundly alters the reading experience, turning it into bodily and sensory experience. 

Both Bouchardon’s works, Loss of Grasp as well as Touch, are challenging the role and position of senses in digital literature, questioning their possibilities for the construction of narration and their mutual interaction, as well as the complex relationship between sight and touch. 

Loss of Grasp and Loss of Control

The importance of the user’s gestures in Bouchardon’s pieces also raises the questions about the relationship between touch and grasp on one side and control on the other. Does to touch something necessarily mean to control it?

It turns out that Loss of Grasp has certain limits of “material” nature. The number of possible flows of narration is limited; actually, it is only one. Uncertain and unknown is in fact only that when the user will find the solution and make the right move on interfaces, namely the move that will let her further through the space of the artwork. Her exploration of the interfaces is limited by certain rules and constraints, written and programmed in advance; the right move is just one and only. Thus, the author keeps control over his work till the end. From this point of view, Loss of Grasp differs from, for instance, generative poem Poemas no meio do caminho (2012) by Rui Torres. The text is written in Portugal and there are two versions of the poem – horizontal and vertical. In the vertical version, the reader reconfigures the text along the paradigmatic axis of language by selecting particular words of the text that morph then and are changed by another. The possible combinations are offered by the machine. Thus she is creating her own, new version of the poem that exists only for a short while, since the next click makes it disappear and fade into oblivion (however, the reader’s creations can be saved on the weblog). The reader shapes the text and her reading experience by her own. The number of combinations is endless, although limited; it can be said that they are unpredictable. The author of the poem does not directly control each version of the poem that is created by reader and machine together. He is “only” the one who created the space for the versions. The horizontal version of Torres’ poem, however, is visually more impressive, 3D textscape offers the reader a lot of different reading experiences, depending on her navigational decisions. 

Loss of Grasp differs as well from several new media artworks where the loss of user’s control has become their key feature not only on the level of their contents but also on the material one. So-called glitches (transient faults in the system), sofware crashes, noise, and other digital errors have inspired several new media artists to prepare art projects that manipulate the medium in its basic, software level. For instance, art collective JODI, one of the beginners of net.art, created several such artworks, among them artist-made video game mods that subvert the original game experience. There “the code of the machine itself is celebrated, with all its illegibility, disruptiveness, irrationality, and impersonalness” (Galloway, Gaming 28). Their untitled game (1996–2001) “often lapses into pure data, streaming real-time code up the screen with little or no representational imagery at all,” by which the apparatus of the game’s source code is foregrounded (Galloway, Gaming 115). Galloway also cites the gaming experience of Anne-Marie Schleiner, describing how the gamer in untitled game, which is the artist mod of the video game Quake 1, is at a loss for any type of faithful interactivity: “When I push the spacebar to jump in E1M1AP instead the world rotates uncontrollably. In G-R the screen refreshes non-stop with bright RGB colors, (no navigation at all). /…/ Or the program becomes the performer, I am no longer player god in control” (Galloway, Gaming 121). 

Over the last decade the interest in the issues of embodiment and materiality in digital worlds has spread again. The hybrids between human and machine are more complex and sophisticated now; the extensions of bodies into digital spaces have resulted even more in the blurring of the boundaries between technological and “meat,” between natural and artificial. Such novel bodies, shaped by new technologies and software-supported, are explored also by several e-literary works that creatively apply new media specificities. The line coming from Shelley Jackson’s hyperfiction and textual body art to Serge Bouchardon’s recent researches of interface can give us an insight not only into the issues of embodiment in digital world in general, but also into the changes that electronic literature has gone through in the course of its existence. By employing several concepts from phenomenology we can shed light on less exposed aspects of the issues discussed.

Works Cited

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