Electronic Literature and the Unmasking of Codes

The cultural materialist approach in literary studies, which treats literary texts as cultural products, has revealed the contribution of literature to social and political formations while at the same time is also produced by them. With the rise of the significance of digital technology, it becomes more apparent that texts, literary or otherwise, are produced and styled by systems of coding, making bare the ideological premises that operate texts. By looking at the technologies previously used to produce texts and particularly the current explorations in electronic literature, this presentation seeks to show codes used to produce texts are ideologically charged.