Tuesday, August 28, 2001

Electronic Literature Organization Moves Its Offices to UCLA By SCOTT CARLSON The Electronic Literature Organization will move its headquarters from an independent office in Chicago to the campus of the University of California at Los Angeles. Supporters of the organization hope the new location will give electronic literature prestige and a higher public profile. The organization promotes the writing, publication, and reading of fiction and poetry produced primarily for electronic media. Its board voted last Wednesday to move the organization's offices to UCLA, which has offered both space and a budget. The university will also pay the salary of some staff members. Jeff Ballowe, the president of the literature organization's Board of Directors, said the organization decided to move because the university already offers courses on electronic literature. The courses are led primarily by Katherine Hayles, a leading scholar and critic in the electronic-literature field. "The ELO is absolutely critical to electronic literature," Ms. Hayles said, comparing the group to the Modern Language Association. In the early days of the MLA, which was founded in 1883, literature was primarily taught in Greek and Latin, Ms. Hayles said. "The idea that you would study literature in English was seen as heretical. So the MLA was a revolutionary movement in its beginnings, and the ELO is playing a somewhat similar role." Ms. Hayles led the campaign to attract the group to UCLA. The literature organization had considered other campus bases, including Brown University, the Georgia Institute of Technology, the University of Southern California, and the University of Virginia, she said. But she also said, "We don't see this as a competition with other schools," and added that she expected the Electronic Literature Organization to move to another university after five years. "It's healthy for the organization to move [to another university]. Having this in-house relationship is a way to foster close connections and communications with scholars." She said that her department would spend about $200,000 on the Electronic Literature Organization over the coming five years. The Electronic Literature Organization supports only literature that is produced for electronic media, rather than, for instance, traditional literature that migrates to an e-book. The group offers symposia every year to discuss electronic media and the future of electronic literature. It maintains a Web site that offers news about the genre and a long list of electronic literature. And the group annually gives two $10,000 awards for outstanding electronic literature. The group's directors and advisers include the literary luminaries John Barth, T.C. Boyle, Robert Coover, and George Plimpton, and the publisher Nan A. Talese. Diana Slattery, who is the author of the hypertext work Glide and the associate director of the Academy of Electronic Media at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, said the move would benefit the organization. "I'm really happy to hear this -- it would mean a great deal for the genre in a very positive sense." "To the degree that electronic literature is something spreading, getting known, and inserting itself into literature per se, I'm sure that locating under the wing of a university will further those aims," she added. Easy-to-print version E-mail this article

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