New
Like Borges explored in his short story “The Garden of Forking Paths”, new methods of production require people to view the ending product with a more observant strategy adventitious from the traditional way of reading. In the story, Ts’ui Pên created a labyrinth embodied in his book, which in some way corresponds with the interactive fiction Hayles mentioned in her essay. The book is described with the word “chaotic” by Pen’s descendants, it is through Albert Stephen’s examination that they found out the book must be read in an unconventional way. The line that I found that summarizes a similarity between the labyrinth and electronic literature is that “in all fictional works, each time a man is confronted with several alternatives, he chooses one and eliminates the others; in the fiction of Ts’ui Pên, he chooses— simultaneously—all of them.” (Borges) Electronic literature, as Professor stated in class, leans more on the “thinkership” rather than “readership”, therefore offers more possibility for the readers’ own interpretation than conventional literature does. What fascinates me about electronic literature is not the content contained(for example in “The Library of Babel”, most of the readings are unable to translate), but the realization that human beings already contained all the answers to everything, yet the realization itself makes it impossible to grasp these answers.
