Five Theses on E-Lit Scenes

At the 2025 Electronic Literature Organization conference in Toronto I participated on a panel devoted to If/Then, a computational poetics group/workshop/collective/community that has been meeting monthly over Zoom since Fall 2020. Carly Schnitzler and Lillian-Yvonne Bertram, the organizers of If/Then were on the panel, as well as three members of If/Then’s Community Advisory Board—Kathy Wu, Zach Whalen, and myself. The impetus of my contribution to the panel was a conversation I’ve been having in my head for a while now about electronic literature (e-lit) scenes, and where If/Then fits in. This short talk will have a very niche audience, but for those readers, I hope my five theses about e-lit scenes will be evocative, if not provocative.

In his keynote address at the 2017 ELO conference in Porto, Matt Kirschenbaum had fun riffing on the occasional confusion that arises between ELO the Electronic Literature Organization and ELO the Electric Light Orchestra, the bestselling British prog-rock band whose hits include “Mr. Blue Sky” and “Hold on Tight” (Kirschenbaum 28–29).

Scott Rettberg’s keynote on Friday of this conference played again with the idea of rock ‘n roll, and even more to the point, evoked several times a key concept I want to talk about today, which is the idea of e-lit scenes, for example the early “Chicago” e-lit scene that Scott described. 

I want to build today on the idea of e-lit scenes as analogous to music scenes. I’m talking about this idea of scenes today because of my participation in If/Then, an entirely virtual scene borne out of the Zoom era of the pandemic, which, mostly through the care of Carly and Lilian-Yvonne, continues years later, with its lively monthly workshops and open mics. During the worst of the pandemic and social isolation, If/Then was a godsend for many. Something to look forward to, socializing around a shared common interest. 

And for me personally, If/Then was the first time in many years that I felt I was part of a scene. 

Scene. 

That’s a term I probably should define. One of the groundbreaking works of scholarship on musical scenes is Barry Shank’s exploration of the progressive rock scene of Austin, Texas, in which he characterizes a scene as “an overproductive signifying community” (Shank 122)—that is, a community that generates for more “semiotic” information than can possibly be made sense of, which all jumbles and scrambles chaotically together, creating new fusions and new identities which, despite their newness, feel authentic and sincere. Building on Shank’s work, the musicologist Will Straw has made the distinction between a musical community and a musical scene (Straw 373). The difference being a community implies a sense of stability, whereas a scene, as Holly Kruse puts, is “less stable and historically rooted” than a community (Kruse 38). A scene by its very nature is fluid, especially on its margins. People come and go, moving in and out of the scene, and the scene continues not despite people coming and going, but because people come and go, bringing new identities, new techniques, new styles, new approaches with them.

Now that I’ve given a sense of how I’m using the term scene. I want to offer five theses—provocations, really—about electronic literature and e-lit “scenes.”

1. E-lit scenes exist. Perhaps this goes without saying, but it’s not uncommon for the rhetoric in the electronic literature community to highlight inclusivity, the democratic and democratizing nature of the work we do and the tools we use. Yet, there are also very distinct scenes that can seem exclusive to outsiders or those on the margins. Some of these scenes are defined by geographic location, some by access to resources, some by charismatic personalities. Either way, there are often significant and unacknowledged barriers to accessing those scenes, either as a participant or as a fan.
   
2. Scenes can arise around a particular platform. For a solid decade there was the Flash scene. There was the bot scene on Twitter. There was the golden era of the Twine scene. In many cases you find the practitioners in these scenes learning from each other, inspiring each other, even trying to outdo each other with friendly rivalries. Now the problem, of course, of a scene centered on a particular platform is, what happens when that platform goes away? Here again, I’m thinking about the Flash scene and the Twitter bot scene. The work itself is often lost, and that’s the problem many archival and preservation efforts try to address. But just as importantly, and much less acknowledged, the scene—that overproductive signifying community—that too is often lost.
   
3. Scenes are in a constant tension between stasis and change. Again, this is probably a self-evident observation. I mean, what in this world isn’t in constant tension between stasis and change. Nevertheless, there are significant implications of this tension inherent to scenes that we often forget. As I’ve already said, people come and people go. Take If/Then, for example. While there are regulars, each monthly meeting brings in new people who might be there just for that particular topic or because they know or know of the presenter or workshop leader. We’ve never had the same Venn diagram of people in two meetups in a row. Which is awesome. The minute new people stop coming or other people stop drifting away, the minute it’s no longer a scene and all the creative energy that implies.
   
4. Scenes can be—and should be—resistant to notions of canonicity. This thesis is a corollary to the previous one. And I don’t mean the canon strictly in the sense of vaunted individual works. I also mean a canon in terms of acceptable styles, techniques, and themes. A parallel, if I can jump from music scenes back to the literary world, might be thinking about creative writing MFA programs as scenes. As Mark McGurl argues in his work, these programs have resulted in a kind of stagnant, narrow view of what counts as literary fiction. As an aside, it’s worth mentioning, as Matt Kirschenbaum did in his 2017 keynote (32), McGurl begins his book by highlighting the Brown MFA program, out of which, as McGurl notes, Shelley Jackson’s The Patchwork Girl, one of the most canonized works of electronic literature, emerged (McGurl 43). 
   
5. Not being in a scene is okay. The rock historian Andrew Hickey argues that Bill Haley’s 1954 hit “Rock Around the Clock”—was (1) one of the first songs where all the recognizable elements of rock and roll gelled together, including replacing the sax solo common at the time in jump band music with the guitar solo;—and (2) was all the more remarkable because Haley was operating outside of a scene. He had no peers. There was no East Coast rock and roll music scene at the time, no network of other musicians in the area also experimenting with fusing elements of the blues, jump bands, and country music. As Hickey puts, “There was no-one to tell them what to do, or what not to do” (Hickey). And as someone who has rarely been part of a scene, let me tell you, not having people tell you what you can or can’t do, can be a very liberating thing.

So these are my five theses. I’m sure all of us working together here could come up with five or ten or fifteen more, as well as find plenty of counter-examples. These five theses are not meant to be prescriptive. Rather, they are meant to get us talking about this very real and material aspect of electronic literature that we often forget: e-lit scenes, for better or worse, exist, and they have played an underappreciated role in defining the contours—or we might even say the margins—of the field. 

Works Cited

Hickey, Andrew. “Crazy Man Crazy” by Bill Haley and the Comets. 16, 21 Jan. 2019, https://500songs.com/podcast/crazy-man-crazy-by-bill-haley-and-the-comets/.

Kirschenbaum, Matthew. “ELO and the Electric Light Orchestra: Electronic Literature Lessons from Prog Rock.” Matlit: Materialidades Da Literatura, vol. 6, no. 2, Aug. 2018, pp. 27–36.

Kruse, Holly. “Subcultural Identity in Alternative Music Culture.” Popular Music, vol. 12, no. 1, 1993, pp. 33–41.

McGurl, Mark. The Program Era: Postwar Fiction and the Rise of Creative Writing. Harvard University Press, 2011.

Shank, Barry. Dissonant Identities: The Rock “n” Roll Scene in Austin, Texas. University Press of New England, 1994.

Straw, Will. “Systems of Articulation, Logics of Change: Communities and Scenes in Popular Music.” Cultural Studies, vol. 5, no. 3, Oct. 1991, pp. 368–88.