Electronic Literature and Its Departure from the Supremacy of the Author Function

Abstract

In ‘What Is an Author?’, Michel Foucault maintains that our present society can only accept literary discourses if they are governed by what he calls author function. In electronic literature, there are texts that systematically depart from this tradition. In order to identify these texts, the chapter introduces the model of the textual action space, which is then used to analyse the production and reception processes of works of electronic literature, among them Toby Litt’s blog fiction Slice, the collaborative writing project A Million Penguins and Renée Turner’s mash-up fiction She…. The results of the analysis of the texts highlight that literary theory and philosophy need to review their models to accommodate them to changing practices of literary production and reception.