Nederlandse Letterkunde - Volume 28, Issue 2, 2023

Taking Dutch digital pioneer Marleen Stikker’s claim that the ‘internet is broken’ as its cue, this article explores the ways in which Dutch literature from the first half of the 1990s reflects on the potential and risks of the impending digital age. Its focus is on two contemporary literary works composed within the context of – or reflecting on – the 1994 launch of De Digitale Stad (dds), an experimental free-net initiative partly facilitated by the city of Amsterdam. Both case studies – the novel Oase by Dirk van Weelden and the collaborative radio play Station het oor – shed light on the cultural production surrounding dds, as they offer literary refractions of dominant spatial figures and topoi concerning the internet. In order to highlight these literary reflections as well as the complex and dynamic sociocultural, economic and technological forces in which they originated, the article draws on close reading as well as concepts and methods from media archaeology. Notably the concept of ‘imaginary media’ allows us to expound on the various ways technologies old and new were given literary meaning in the late twentieth century.

In J.J. Voskuil’s monumental seven-volume novel series Het Bureau (1996-2000), main protagonist Maarten Koning devotes himself to creating an ‘atlas of folk culture’ at a research institute for Dutch culture. The novelistic cycle minutely describes the ‘microcosm’ of a scientific community and at the same time offers a broad panorama of the Netherlands during the period it covers (from the fifties to the eighties of the last century). In this article, I situate Het Bureau at the beginning of the present information age, where switching between different forms of attention becomes important as a new form of adaptation. I read the cycle as an early ‘database novel’, in which literary prose is characterized by seriality, inclusivity, quantitative forms of representation and (seeming) endlessness. I compare the card system of the Maarten’s ‘Folk Atlas’ with the series as a whole, and the labor that Maarten performs with that of the reader. The challenge of sorting the relevant from the irrelevant plays a central role on several levels: thematic (intradiegetic), creative (the writing process) and hermeneutic (the labor of reading). On all these levels, I will argue, an openness for seemingly irrelevant information is thematized or presupposed, and an attitude of tolerance for such apparent irrelevance amounts to a productive reading. With reference to Catherine Malabou’s distinction between flexibility and plasticity, I argue that novels like Het Bureau offer the reader a potential of resistance against the demands of the attention economy.

Maxim Februari’s Klont(2017) is arguably one of the most well-known Dutch novels on issues of datafiction and digitization. This article combines a close reading of this work with a reflection on the aesthetics of datafication in recent scholarly and artistic discourses. It demonstrates that Februari’s imaginative representation of big data as an amorphous ‘lump’ or ‘clot’ of viscous materials and metabolic processes challenges a dominant view of the digital as being based on discrete patterning and frictionless computation. Drawing on David M. Berry’s notion of a (post)digital pattern aesthetics, the article situates Februari’s novel within a larger counter aesthetics of datafiction that is also articulated in the work of philosopher Miriam Rasch and media scholar Luciana Parisi’s notion of ‘patternless data’. While this counter aesthetics lends itself to a critique of seamless ‘dataism’ (Rasch) it comes with ideological implications itself. In Februari’s novel they surface in a curious association of the formless digital ‘klont’ with notions of femininity and the female body.

When digital media are described as ‘(in)accessible’, this can refer to several things: its availability, approachability, or accessibility to disabled people. As a result, electronic literature is either hailed or dismissed based on an imprecise notion of accessibility. In this article, I analyze works of electronic literature through the lens of these different understandings of accessibility in order to pinpoint the assumptions surrounding digital media about the situatedness and capacities of the reader. I address the availability of electronic literature by connecting the reading experience to convergence culture, the gift economy, and locality. I deepen the insight into reading experience by analyzing the approachability of electronic literature in relation to the Russian-Formalist concept of ‘defamiliarization’. To understand this defamiliarized experience of literature, I analyze how digital accessibility to disabled people influences the writing and reading of electronic literature, positing access as a form of ‘writing under constraint’.