A note on canon.
Last evening, I picked up Sarah Sloanes Digital Fictions: Storytelling in a Material World (2000)- a recently borrowed acquisition, and was absentmindedly leafing through its bibliography when it struck me, not for the first time, that to a certain degree writing an ph.d.thesis is as much about expanding the "canonical bibliography" with new titles as it is coming up with new content...The field that I study (Digital aesthetics, digital narratives and other ways of creating story-experiences with the computer, -please note more literature than games, otherwise the canon would be different) is still quite new theoretically (some 20 years??) but still my sense is that there is already a certain canon established (of theory books that is, I consciously sidestep the question of a canon of interactive fiction work, games, various versions of cybertext etc here because this is minefield of somewhat dangerously normative nature). Hence, as an integral part of my "research" what I look for in a bibliography like Sloane's is titles apart from those listed below - in this still limited field of not yet canonised relevant publications - which can help me in my own work . And what I try to do as part of my own research is try to find articles and books which can be added to my own canonical bibliography in a new combination and though that to the unwritten but yet in the academic air floating "bibliography of the field" as such.
OK, deep breath: here is a list of what I think is the top 10 "canonical books" (not necessarily in terms of quality but of most referred to and most often listed) - also found in Sarah Sloanes bibliography (and in Espens "Cybertext" which was the book in the list I had available to check):

Roland Barthes: S/Z (1970 org./1974, first US translation)
Sherry Turkle: Life on the screen (1984)
Gilles Deleuze/Feliz Guattari: A thousand plateaus (1987, eng. trans)
Jay David Bolter: Writing Space - the computer, hypertext and the history of writing (1991)
Brenda Laurel: The computer as theatre (1991)
G.Landow: Hypertext:The convergence of contemporary critical theory and technology (1992)
Richard Lanham: The electronic word: Democracy, technology and the arts (1993)
G.Landow (ed.): Hyper/Text/Theory (1994)
Espen Aarseth: Cybertext - Perspectives on Ergodic Literature (1997)
Janet Murray: Hamlet on the Holodeck (1997)

Seymour Chatman "Story and Discourse", Gerard Genette "Narrative Discourse", Michael Joyce "Of two minds: Hypertext, Pedagogy, and Poetics", Walter Ong " Orality and Literacy", J.L, Austin "How to do things with words", Elisabeth Reids "Cultural formations in text-based virtual realties", Michael Heim "The Metaphysics of virtual reality", de Certeau "The practice of everyday life", Michael Benedikt (ed) "Cyberspace - First steps", Marie-Laure Ryan (ed): "Cyberspace Textuality & Literary Theory" are some often spotted comers-up.
Jane Yellowlees Douglas "The End of Books- or Books without end? Reading interactive narratives" published in 2000 is going to found in post-2000 bibliographies too, I think. As is Marie-Laure Ryans "Narrative as Virtual Reality" (2001). Probably Lev Manovichs "The Language of New Media" (2000) will be a must-read too. And hopefully Eskelinen/Koskimaas "Cybertext Yearbook" series (2000 - ) will be indispensable if you want to know who the future canonical writers will be...
# posted by Lisbeth at: 11:16