Cybertext Poetics: The Critical Landscape of New Media Literary Theory by Markku Eskelinen (review)

A prominent representative of ludology, the academic study of games, Markku Eskelinen has gathered in this impressively fat book (with frequently inserted recapitulative figures, but totally deprived of any other illustration) his essential thinking on the subject. However, one should warn the reader that the scope of Eskelinen's book is strictly formal and theoretical: What he intends to establish is a general framework for the description and analysis of all texts that can be produced and read today. More specifically, his ambition is to list the various dimensions that can be distinguished in a literary text, whatever form such a text may take, and to study the combinatory principles that rule their use.

The starting point of this research is twofold. First, there is the observation that the countless media transformations of the last decades have given birth to an almost infinite number of new works and new text types that can no longer be accounted for within the framework of traditional, i.e. print-based, literary analysis. The case of games, which Eskelinen rightly considers an example of such a new literary form, introduces features that are so different from what can be reasonably conceptualized in classic terms that literary theory can only either ignore these new forms or miss their qualities and interest by identifying them as exceptions, anti-narrative constructs, or idiosyncratic items that do not have any place in any taxonomy, whatsoever. Issues and aspects such as simulation (versus narrative) or the multi-layeredness of time and space (not just as parameters of fictional representations, but as basic features of textual production and reception) play here, of course, an essential role.

Second, and this is no longer an observation but a theoretical claim, there is the conviction that the solution to the above-mentioned problem is not to split the field of literary studies into two subfields: print culture on the one hand and digital-born culture on the other hand. Although this is still the default option of most literary scholars, many of whom defend the incompatibility between print modus and digital modus, Eskelinen takes a different, much more homogenizing stance. For him, both print and digital-born texts should be studied with the help of the same (but expanded) conceptual and analytical devices. Thus, the whole book is an attempt (a convincing attempt) to demonstrate the usefulness, if not the necessity, of this overall approach. The refusal to draw a strong line between both domains does not imply, however, that Eskelinen is obsessed with creating a new general and all-encompassing theory. His goal, which is both more modest and more ambitious, has to do with the elaboration of a toolkit, i.e. of a list of aspects and dimensions as well as a certain number of proposals and hypotheses concerning their concrete use. Interpretation of specific works is something that falls outside the scope of this book, which must be read as what it is: a theoretical inquiry into the parameters of what we mean by a literary text today (and even within this field Eskelinen is mainly concerned with narrative literary texts).

The study of narrative is boundless, and the exceptional dynamics of the field make it very difficult to keep a reasonable overview of everything that is being done, undone and redone, often simultaneously. The first impression that one takes from Eskelinen's book is that the author has an extremely clear view of his material. Not only does he know the basic and less-basic discussions on most key aspects of (formal) narratology well, he also succeeds in establishing an always-lucid hierarchy between the authors and theories he considers essential for the construction of his own model. He introduces authors and theories mainly to test and challenge the consistency of his proposals.

Eskelinen relies on two major references: Gérard Genette...