At the outset of my thesis research this year, my exposure to Linda Hutcheon's concept of  historiographic metafiction really made me feel as though I would never ever come across a more shamelessly coined term of absolute emptiness. I know, I know, this column has already, in its title, implicated Linda Hutcheon as a scholar who, despite her efforts and subsequent fame, fell short in fully developing a concept of the Canadian postmodern, but really, a whole new flashy term just for metafiction that just happens to contain historical events in its plot? Isn't all metafiction, or writing in general, in being art that uses language and rests upon the cultural framework of the author and their subsequent cultural biases, historiographic? Totally lame! However, to sidestep this repetitive post-pomo student finger-wag at Linda Hutcheon, I actually found something absolutely and wholeheartedly worse in its shameless toting of pretentious intellectual validity without actually possessing, in my opinion, any theoretical substance: Epsen J. Aarseth's concept of ergodic literature.

After a close friend of mine tossed me the manuscript for his first novel, citing Mark Z. Danielewski's American cult classic House of Leaves as an influence, I set out to read some criticism and articles on the book before delving in. The term ergodic literature came up a few times with reference to Danielweski, and after looking over ergodic theorems in math and getting a general idea that the primary term referred to non-linear dynamism in numbers, I guess I sort of had a general idea that it referred to, I dunno, dynamic texts? This all seemed very convoluted to me, and as I set out to get to know Espen J. Aarseth a little better to wrestle this thing down, I quickly realized that it truly, truly was.

Espen J. Aarseth is a Norwegian video-game scholar (yes, they do exist) and a scholar of (purists, please look away) electronic literature. When I originally read his bio I was totally stoked to read what he was all about, considering the field of tech-based or tech-augmented art and lit is totally interesting. The only problem is that the dissertation in which he coins this term - Cybertext: Perspectives on Ergodic Literature - totally bashes Literary Studies and repeatedly asserts that the application of traditional literary theory to cybertexts is "imperialistic" and idiotic. Ah!

With this in mind, I'm sure you all understand why I was so absolutely confused. I'm no stranger to literary figures attacking what they perceive to be the literary establishment - it's good for growth and discussion, a little bit of intellectual tension ain't gonna hurt nobody - but to coin a literary term and then turn around and say that literary studies - the body of academic study that obviously bore him - has nothing to contribute to the study of technologically augmented literature? Absolutely ridiculous!

Even more ridiculous: the assertion that ergodic literature is a whole new category of literature. The technical definition of ergodic lit is that it requires nontrivial effort to be accessed and traversed. What the hell does that mean? As if the process of reading any literature wasn't already inherently active. If one can read something passively, do we even call that literature, or art? It's entirely unclear what exactly this trivial effort is, but it seems to me that he draws the line in media, where the turning of a page is rendered trivial in opposition to new ways of accessing narratives, i.e. gaming and digital technology. This bold assertion really made me scoff -  a book and a screen are really just different platforms for accessing a text, and I simply cannot believe that anyone could ever suggest that new technologies have made readers more active in their access of literature.

Aarseth set out, in his ballsy dissertation, to "describe any text according to their mode of traversal" (62), a very literal application of McLuhan's musings on media, which explains his odd disconnect with the aspects of imagination that transcend media, that can live in story outside of the text, or game itself. This kind of jazz makes me a little sad, because it's dudes like Aarseth that are working far too hard to antagonize Literary Studies, and in turn, are serving to make the Literary community feel, well, antagonized by academics who are interested in these types of study. Also, as an aspiring academic who is definitely interested in the study of electronic literature and digital poetics, this kind of stuff makes me especially angry, considering I feel as though literary studies and the study of burgeoning new technological media really could work together to create some damn good work. The last fifth of my thesis is entirely devoted to looking forward to work that is being done in the Canadian post-pomo landscape with technology and traditional forms of literature working hand-in-hand. Am I just a hippy or something?

So what's with all the coining? Is it contemporary, postmodern or now, ergodic? Is it that metafiction historiographic? What the hell do any of these things mean? As a post-millennium student this really all seems very silly to me. Though I love theory, it really loses its weight when it's taken so far from the ground, and much like the Hutchmeister, Aarseth seems to be coining not in cyberspace, but in outer space.