Abstract
Literature created in digital media is often fluid and ephemeral, shaped by the shifting timelines of social platforms or by experimental forms in which texts move, fade, or disappear. Conventional literary studies, however, rely on the stability of the printed text, enabling rereading, quotation, and archival analysis. As digital texts become constitutively ephemeral, these methodologies face significant limitations. This contribution addresses this challenge by drawing on theatre, dance, and performance studies, disciplines accustomed to engaging with transient objects. By reformulating their methods, the project reframes ephemerality not as a technical byproduct but as a core poetic principle of digital literature, approaching literary texts through a flexible and performative analytical lens.
The trouble with digital literature
In its fundamental structure, the EXC 2020 Temporal Communities assumes that literature moves and transforms between different media, arts, and materialities. Literature is neither irrevocably bound to a specific object nor to a specific time. Rather, it is constitutively mobile and transformative. Conventional literary studies, however, largely assume and rely on a more or less fixed object or artefact: the text as ink/writing on paper, which does not, or only very slowly, disintegrates, thereby securing the possibility of frequently revisiting the same text. A few approaches have explored the ways in which literary texts can be unstable, mobile, fluid, or fleeting. Most prominently, Stanley Fish highlighted the changeability of texts in the process of interpretation . In the introduction to the edited volume Kinetographien, Inke Arns, Mirjam Goller, Susanne Strätling, and Georg Witte discussed the question of movement within texts and other media involved in the process of noting, sketching, and recording performances, plays, and dance . Different poetological approaches to drama around 1800 , on the one hand, and generated digital literature , on the other, offer a glimpse of the variety of textual and literary movement across different media. Furthermore, editorial theory and textual criticism have outlined ways in which different versions of a work destabilise the notion of the text as a fixed object , with research on medieval and early modern manuscripts, in particular, demonstrating that texts are primarily only conceptually stable and fixed (; ).
Although these approaches provide fundamental insights into moving texts, they also reveal the necessity of revisiting them in light of the significant changes posed by digital literature, and in particular digital literature on social media platforms. Depending on the technical specificities of a given platform, such texts often move on the screen, vanish, are deleted (#mightdeletelater), or simply disappear in ever-shifting timelines and amidst the torrents of data produced and processed every second. In other words, digitality introduces an ‘ephemeral turn’ that shapes digital communication . Existing approaches tend to address ephemeral aspects selectively, or to engage with digitality more broadly, rather than with the specificity of literary texts (; ; ; ; ; ; ). The first response of literary scholars encountering these texts is often to take screenshots, to bookmark them, or even to write them down, in order to confer some stability. In other words, the response is to save and archive these texts in ways familiar to Western scholarly practice, thereby guaranteeing repeated access. However, the ephemerality of these texts is not merely a byproduct of their specific mediality; it is constitutive of their poetics. As Mindy Seu argues, ‘Digital Poetry will be perceived as living because it is living’ . Although performativity is now an integral part of literary studies, this ephemerality and performative dimension of digital texts continue to pose difficulties for literary analysis.
How performance studies deal with ephemerality
Consequently, literary studies are confronted with a rather unfamiliar but constitutive ephemerality of literature. However, this ephemerality is a fundamental feature of other disciplines within the humanities, first and foremost of dance and theatre studies. Co-presence within theatres (see most prominently ) as well as the ephemerality of performances , have long been cornerstones of theatre and performance studies, and even their deconstruction . Particularly during the Covid Pandemic and the impossibility to visit live performances due to lockdowns, this question of what performances and the theatrical constitutes was reevaluated on the basis of new forms of digital performances (see, for example, the recent event series Temporal Communities and Digitality – Theatre During the Pandemic). Although the more recent focus on reenactments of dance and performances challenges the notion of ephemerality and even theorises reenactment to be post-ephemeral , the scholarly discourse in these fields still revolves around the prospect of the disappearance of the research object or event. While dance studies have reimagined dance as writing (; ), notations, recordings, or libretti remain vastly distinct from the event of the dance or performance itself and moreover, various forms of “liveness” remain a constitutive part of performances.
One way to deal with the newer digital literature and its ephemerality would be to claim it to be media art,1For ways in which media, art, and literature intersect, see . to declare it to be performance art, or simply not to integrate it into the literary canon.2For an analysis of the dynamics of German literary criticism and the literary market, see . However, since these texts reflect basic concepts of literary studies, like rhetorics, poetics, narrative, intertextuality, to name but a very few, both these texts and literary studies would greatly benefit from a transdisciplinary approach. To put it figuratively: in digital media, literature and the dancing body meet, and the analysis of these texts calls out for a transdisciplinary methodology that grapples with this encounter.
Performance aspects of digital literature
Sarah Berger and their experimental literary posts on Instagram discuss the ephemerality of literature through poetological means. With the account fem_poet, they create collages that combine images and texts. Some of these texts are written specifically for the collages, while others are sourced online; often, Berger creates reels or short videos. Almost all of these posts aim to promote awareness of repressive societal structures. One such collage begins with a screenshot of a hateful tweet by an opponent of abortion, attacking those who perform abortions or advocate for abortion rights. The tweet initially appears on screen, but there is only limited time to read it, because texts pointing to injustices, dangers, and deaths resulting from restrictive abortion laws rapidly overwrite this tweet, rendering it unreadable. The movement between the different textual layers is swift, and sometimes two texts appear simultaneously, which makes both almost impossible to read. The collage thus draws attention to the speed of the digital medium: the overlapping texts reflect the massive volume of information that floods the user interfaces and timelines. In this way, the collage performs ephemerality as a constitutive part of digital literature. It shares its movement with performance studies and its re-accessibility with literary studies, insofar as it can be replayed. However, since it necessarily relates to day-to-day politics and the topicality of its content, it is also connected to the specific temporality of the social media platform or app. Repeated access of the post, days or even months later, via bookmarks, screenshot, or searches within the account, withdraws it from this original context and alters the text as a whole (see ). In this tie to the timeline, the post is, like the event of a dance or performance, ultimately not repeatable.
An example of temporary ephemerality, caused by the reader’s interaction with the text and their use of the screen, is Still by Jasmine Vojdani . Published in the online magazine &Shy, the work employs the disappearance of text to explore the specific connections between screens, bodies, eyes, and reading. In doing so, it not only contests the notion of the user interface as simply a representation of the book—such as a PDF scan—but also challenges the idea of the interface as a neutral window onto the digital world. Still is readable only when the text is, in fact, still. Any attempts to scroll the text (in order to continue reading content that exceeds the size of the screen) results in a temporarily blurred text, rendering it unreadable; at this moment, the text effectively ceases to exist. Still generates an ‘unworkable interface’ , but only when the user acts in the way expected by the medium: reading, scrolling, touching the screen. The work generates an innovative approach to the nexus of the haptic (scrolling), the visual (reading), and the question of control over what the interface represents. The unreadability of the text, caused by its movement, draws attention to the interface itself, and renders itself and its mechanisms visible.
When Berger’s collage plays with ephemerality in its specific context, and the text Still becomes unreadable, this does not mean that these works simply vanish. Rather, as Rebecca Schneider observes with regard to performance, something remains. Performance does not automatically entail disappearance; ephemerality does not inevitably mean vanishing; nor is performance the ‘antithesis of “saving”’ . While William Forsyth argues that dance constitutes spatial writing, and while dance studies have brought writing and text onto the stage, literary studies, particularly analyses concerned with digital literature, would benefit from bringing dance and movement into the text. Such an approach allows for a reading attentive to both the presence and ephemerality of movement, as well as to its resistance to disappearance, thereby maintaining what Claudia Jeschke terms ‘a versatile gaze’ .
If literary scholarship takes the performative dimension of (digital) literature seriously, and consequently acknowledges its ephemerality within Western regimes of knowledge and knowledge production, it must refrain from resorting to screenshots or from archiving documents in the habitual manner of the discipline.3In February 2023, the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek and the Science Data Center for Literature announced that they would archive every tweet written in German that was then available on Twitter and in its archives . Rather, such an approach would entail reevaluating the supposed objectivity attributed to documents, as well as the possibility of returning to them. Digital literature encourages, and indeed compels, scholars to rethink methodologies and to take performativity seriously by recognising the fleeting moment as an integral part of knowledge production.