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This thesis takes into consideration the presence of computers and electronic equipment in French literary and multimedia discussions, beginning in the first chapter with the foundation of the Oulipo group in 1960 and taking as a starting point the group's conceptions of the computer in relation to literature. It proceeds in the second chapter to explore the materialities and physical factors that have informed the evolution of ideas related to the composition and reading of digital texts, so as to illuminate some of the differences that may be purported to exist between e-literatures and traditional print works. Drawing on Roland Barthes' 'Between Work and Text,' the chapters gradually progress into an exploration of spatiality in digital and interactive literatures, taking into account the role of exhibitions in accommodating and diffusing these forms in France, notably the 1985 exhibition 'Les Immatériaux,' to whose writing installations the third chapter is dedicated. The first three chapters thus focus on computer assisted reading and writing prior to 1985. The chapters that form the second half of the thesis deal with more recent years, exploring online and mobile application works, reading these as engendering their own distinct physical spaces that extend beyond the 'site' of the work - both the website or display and the tactile materials on which the work is operated - creating in relation to the reading what Roberto Simanowski terms a 'semiotic body'. The fourth chapter takes into consideration the role of the reader's body in Annie Abrahams' 'Séparation' and Xavier Malbreil's 'Livre des Morts'. The fifth chapter explores gesture as a mode of reading and reinscription in the online, interactive works of Serge Bouchardon. Finally, the sixth chapter looks at mobile application narratives, spampoetry and email art, offering ways of reading the new spatialities these forms generate. The work as a whole aims to offer some perspectives for considering digital literatures as capable of creating complex spatial experiences between work and text.

This thesis conducts a critical investigation into digital literature—a genre of literary expression that is integrated with, and articulated using, digital computing systems and infrastructures. Specifically, it presents a framework for evaluating the expressive capacities of this genre as it relates to particular conceptions of knowledge-making in the contemporary technocultural environment. This framework reveals how the generation of critical knowledge concerning digital literature, as crystallised through a reader’s material engagements with specific works, enacts a ‘performative’ conception of knowing and being, in which the observable world is treated as emerging in the real time of practice—as being articulated through the entanglement of human and nonhuman agencies, rather than existing as a fixed array of passive, unchanging primitives. Digital literature is presented subsequently as a model of this greater performative vision—as a means of evaluating the structures and processes that manifest it, particularly within digital systems, and for assessing its practical and political implications for art and culture more broadly. In so doing, this thesis aims to justify the value of engaging digital literature from a standpoint that is more expressly political, contending not only that these texts are revealing of key processes shaping digital activities, artefacts, and environments, but are enacting alternative vectors of thought and practice concerning them.

This thesis examines key examples of materially experimental writing (B.S. Johnson’s The Unfortunates, Marc Saporta’s Composition No. 1, and Julio Cortázar’s Hopscotch), hypertext fiction (Geoff Ryman’s 253, in both the online and print versions), and video games (Catherine, L.A. Noire, The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion, and Phantasmagoria), and asks what new critical understanding of these ‘interactive’ texts, and their broader significance, can be developed by considering the examples as part of a textual continuum. Chapter one focuses on materially experimental writing as part of the textual continuum that is discussed throughout this thesis. It examines the form, function, and reception of key texts, and unpicks emerging issues surrounding truth and realism, the idea of the ostensibly ‘infinite’ text in relation to multicursality and potentiality, and the significance of the presence of authorial instructions that explain to readers how to interact with the texts. The discussions of chapter two centre on hypertext fiction, and examine the significance of new technologies to the acts of reading and writing. This chapter addresses hypertext fiction as part of the continuum on which materially experimental writing and video games are placed, and explores reciprocal concerns of reader agency, multicursality, and the idea of the ‘naturalness’ of hypertext as a method of reading and writing. Chapter three examines video games as part of the continuum, exploring the relationship between print textuality and digital textuality. This chapter draws together the discussions of reciprocity that are ongoing throughout the thesis, examines the significance of open world gaming environments to player agency, and unpicks the idea of empowerment in players and readers. This chapter concludes with a discussion of possible cultural reasons behind what I argue is the reader’s/player’s desire for a high level of perceived agency. The significance of this thesis, then, lies in how it establishes the existence of several reciprocal concerns in these texts including multicursality/potentiality, realism and the accurate representation of truth and, in particular, player and reader agency, which allow the texts to be placed on a textual continuum. This enables cross-media discussions of the reciprocal concerns raised in the texts, which ultimately reveals the ways in which our experiences with these interactive texts are deeply connected to our anxieties about agency in a cultural context in which individualism is encouraged, but our actual individual agency is highly limited.