When Literature goes Multimedia

"In February 2000 Robert Coover noticed the 'constant threat of hypermedia: to suck the substance out of a work of lettered art, reduce it to surface spectacle.' Coover's message seems to be: When literature goes multimedia, when hypertext turns into hypermedia a shift takes place from serious aesthetics to superficial entertainment. What Coover points out is indeed a problem of hypermedia. If the risk of hyperfiction is to link without meaning, the risk of hypermedia is to employ effects that only flex the technical muscles. Can there be substance behind spectacle? In this paper I discuss three examples of German digital literature which combine the attraction of technical aesthetics with the attraction of deeper meaning." -- From ELMCIP